Creativity and schizophrenia spectrum disorders across the arts and sciences

Creativity and psychopathology: are there similar mental processes involved in creativity and in psychosis-proneness?

“…Within this framework, some psychopathological traits may generally be thought to feed the generation stage, while at the exploration stage high cognitive control is needed to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to elaborate relevant unusual representations toward actually creative ideas (cf. Kaufman and Paul, 2014 ).…”

“…We hence assume that available evidence for a relationship of psychosis-proneness with creativity, particularly within the psychometric research tradition, may sometimes be restricted to unusualness. But any trait supporting the generation of unusual representations may be highly conducive for the creativity of thought, if it concurs with the necessary cognitive control to guide evaluation and elaboration at the exploration stage of creative idea generation (see also Carson, 2011 ; Kaufman and Paul, 2014 ). We would thus more likely succeed in our understanding of the putative link between creativity and psychopathology if we base our conclusions more strongly on carefully designed empirical studies, which focus on specific cognitive and neural processes that may be similar or even shared between creative and psychotic thinking.…”

High Schizotypal Individuals Are More Creative? The Mediation Roles of Overinclusive Thinking and Cognitive Inhibition

“…Similar to the notion that the relationship between psychopathology and creativity depends on the symptoms and severity of psychopathology, researchers have indicated that, rather than schizophrenia, it is schizotypy 1 , a personality trait similar to schizophrenia symptoms but at a diminished level ( Debbane and Mohr, 2015 ), that explains general creativity 2 and creative performance ( Kaufman and Paul, 2014 ; Fisher, 2015 ; Wang et al, 2017 ). While schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder, schizotypy is a psychological construct that is characterized by the personality traits, such as magical ideation (the propensity to have non-conventional beliefs and accept causality not culturally valid), perceptual aberration (the distorted perception of body and objects), anhedonia, social withdrawal, eccentric behavior, and odd speech ( Schuldberg et al, 1988 ; Cox and Leon, 1999 ; Nelson et al, 2013 ).…”

Schizophrenia Behind the Great Jazz

“…Several perspectives have been proposed related to the connection between schizophrenia and creativity. Kaufman and Paul (2014), among others, stated that schizophrenia by its nature disposes toward satisfying one requirement for creativity, namely, originality. It is based on the idea that schizophrenic thoughts are more likely to be unique or new.…”