Brains of Schizophrenics and Artists Work Similarly

 Schizophrenia may be the most fascinating of all the mental diseases in that it’s the quintessential ‘bad’ one. Schizophrenics experience the inability to identify their own inner voice and therefore imagine that the voice inside their minds is coming from someone else. Most of the time, they draw the same conclusions that anyone would, that they’re being spoken to by demons, aliens, the government or God. In addition to this, they have unstable mood swings, are quick to anger and suffer delusions. Even being heavily medicated, many end up institutionalized, impoverished and living in the streets. By all accounts, schizophrenia is a terrible condition, but we now know that at least part of what is happening in the schizophrenic mind is also what is happening in the minds of highly creative people.

Associate professor Fredrik Ullen of the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute looked at brain scans taken of people with schizophrenia and compared them to people who did exceptionally well on a test of divergent (creative) thought. He found that both groups had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors. In short, “Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus,” said Professor Ullen. He believes it’s this flow of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark. In some this could lead to painting an ethereal scene of another world, in schizophrenics this ability is taken to the extreme and they’re not able to get away from their own disturbing thoughts.

But how much value can we place on this finding? By itself, I don’t think this is very surprising, but taken with the fact that when one identical twin has schizophrenia, the other identical twin has only a 50% chance of developing it, I find this very compelling. This means that even when someone has the genetic make – up to develop schizophrenia, it can go either way. Ullen’s findings support this. When people have a history of mental illness in their families, be it bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, they’re more likely to be creative, meaning that the same genes that control mental illness may control creativity, but perhaps the eternal environment is what pushes people to become either artistic or insane. While most can’t keep jobs and many will end up homeless, some schizophrenics, the mathematician John Nash, the artist Louis Wain (whose descent is illustrated by his changing artistic style below), or the writers Jack Kerouac, John Kennedy Toole or (I imagine) Philip K Dick had actually managed to use that creative streak to tap into an internal world that most of us simply don’t have. We understand that schizophrenic symptoms are exacerbated by drugs and alcohol, but what we don’t understand is how many people per year make the leap between being highly creative and becoming schizophrenic because of the abuse of these.

It’s about time we start recognizing the inherent value in what we deem as mental illness. Society is tailor made to one specific type of person and for this reason; people with minds that work differently are often pushed to the periphery and left to lead a terrible existence. The most brilliant thinker of our times could be the homeless person that you’ve passed over a hundred times on your way to work who always seems to be talking to someone you can’t see. As long as we’re quick to stigmatize people with mental disorders (or perhaps simply just mental variations) we’ll never truly understand all the different ways that the human mind works and the beauty that can come from it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/10154775.stm