Leveraging the "mad genius" debate: why we need a neuroscience of creativity and psychopathology

In addition to anecdotal examples, we see a growing body of empirical studies associating creativity with various forms of psychopathology, including mood disorders (for reviews, see Johnson et al., 2012; Kaufmann and Kaufmann, 2014), schizotypal thinking (for a review, see Barrantes-Vidal, 2014), alcohol abuse (Andreasen, 1987; Dardis, 1989; Ludwig, 1990, 1992; Post, 1994), and more recently ADHD (Healey and Rucklidge, 2006; Healey, 2014) and autism (Pring et al., 2012). [...]we have a “mad genius” debate, with one side suggesting that elements of mental illness may enhance creativity (at least in small doses) and the other side suggesting that the correlation between creativity and psychopathology is unsupported and that virtually all the studies that claim a connection are riddled with methodological errors. Several of these strategies include visualizing outcomes of an action (mental imagery), generating multiple (both original and mundane) solutions to a prompt (divergent thinking), consciously making comparisons of between two disparate concepts or objects (metaphorical thinking), and putting aside a problem to allow it to incubate until a solution suddenly arrives (insight). [...]brain imaging work can be applied to the study of the cognitive mechanisms that may be commonly shared between creativity and psychopathology. What we did not test is whether the high creative achievers in our studies exhibited phasic changes in latent inhibition, or whether their reduced inhibition was more trait-like, as is seen in persons at risk for psychosis. Because latent inhibition tasks are compatible with neuroimaging, the study of controlled cognitive disinhibition is one area of potential study for the neuroscience of creativity.