Creativity and Psychosis: Latent Inhibition as a Dual-Track Process
Creativity and Psychosis:
Latent Inhibition as a Dual-Track Process
Russell Anderson
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
May 7, 2013
Creativity and Psychosis:
Latent Inhibition as a Dual-Track Process
The connection between genius and madness has been a popular colloquial association for thousands of years. Aristotle, for instance, once stated, “Those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia” (Prentky, 2001, p. 95). About 2,000 years after Aristotle made this statement, Morel argued that genius and degeneracy were biologically linked, claiming that the two populations stemmed from the same gene pool (Prentky, 2001, p. 95). Today, much debate surrounds the notion of the alleged relationship between psychosis and creativity, specifically. A disconcerting issue in the scientific examination of this supposed link is the confusion around the exact criterion of creativity. While a detailed discussion of this issue is outside the realm of the current paper, for the sake of the argument, creativity will be loosely described as problem-solving defined by the operational construct of divergent thinking which involves the ability to make associations between seemingly irrelevant ideas or stimuli (Prentky, 2001 & Carson, 2003).
This particular way of viewing creativity is conducive to investigating the creative individual’s suspected link to the psychotic individual because psychotic cognition is often perceived as divergent due to the psychotic individual’s inability to filter out information which leads to bizarre connections, hallucinations, and paranoia. The difference between this loose association within psychosis and the loose association within creativity has been linked to the ability or disability of attentional control (Chavez, 2006). In addition, deductive thinking has been shown to correlate with the personality trait of
Latent Inhibition as a Dual-Track Process
Russell Anderson
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
May 7, 2013
Creativity and Psychosis:
Latent Inhibition as a Dual-Track Process
The connection between genius and madness has been a popular colloquial association for thousands of years. Aristotle, for instance, once stated, “Those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia” (Prentky, 2001, p. 95). About 2,000 years after Aristotle made this statement, Morel argued that genius and degeneracy were biologically linked, claiming that the two populations stemmed from the same gene pool (Prentky, 2001, p. 95). Today, much debate surrounds the notion of the alleged relationship between psychosis and creativity, specifically. A disconcerting issue in the scientific examination of this supposed link is the confusion around the exact criterion of creativity. While a detailed discussion of this issue is outside the realm of the current paper, for the sake of the argument, creativity will be loosely described as problem-solving defined by the operational construct of divergent thinking which involves the ability to make associations between seemingly irrelevant ideas or stimuli (Prentky, 2001 & Carson, 2003).
This particular way of viewing creativity is conducive to investigating the creative individual’s suspected link to the psychotic individual because psychotic cognition is often perceived as divergent due to the psychotic individual’s inability to filter out information which leads to bizarre connections, hallucinations, and paranoia. The difference between this loose association within psychosis and the loose association within creativity has been linked to the ability or disability of attentional control (Chavez, 2006). In addition, deductive thinking has been shown to correlate with the personality trait of
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