A Comparative Study of Attentional Strategies of Schizophrenic and Highly Creative Normal Subjects

Abstract

Frequent references have been made to the similarities between highly creative and psychotic thinking. This study attempts to test the hypothesis that one explanation for such a correspondence lies in the fact that individuals in both these populations habitually employ common attentional strategies which cause them to sample an unusually wide range of available environmental stimuli. A group of highly creative adults and a group of equally intelligent but low creative adults were compared with a group of acute non-paranoid schizophrenic adults on three tests designed to assess attentional and other cognitive styles. The results offer support to the view that both highly creative and schizophrenic individuals habitually sample a wider range of available environmental input than do less creative individuals. In the case of the schizophrenic this involuntary widening of attention tends to have a deleterious effect on performance, while, in contrast, the highly creative individual is more able to successfully process the greater input without this incurring a performance deficit.

Psychoses and creativity: is the missing link a biological mechanism related to phospholipids turnover?

“…activity for creative individuals in mental imagery tasks, implicating decreased frontal lobe arousal when highly creative subjects think creatively. Studies of general attentive capabilities between creative and non-creative subjects do show that subjects who exhibit fewer creative traits do focus their attention more narrowly [32]. These results support the idea that creative people have a broad focus of attention and greater attentive capacity, which is related to specific mechanisms of cortical activation.…”

Cognitive mechanisms underlying the creative process

“…Martindale (1999) has identified a cluster of such attributes, including defocused attention (Dewing and Battye 1971, Dykes and McGhie 1976, Mendelsohn 1976, and high sensitivity Armstrong 1974, Martindale 1977), including sensitivity to subliminal impressions; that is, stimuli that are perceived but of which we are not conscious of having perceived (Smith and Van de Meer 1994).…”

A Module for Metaphor? The Site of Imagination in the Architecture of the Mind

“…Schizophrenia patients show a large advantage on this task compared with controls, and indeed, when a group of 'highly creative' normals were tested, their performance was essentially indistinguishable from that of the patients (Keefe and Magaro 1980). A similar pattern is found on a task where non-standard, novel criteria for sorting objects must be devised by the subject (Dykes and McGhie 1976). The performance of schizophrenia patients is enhanced.…”