Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

uclahealth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 116 posts

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#21

Post by zeruch »

xattt wrote: post #6
winReInstall wrote: post #2

To connect the unconnected, a feature also seen in which brain-disease, often associated with the erroneous associations (paranoia, over-association of noise as voices and faces). Show me your wunderkind and i show you the shizophrenia in the family. I wonder if you could even retrain active run-away shizophrenic people to produce meaningfull creative outcomes. So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics…

> So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics and science wikipedia articles to a megaphone. Is this word salad deliberate?

If one lives in the Bay Area this is an all linear meat grammar meal.

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#22

Post by plutonorm »

winReInstall wrote: post #2

To connect the unconnected, a feature also seen in which brain-disease, often associated with the erroneous associations (paranoia, over-association of noise as voices and faces). Show me your wunderkind and i show you the shizophrenia in the family. I wonder if you could even retrain active run-away shizophrenic people to produce meaningfull creative outcomes. So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics…

My mother was schizophrenic and very smart, I'm very smart and very creative, sometimes a little crazy, but not psychotic... yet, lol.

So this checks out. Your second paragraph is a little word salady.

My mind is always set to 100mph, until it's so tired that I fall into a mild depression. Then recover. Kinda bipolary. I think schizophrenia is what happens to creative brains with high connectivity and too much activation. The continuous activation causes excessive oxidative stress which eventual causes organic damage.

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#24

Post by robonerd »

I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative, and those who think they don't are impeded not by a lack of creative spark, but rather by their own inhibitions and belief that they aren't creative. Part of this is cultural; engineers are told by society that an engineer/artist schism exists and incorporate that meme into their self-image, writing off their own ability to be creative. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because creativity is like a muscle that needs to be exercised.

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#25

Post by exmadscientist »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #19

This doesn't say which comes first, though. Does the training of "creative" disciplines make the brain work differently from the "non-creative" disciplines, or is it a birth trait? The brain is an elastic organ.

Speaking as someone with family experience with a very closely related thing... oh man, it's totally 100% visible from birth or nearly so. Some brains are just different.

And, unfortunately, the schizophrenia thing discussed above is real too. Not that it's necessarily genuine schizophrenia or even some watered-down version, just that these things live in the same metaphorical neighborhood and you cannot pretend otherwise.

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#26

Post by UnpossibleJim »

exmadscientist wrote: post #25
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #19

This doesn't say which comes first, though. Does the training of "creative" disciplines make the brain work differently from the "non-creative" disciplines, or is it a birth trait? The brain is an elastic organ.

Speaking as someone with family experience with a very closely related thing... oh man, it's totally 100% visible from birth or nearly so. Some brains are just different . And, unfortunately, the schizophrenia thing discussed above is real too. Not that it's necessarily genuine schizophrenia or even some watered-down version, just that these things live in the same metaphorical neighborhood and you cannot pretend oth…

I only bring it up because I graduated from art school and now I code all day for my job (I'm older with a family to support) and the difference in my thinking styles is noticeable. Not only to me, but to my friends by the way I speak and in my personality.

This leads me to the "chicken and the egg" question. So often people look at coding as an acquisitionable ability, where as they view creative ability as something you have to be born with, discounting the years if effort that goes into those abilities. Be they cooking, painting, writing, what have you.

Even their test subjects had graduate degrees in creative disciplines. Generally that doesn't bide well for schizoeffective disorders... the comparison to graduate degrees in the arts with graduate degrees in mathematics with schizoeffective disorders is probably near equal, as many papers have linked schizophrenia to a pre-viral load:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/....

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#27

Post by szundi »

tomc1985 wrote: post #8
winReInstall wrote: post #2

To connect the unconnected, a feature also seen in which brain-disease, often associated with the erroneous associations (paranoia, over-association of noise as voices and faces). Show me your wunderkind and i show you the shizophrenia in the family. I wonder if you could even retrain active run-away shizophrenic people to produce meaningfull creative outcomes. So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics…

Are you calling all creatives schizophrenic? Because, uh, citation needed, and that goes against my experiences of hanging out with nothing but creatives 90% of the time. Us all being schizophrenic would be pretty revelatory if it was true. Artists may be weird, but...

A schizophrenic cannot really stop/even know the association jump is weird, but a prodigy will know.

Difference is the people who see prodigies as schizos are narrowminded.

There is a big difference between not understood and being random.

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#28

Post by mattwad »

robonerd wrote: post #24

I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative, and those who think they don't are impeded not by a lack of creative spark, but rather by their own inhibitions and belief that they aren't creative. Part of this is cultural; engineers are told by society that an engineer/artist schism exists and incorporate that meme into their self-image, writing off their own ability to be creative. This becomes a self-ful…

For sure. I have a bachelor's in Fine Arts but taught myself to code. I think the pendulum has swung too far, I need to get back to painting/drawing and exercise that muscle again :)

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#29

Post by bergenty »

robonerd wrote: post #24

I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative, and those who think they don't are impeded not by a lack of creative spark, but rather by their own inhibitions and belief that they aren't creative. Part of this is cultural; engineers are told by society that an engineer/artist schism exists and incorporate that meme into their self-image, writing off their own ability to be creative. This becomes a self-ful…

I’m right there with you. I thought I wasn’t creative. The magic insight was that you just start doing the thing and creativity comes as part of the process.

Don’t know how to start? Just start and the process automatically becomes breaking down the task into thousands of tiny parts that you then just do.

Re: New study shows highly creative people’s brains work differently from others'

#30

Post by anonporridge »

tiborsaas wrote: post #12
tomc1985 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you calling all creatives schizophrenic? Because, uh, citation needed, and that goes against my experiences of hanging out with nothing but creatives 90% of the time. Us all being schizophrenic would be pretty revelatory if it was true. Artists may be weird, but...

It was just implied that being a prodigy and being schizophrenic might not be far off each other.

Perhaps prodigy's are just the schizophrenics who are lucky enough to create value in their extreme heterodox thinking.
Post reply on HN