Why So Many Artists Are Highly Sensitive People | Hacker News Reader

Why So Many Artists Are Highly Sensitive People

huffingtonpost.com

93 pointspmcpinto52 comments

Answering a personality questionnaire is always a great opportunity for me to appreciate my talents. Take the question "Do you have a rich, complex inner life?" Well, I certainly do, and thanks for reminding me to dwell on this fact.

What a vapid and narcissistic comment. Only on hacker news.

I think you're missing the critical tone of the parent's comment.

In that case the OP is missing the point.

The PuffHo article is vapic & narcissistic the same way.

Not really. It's just a crappy / flashy exposition of some very routine psychological research.

The first half of that set of questions could be useful.

Some of the wording needs tweaking (example from OA)...

"2. Do you become unpleasantly aroused when a lot is going on around you?"

...aroused being used in the psychology sense by questioners no doubt but could be misunderstood. Perhaps pop an 'opposite' question in later on, something like...

"Do you feel happier when there is a lot happening in a place, lots of people, lots of noise?"

A more interesting line of inquiry is why so many of those blessed with the highest instincts for creativity have so little empathy towards those around them. As if they are so in thrall with their own genius they have little capacity for the smallest kindnesses. Or are so focused on manifesting the perfect visions contained in their minds, any quotidian concerns seem far beneath them and an utter waste of time. Consider Tolstoy and his wife Sofya, or Picasso and his muses. Einstein even referred to a "glass pane" separating himself from the norms of society.

They're unique in their local environment. They have a sensibility that annoys people. When their environment fails to immediately satisfy them it gets tired of feeling their negative emotions. They're expected to be happy or shut up. The more they develop this component of themselves the more they're denied empathy. They get tired of giving and not receiving. What we call empathy nowadays is actually just sympathy. These people know that but you apparently don't... We collectively suck at empathy. As you have just demonstrated.

Try giving them some real empathy sometime instead of just pandering to their "genius". You'll see a human emerge before you. We like to call them narcissists at this point. "See!", we say. They can do it if they want to. They're just self-centered. This is a defense of our own egos and an instance of fundamental attribution error. Empathy costs much more than sympathy. Imagine if empathy were all you could give. Imagine being that alone.

There's a lot to that mechanism you describe, which is essentially a cycle of (psychic) violence. It is a cycle initiated by very real otherness on one side, and the other side's instinct discomfort with otherness. So, essentially this problem would be solved of more people sought out and learned to enjoy diversity in personality. (e.g. http://ncase.me/polygons/ but applied to personality, not race.)

Well said. We should more often drop the labels and categories entirely and simply treat each other as fellow humans.

I think much of what you've said can be applied to other types of social outcasts e.g. drunks, gamblers, etc.

What was said applies to the labelers, not the labeled.

After a lifetime of encounters where it's clear that what goes on in your head is not what goes on in other heads, you start to feel separate. Alone in a very real sense. I've not seen Einstein's description of the "glass pane" but it's a decent way of putting it.

And by the way, the lack of empathy tends to be a two-way street.

Seems like you have no empathy for them, rather - judgement and assumptions.

Not sure about Picasso, but I remember reading somewhere that Tolstoy tried to be good for his wife, but she was too superficial and egoist, and manipulative. He tried to act generously, giving to the farmers a part of the result of their labor, but she refused. Then he wanted to at least control his own writings and give for free the books he wrote, but to that she disagreed too.

I found where I had this information: Henri Guillemin yalked about Tolstoy. Ok, he's a leftist too.

Is it just because it's an excerpt, or do these researchers have serious blinders on? How about other hypotheses like:

- Michael Jackson's father beat him for mistakes.

- Performers try to connect with their audience. "Sensitivity" is a bundle of things which helps chances of success, at least if you don't have a big professional team creating your songs.

- People with some experience of unalienated labor ("imagining things and then bringing them into being" and a balance of imaginatively creating both people and artifacts [1]) don't have to deaden themselves as more alienated laborers must.

[1] From David Graeber's "Direct Action: an Ethnography" and "Dead zones of the imagination".

This was research? I saw a romanticizing of celebrity musicians as cute little kittens, where it went on and on about, "Aww, look how adorably sensitive they are."

For one thing, anyone who trains in music develops a heightened awareness to subtleties in sound. It is not surprising at all for a musician to report an awareness of richness in sound that others don't bother with. Just like a carpenter probably would report a deep awareness of grain in wood and how it affects the structural integrity or something similar.

Performance art is where people put their emotional extremes on showcase. Obviously the ones with the most extremeness are going to get the most attention from people who want to see that sort of thing. People who are "highly sensitive" are an extreme, and their display of emotions are going to appear more intense, and thus more exciting for performance art consumers.

How about doing research on the types of people who would be so obsessive about watching other people's pain and joy? Why do they get so wrapped up in the "charisma" of a performer, and needing to see something private put on display in an artificial way?

Um, yes, it's certainly research.

The "heightened sensitivity" of musicians isn't just about being more aware of the richness of sound. The musician will likely score as more sensitive on every item of that test.

The third paragraph you write seems to be in perfect alignment with what the article is saying. I don't know what you are trying to get at in the fourth paragraph.

The described sensitivity is easily related to by software engineers. It's often difficult to receive an annual review or feedback from code commits. It's a feeling of wanting feedback to continue growth, and fearing it due to sensitivity.

One book I've enjoyed which equips confidence is "Thanks for the Feedback." It's a book by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

Prepare to read one chapter every few days. It's a heavy read. Well written, it's an abundance of information: you may need to take time for brain rewiring as I did.

Amazon link:

Thanks for the Feedback - http://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedback-Science-Receiving-Well...

Sorry, but engineers are not artists. People need to stop elevating their profession and job titles to something they're not and take pride in what you actually are; which is pretty great in itself.

I agree that it's very unlikely engineers are more sensitive than the average person, but engineers can also be highly sensitive and perhaps it's useful to provide some advice for handling career-specific situations.

I don't know how elevated that is, you are an artist if you make art and art might be really simple.

As Wendy Cope reminded us in Engineers' Corner.

Wow, artists have a rich inner life? Yo-Yo Ma feels happy, but also sometimes he feels sad? Isn't this just describing a human being?

Yeah, the emotional life is part and parcel of human experience. But this article is talking about a heightened sensitivity, take all of the above and multiply it a few times over. Not everyone needs to sleep for a week after going on vacation, cries during movies, or spends the rest of the weekend alone after going to a party Friday evening. Those are the sorts of personality traits the article is talking about.

According to this article, a creative person experiences heightened sensitivity to stimuli and exhibits paradoxical behavior. Then he/she chooses a medium for expression to channel the chaotic sensory and emotional experiences into one that is controlled more so by themselves, else how can we deem someone as creative until they create. Seems like we need to understand creativity a bit more, because as many users are commenting, some descriptions and questions from this article are vague and highly applicable the basic human experience (we're all creative! :))

I looked for some resources by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (MC) who was referenced for studying creativity.

Here is what appears to be chapters 2 and 5 of his book Creativity (hosted by CS7601: Computational Creativity, host by Georgia Tech):

1. Ch. 2. - "Where Is Creativity?": http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers...

2. Ch. 5 - "The Flow of Creativity": http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers...

3. Class Website: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/

Csikszentmihalyi also wrote Flow, which is about the psychology of optimal experience.

1. TED talk by MC: https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?la...

2. Flow - coined by MC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Because they are expected to behave that way. I have know several artists who played back and forth on the highly sensitive spectrum over time. A few stooped behaving this way when they gave up on being artists.

The thing is stereotypes attract people to behave like X, and they promote X in borderline peope. Programmers often get to behave introverted and you can see shits when someone moves from say sales into programming.

Who said that openness and sensitivity are contradictory? Is the article building a straw man?

From the article:

> Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified openness and sensitivity as oppositional personality elements that not only coexist in creative performers, but form the core of their personalities.

I was hoping for a scale on the "temperamental sensitivity" and "rich inner life" quiz at the end.

I found myself at 18/24 and anecdotally, I'm highly sensitive to abrupt noise changes and lighting in physical spaces. Presumably I'm not the only here that keeps their home office only dimly lit with consistent white noise from the central air fan.

If you rephrase this quoestion as: "What benefit do acute senses give an artist?" you already have your answer.

Better title would be "Why so many sensitive people are artists" imo. Small change on the first glance but important one.

But, there's quite a big difference between 'sensitive' and 'highly sensitive'. The latter being someone who most would perceive to be too sensitive.

Otherwise your suggested change definitely makes the title less click-baitish.

This helps to underscore that the field of mathematics is also an art form, since the behavior symptoms high-level math researchers are indistinguishable from "artist types"; Goedel, Riemann, Turing, and others come to mind. The "sensitivity" and "complexity" suggested in this article are not isolated to artists.

No I don't think this is quite right. The romantic artistic image of the mathematician is a prevalent one now, and we choose to see examples to fit the type. But it hasn't always been this way. Before the early 1800s the mathematician was scene as a pragmatic, man of the world sort. Or so Amir Alexander argues in his book Dual at Dawn: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Duel-Dawn-Mathematics-Histories-Tech...

I agree with you that sensitivity and complexity are not isolated to artists, and a agree to some extent that mathematics is an art form, just wanted to point out that 'mathematician as tortured artist' is a relatively modern trope.

It's hard for a "man of the world" to make time in the 21st century to learn enough about mathematics to make meaningful contributions to the field which still doing the other things being a "man of the world" requires, except perhaps in a few isolated places that happen to overlap something practical. Or, in other words, we programmers probably overestimate the ability for non-mathematicians to contribute to the field because we happen to be sitting in the very best such place already.

Same reason we don't get true renaissance people anymore; one can not even know everything about genetics, to say nothing of biology, let alone half-a-dozen other disciplines.

Are these traits truly associated with "artistry" and "creativity", or are we simply in a place where we've done so much than moving things forward requires monomania?

Yes, no one is a renaissance person any more. But I don't think that there were as many renaissance people in the past as we think. Admittedly I don't have much evidence for this. In the case of maths, I think our idea that many more mathematicians used to be polymaths in the past is slightly skewed dues to the fact that until about 2 centuries ago, 'mathematician' and 'physicist' were not distinct categories. We think of Gauss and Euler as polymaths, but Euler was by all accounts a terrible philosopher.

EDIT: I just remembered that Gauss was an extremely competent philologist, so maybe the above is no longer valid.

Fair enough. I like to think of math as an art form, and I think on some levels it certainly is (as much as I'd also consider Einstein an artist in many ways). The end product is different than an "artist" but I think a lot of the thought processes overlap and cause similar perspectives.

I like how the whole piece is just one big ad for their upcoming book.

"Read more from the upcoming book here: This Science-Backed Trick Can Unlock Your Creativity In Just 5 Minutes"

Sometimes I tell myself I am not crazy enough to be a really good coder.

But then I see other really good coders who seem perfectly sane.

What you are asking is not what the article is saying. So...?

“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud”

― Émile Zola

A true artist is one who never calls him/herself an artist is my stance. It is usually when society sees a person's works and starts to give positive reviews that the inner artist is unleashed on the world. Sensitivity plays a part, but only insofar as the artist can channel art through the correct medium. If I'm electrosensitive (I constantly get electric shocks for example), then computers are probably the best medium. Someone with an ear for sound would likewise choose musical instruments to mirror back the sound of nature..

> If I'm electrosensitive (I constantly get electric shocks for example), then computers are probably the best medium.

This statement appears as mystical as tarot cards. What connection is there to getting electric shocks and using a computer other than some vague mystical correlation not founded on anything logical?

This reads like the wrong combination of shoes and floor, resulting in huge ESD problems. Highly individual, too.

Nope..Cork sandals will produce the same effect. It's not highly individual, it is highly reported many times by many people, but usually cast off as irrelevant or unimportant to people's daily life...

Dude, you really need to make sure your gear is grounded properly. You should not be getting electrical shocks from touching stuff. I can't begin to tell you how many times we've had screwball problems with equipment that had floating voltages due to poor earthing---problems that went away the minute we fixed the wiring. (The guys maintaining said equipment though nothing wrong of the fact that they were getting shocked and said nothing about it for months!)

I get shocks "all the time". It's when humidity is low and I build up a static charge, which happens in the winter because outside air hasn't got much water in it, then it gets heated to room temperature and has very low humidity. There's no mystery here. I bought my first wireless router simply because I was frying my wired routers; I'd systematically walk through all the ports, destroying them one by one, then I'd have to buy a new one. I realized it was cheaper to pay much more and go wireless than keep buying wired routers. I cringe when it happens now because I always know I'm frying something, I just don't know what. Fortunately, I've got a house humidifier now, which mitigates the problem.

Alternatively, as others say, you've got a grounding problem. But that's a different sort of shock.

Nature is self similar. I come from the school of thought that if something is prominent in my own nature, then it must resonate highly with something else just as prominent. Like attracts like and all of that.

Electrosensitivity as mystical? You could say that, but it genuinely is a case of intuition manually over-riding a brain with an otherwise high reliance on scientific surety.

I earned a 4 year degree in fine arts, have exhibited my work, and make a point to try to create at least one new work each week. I have never made it my career, but art is certainly one of my larger hobbies. By your definition, though, because I actively pursue it and call myself an artist, even though society has not noticed it or given me positive reviews... that means I am not a "true artist".

So I must disagree - one is an artist if you make art that is meaningful to yourself. I have known many artists over the years, and most of us just quietly do our own work for our own reasons. I will not go so far to accuse people who do it for society's reviews and recognition to not be artists - that would be dismissive of their own goals. But artists have varying reasons for doing their work, and trying to define a "true artist" is going to invalidate someone unfairly.

Taking what the parent comment said and what you've said, I can see both points.

In defense of the parent, anyone that practices a trade (singer, actor, artist, programmer, developer, engineer) typically doesn't identify themselves as one of the aforementioned titles unless they get paid to do so. Now, mind you, that doesn't mean in the most traditional sense that lack of monetary reward/success doesn't disqualify their skill but, in this world, it certainly validates ones work/interest.

To make my point, society typically doesn't label someone that can sing a 'singer' unless that is their profession and they get paid for it. Even though I script and do 'some' programming, I wouldn't dare call myself a programmer.

I believe that one shouldn't get too hung on titles. For me, at least, I find a sole definition limiting because there isn't a single title that describes everything that I'm good at, however, there is a single title that describes what I'm good enough to get paid for.

I surveyed a related question once: "Do you have to make money to be an entrepreneur?"

Responses were quite bipolar, though startup people tended to say "no". My own background was in running a small business before working in startups and so it was something I always think about.

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