Originally published October 3 2005
Vanderbilt psychologists study schizotypal personalities to understand creativity
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
By observing blood flow in the brain while the participants in their experiment engaged in creative assignments, psychologists Brad Folley and Sohee Park have provided evidence that schizotypal personalities, or people who act and speak in unfamiliar ways but are clinically sane, demonstrated greater creativity than normal thinkers and psychotics.
New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities -- people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic -- offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity.
Psychologists believe that a number of famous creative luminaries, including Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson and Isaac Newton, had schizotypal personalities.
"The idea that schizotypes have enhanced creativity has been out there for a long time but no one has investigated the behavioral manifestations and their neural correlates experimentally," Folley says.
In the second experiment, the three groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning techniques called near-infrared optical spectroscopy.
The brain scans showed that all groups used both brain hemispheres for creative tasks, but that the activation of the right hemispheres of the schizotypes was dramatically greater than that of the schizophrenic and average subjects, suggesting a positive benefit of schizotypy.
"In the scientific community, the popular idea that creativity exists in the right side of the brain is thought to be ridiculous, because you need both hemispheres of your brain to make novel associations and to perform other creative tasks," Folley says.
"We found that all three groups, schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal controls, did use both hemispheres when performing creative tasks.
The researchers believe that the results offer support for the idea that schizotypes and other psychoses-prone populations draw on the left and right sides of their brains differently than the average population, and that this bilateral use of the brain for a variety of tasks may be related to their enhanced creativity.
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