Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia' | Hacker News Reader

Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'

news.bbc.co.uk

81 pointsArun200918 comments

_"Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes."_

Guess a lot of entrepreneurs feel the same way. Not saying, that everyone who starts a small business is a genius, but I think most people who do, feel uncomfortable in "normal" society. Otherwise why would they risk it all, while eating cheap food and working a lot more than at a 9 to 5?

I read the biography of van Gogh. He was in constant mental pain (based on his letters to his brother) and did not fit in anywhere. He tried learning math (if I remember correctly) 18 hours a day, also tried being a dedicated pastor, etc. He just did not fit in anywhere, until he started painting and drawing. Of course, he didn't fit in the mainstream painting trends either, but I don't think that matters, because the mental discomfort would not have stopped even if he got rich or famous.

Also Dali has wrote a diary, which I heard about before. I will definitely pick it up at the library and read it.

Well, you don't need to be a genius to be creative. Also, who is to say that some entrepreneurs aren't geniuses? Just because they apply their intelligence to business instead of writing novels or proving theorems, doesn't mean they can't be smart.

I think "genius" has a lot less to do with "smartness" or intelligence than with obsession...

I think human beings, and animals for that matter, are naturally entrepreneurial. In the wild, those that aren't would die a quick death. Its only when there was work that could be done by non-entrepreneurs that they began to thrive. Well, subsist anyway.

More reason to be conservative with brain-altering medication.

Unless you want a world without creativity. It'd be easier to control, at least.

Engineers are frequently ADHD (citation?) Can Engineers be called creative? Or is it an entirely different mental illness?

Those who suffer from ADHD are notoriously known as "idea people": highly creative, but poor in execution. Like schizophrenia, it's been suggested that their inability to consistently filter out distractions is the cause, though it seems that different areas are affected.

There are also phases of hyper-focus. I use those to find devious bugs, design tricky parts of code, architect. The rest of the time I fill in code, test, document, package etc.

Are creative people unemployable?

I have the same question. Perhaps the only good way for creative people is to employ themselves. Be entrepreneurs.

It depends where. There're several companies that thrive on hiring creative people and then giving them nearly free reign - Google, finance, think tanks. They tend to be fairly hard to get into, because there are a limited number of positions open for creative knowledge workers and a lot of people who think they're creative.

Also, in many cases you have to "pay your dues" before you can do high-level creative work. This is not because management is cruel, but because "thinking outside the box" requires knowing where the box is. If you take a bunch of random people with no experience in a field and ask them to dream up wild-eyed solutions to outstanding problems, many of them will come up with the same wrong answer. If those people then learn a little about other ideas that people have had and why they didn't work, then they can come up with novel, original contributions that actually work.

"[F]inance" or "think tanks" is kind of broad. You probably mean small- to medium-sized hedge funds in finance (or their equivalent prop desks, as far as they still exist, in investment banks) because otherwise I can't think of finance as a place for creative natures. Most bank divisions and asset managers have set rules and procedures for everything and force you into using their software (environments), like Excel or Matlab or C# or Windows. I'm not saying those are bad in general, it's just I myself hate them and there's absolutely no way I could work for an operation that uses them, which precludes me from practically 98 percent of firms in the industry (ok, I pulled that one out of a hat). Also, although I generally agree with Merton's point that "first you have to show you can do it like them, then you can show you can do better", I think more and more this applies only outside of "paradigm shifts" in Thomas Kuhn's sense. During such shifts, or to propel them, one may do better by totally disregarding the viewpoint of the old guard and "just do".

EDIT: Of course, one would still need to have thought enough about the "old" way of doing or explaining things that one would know why the "old" way failed, in a fundamental way. For example, I think in economics and finance, the fundamental failure is not so much in the statistical assumptions (that is actually a pretty cheap shot to make, theory-wise, Herr Taleb!) but in aggregation.

Everybody fits into a role somehow.

Again? At least this article doesn't even purport to be backed by any published research. Mention some brain scans, toss up a CG image of a brain, and for good measure, start 'em off with a nice photo of Salvador Dali.

The article drops a couple of names. E.g., Fredrik Ullen, from where I got http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100518064610.ht...

Exceptionally creative people are frequently eccentric. Eccentric people are not frequently exceptionally creative.

Regarding losethos's message:

I'm really curious how that nonsense text is generated. Presumably it's not totally random - and perhaps "Incurable" and "Pays the bills" are frequently queried search terms. I wonder what else went into that algorithm. At the same time - what's the point of a post without a url?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Markov_chain#...

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