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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: back to Park (ID:fanpu2019), author: Frost Morning Moon

Van Gogh in history, Jin Xiaoyu in reality, and Andy in movies and TV dramas all show the great risks that geniuses have to take. Nature provides some kind of possibility for human beings, but it is up to human beings to make the possibility become a reality.

Write articles | Frost Morning Moon

I believe many people have read the interesting book genius on the left and madman on the right. The book collects many interviews with people with mental illness, and the author believes that the only difference between a philosopher and a madman is that one is just thinking and the other is actually doing it.

Although the book is controversial, it succeeds in arousing readers' curiosity. Is there a scientific basis behind these almost legendary stories?

In the real history, we do find that many well-known celebrities have a close relationship with mental illness. Every year, March 30 is designated as World Bipolar Disorder Day to commemorate Van Gogh, a talented painter of the 19th century. Van Gogh, a talented impressionist painter, created a large number of amazing works in his short life and struggled with bipolar disorder all his life. Although Nash, the prototype of the movie Beautiful mind, is a world-famous mathematician, and almost everyone who has studied game theory knows the "Nash equilibrium" named after him, he also suffers from schizophrenia and suffers for the rest of his life. Einstein's second son, Edward ∙, was an excellent pianist, but unfortunately he suffered from schizophrenia before the age of 20.

In real life, we can also see such examples. In January 2022, Hangzhou Daily published the article "our Genius son". The life story of Jin Xiaoyu, the protagonist translator, attracted wide attention and was even called "Beautiful Soul" in Hangzhou edition. Jin Xiaoyu was blind in one eye when he was young, and was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder (bipolar disorder), but he has high attainments in the field of translation. he has taught himself to master English, Japanese and German, and has translated 17 books, about 6 million words, in more than a decade.

There are many such examples. This makes us wonder, is the other side of genius destined to be crazy? Is it possible that once a person is given a certain gift, he may suffer from the curse of mental illness because of his extraordinary creativity?

The common characteristics of "genius" and "madman" usually what we call madman refers to patients with schizophrenia (Schizophrenia, hereinafter referred to as "Jingfen"). This is a serious chronic mental illness, characterized by sensory perception, thinking, emotion, behavior and other disorders, accompanied by incoordination of mental activities. In addition, people with bipolar disorder (Bipolar disorder, hereinafter referred to as bipolar disorder) also show some crazy symptoms during manic episodes.

In psychology, creative people are defined as individuals who can use novel methods to produce ideas or expressions that are different from conventional patterns in cognitive activities. Therefore, being able to produce ideas that are different from others is an important prerequisite for creativity. Geniuses in literature, art and science are usually highly creative.

In psychiatry, both seminal separation and bipolar seizures are due to changes in the cognitive and emotional processes of patients, causing them to have different ideas [2]. Take the fine score patient as an example, although he / they usually show a decline in realistic reasoning ability, this style which is not bound by reality cognition seems to have some advantage in artistic creation. Does this mean that mental illness and creative traits may have a common genetic basis?

In order to study the relationship between creativity and mental illness, researchers usually use two methods: ① to assess the incidence of mental illness among outstanding creative talents, or ② to measure the creativity level of patients with mental illness and their relatives. In a large sample of 300000 subjects from Sweden, scientists found that patients with seminal or bipolar disorder and their siblings also tended to work prominently in creative fields. and this overlap seems to be independent of the IQ factor [3] (that is, it has nothing to do with IQ).

So is it possible that the same set of genes acts on mental illness and creativity at the same time? The study of such problems requires large samples, rather than just focusing on a small number of mental patients, so the researchers used the method of polygenetic risk score (Polygenic risk scores, referred to as PRSs) to detect a person's risk of mental illness and further explore the relationship between mental illness and creativity.

For many complex diseases, a single genetic variation is usually not sufficient to assess an individual's risk of disease. The polygenetic risk score method can aggregate the effects of many genetic mutations in the human genome into a total score to assess a person's risk of developing a complex disease. This method has been proved to have predictive value for a variety of common diseases, and has been widely used in clinical and research [4,5]. The combination of multiple genes associated with a complex disease is also different for different individuals, so each person gets a specific PRSs score for a particular complex disease. It is generally believed that the higher an individual's PRSs score for a disease, the more likely it is to develop the disease.

In a 2015 paper published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (Nature Neuroscience), the researchers selected a large sample of 86292 subjects from Iceland to test the ability of PRSs scores to predict corresponding mental disorders in large samples. Both the PRSs scores of seminal score and bipolar disorder can accurately detect the subjects with these two diseases (including 583seminal scores and 500bipolar patients).

Next, the researchers calculated the correlation between the subjects' PRSs scores and their creativity. The so-called creative individuals were defined in the study as subjects who were "engaged in five professions: actor, dance, music, visual arts and writer". The results showed that the correlation between PRSs score and creativity reached a significant level (P fine score = 5.2 × 10 − 6), and so did bipolar (P bipolar = 3.8x10 − 6), but this correlation was not significant in other occupations (i.e. occupations that did not require creativity).

The above two experiments show that a person's PRSs score for seminal score and bipolar disorder can accurately predict his or her risk of both diseases, and the higher the score, the greater the risk; at the same time, individuals with a higher risk of the disease are more likely to engage in creative-related occupations.

So, will the correlation between disease risk and creativity be affected by the individual's general cognitive function, or is it related to the individual's level of education? The researchers also calculated the correlation between PRSs scores and educational attainment. The results show that the higher the polygenetic risk score of bipolar disorder, the more likely a person is to be educated. The same is true of Jingfen. In addition, there are significantly more people at high risk of these two diseases who have received higher education.

However, after excluding the effect of education, the PRSs score of mental illness was still associated with creativity. This means that people with a higher risk of mental illness are more creative than the general population, regardless of intelligence and whether they are well educated or not. Creativity and mental illness (seminal score and bipolar disorder) share the same genetic source [6].

Is it possible that this conclusion is limited to this sample of Icelanders? Can a different group of people come to the same conclusion? In order to verify whether this relationship can be found in other samples, the researchers used the quantitative analysis of the Creative Achievement questionnaire (Creative Achievement Questionnaire, CAQ) in four longitudinal studies (longitudinal studies) in the Netherlands and Sweden. It was found that in these samples from different countries, the correlation between PRSs scores of mental illness and the level of creative achievement still reached a significant level.

Figure 1:4 predictions of polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder on the status of artists in a longitudinal study [6] it is likely to be universal that "even without taking into account the impact of education, those groups that are more likely to develop bipolar disorder or seminal scores are more creative than the general population." However, it should be noted that this is only a correlation and there is no further inference that there is a causal relationship between the two. In other words, from the available evidence, we can not believe that "easy to go crazy" can enhance creativity, nor can we think that high creativity will lead to a person "more likely to go mad". This correlation may also be related to some unknown other variables, which may form a common cause. For example, a specific genetic combination may be the "common cause" of both, which increases a group's risk of bipolar or seminal score on the one hand and makes them more creative on the other.

For such a study published in the Nature sub-journal, we can see that the calculation method used is not complex, but the researchers took painstaking efforts to collect a large sample size, and before and after several experimental designs are very rigorous for the verification of the initial hypothesis. This is the characteristic of psychological research: the difficulty often lies not in complex statistical methods, but in how to select and find a good problem, to obtain sufficient resources to collect a sufficient number of samples, and to ensure that the sampling is unbiased. and ensure that the research results can be verified repeatedly.

Beyond heredity: non-genetic possibilities through the above research results, we can see that while nature seems to give some people creative talent, it also increases their likelihood of developing fine scores or bipolar disorder-like the curse of genius. Is this really the will of nature? In fact, no theory has been found in the existing research that can explain this from the perspective of human evolution.

However, a 2018 study using a large sample of subjects in Sweden found that students who received art education in universities had a higher risk of developing sperm scores, bipolar and unipolar depression in adulthood [7]. So, is it a gene or a combination of genes that gives a person a high level of creativity and causes mental illness, or is it-or is it possible that a group is more creative as a result of an art education? at the same time, the risk of mental illness increases.

So, if a person may be very creative, even to the level of genius, or he may suffer from mental illness and become crazy, how can he face such a curse?

Fortunately, so far, many developmental psychology or psychiatric studies have found that individual development is often carried out dynamically under the interaction of genetic and environmental factors [8]. Mental illness and emotional problems are also formed under the joint influence of genetic genes, socioeconomic status and parental rearing styles [9].

Figure 2. Carry out neuroscience research on emotional development from the perspective of lifelong development [9] although the relationship between creativity and mental illness seems to put a magical color on the fate of many unfortunate geniuses, it should be noted that most situations in real life are not like those written in some special cases or novels. The possibility of a person being a genius and a madman at the same time is very small, and most of the seminal score and bipolar patients in psychiatric hospitals have varying degrees of cognitive and social dysfunction, which need the hard care of their families.

In addition, a meta-analysis study found that the type of scale used to measure creativity, the content of the scale, and the severity of the fine score will affect the researchers' judgment of the relationship between creativity and fine score. Creativity and psychopathology seem to follow an inverted U-shaped curve. Mild schizophrenia can promote creativity, but complete expression of essence can destroy creativity [10].

In the popular Ode to Joy a few years ago, the highly intelligent actress Andy's mother suffered from schizophrenia and her half-brother also lived in a mental hospital. Andy always worried that he would one day be as schizophrenic as his mother. Such a plot is indeed in line with the scientists' conclusion that creativity and mental illness (semen and bipolar disorder) share the same genetic origin, but according to the current overall research, perhaps her concerns are superfluous. Because Andy has only one relative who is sick, and the environment in which she grew up made her receive a good education, which greatly reduced the risk of the disease. Such a genetic base (with a mild risk of schizophrenia), coupled with an elite education in the United States, may have enabled her to fully develop her creative talent and become a financial genius. In contrast, Andy's younger brother, whose parents were both fine score patients and unadopted from an early age, was more negatively affected by the genes of his parents that could cause schizophrenia in a harsh environment, and eventually became a madman. From the perspective of the group, these sick individuals seem to be victims of some unfortunate growth in an adverse environment in the process of gene transmission in such a creative and talented population, so for this kind of patients, we should have more respect and compassion.

Perhaps, for people with high genetic risk of mental illness, such as Andy and siblings, how to actively choose a suitable environment and career according to their own characteristics, and make good use of some talents or characteristics associated with the risk as reasonably as possible, it is the most important thing to control the risk of illness through acquired education and self-adjustment, and to give better play to the advantages of their creativity.

reference

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