Nora Kline

AP Psychology

a. How does the author define creativity?

“The word ‘create’ derives from the Latin creare, which means ‘to produce, make or
create.” (6)
“The concept of creativity has historically been used interchangeably with the germ
‘genius.’ Genius is a common Latin word, originally derived from the Greek ginesthai,
which meant ‘to be born or come into being.’ (6)

Page 17:
- originality
- utility
- person
- process
- product

b. What, if any, are the connections between creativity and psychiatric disorders? What
are the underlying misconceptions?

c. Why is neuroscience becoming the newest paradigm from which to explore human
behavior?

d. What is one activity in which YOU can engage that would enhance your own creative
genius?

http://nancyandreasen.com/id2.html:
The definition of creativity is operational. That is, creative genius is defined as the ability
to produce something that is highly original. Highly creative subjects are identified,
representing a variety of different fields in the arts and sciences: writers, visual artists,
musicians, physicists, mathematicians, chemists, computer scientists, life scientists, earth
scientists, social scientists, etc. Approximately half will represent arts and half sciences.

Before these tools were available, we could only study the brain after people had died,
through using post mortem tissue. Now we are able to visualize and measure the
structure, function, and chemistry of the living brain in people of all ages, ranging from
childhood to old age. This makes it possible to answer interesting questions about brain
development and aging, gender differences, the neural basis of creativity or spirituality,
and the neural basis of a variety of mental illnesses.

http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/reporter/index.html?ID=5061:

Creativity, she noted, must incorporate measures of great skill or talent and “the ability to
perceive and produce novel ideas or products that are useful to society.”

Andreasen also addressed the link between creativity and mental illness. By studying
writers involved in the “Iowa Writer's Workshop,” Andreasen found that they and their
family members displayed a high incidence of mental illness.

“Eighty percent of the writers had significant mood disorder that required treatment,” she
noted.

This suggests, she said, that people who are considered highly creative may be more
vulnerable to mental illnesses like schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=6631146:

My own view is that creativity is an intellectual capacity that's not directly related to
intelligence. And it is capacity of seeing new things, new relationships, create novel
things, and it spreads across the arts and sciences.

I mean there's the stereotype that a genius is somebody with a very high IQ, and the point
I make is the genius is somebody who has the capacity to think outside the box and have
original ideas, produce beautiful things, things that are useful to society and so on.

Of course. You know, there's definitely a connection. I did actually the first objective
empirical study of the relationship looking at people at the University of Iowa Writer's
Workshop, a study that I did in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I interviewed a total of 30 of them
about their own history of mental illness and that in their families, as well as the history
of creativity in their families.

And I did not expect the findings that I obtained, which was that a very high percentage
of them suffered from depressive illness or bipolar illness at some time in their lives. And
they had a higher rate in their families and they had a higher rate of creativity. And
subsequently, other have done a similar study and replicated it. So it's fairly solid that
creativity in the arts, at least in writers, is related to instability of mood.

I wanted to add one important thing, though. These writers, though they had episodes of
mood disorder, were mostly normal in between their episodes and almost universally they
said that they would prefer not to have mood disorder, that it impaired their creativity
rather than enhanced it. That's to get rid of the stereotype of romanticizing the mad
genius.