WHY has schizophrenia not been eradicated from our genes? The answer might be because people with mild symptoms engage both sides of their brain and use more of it. And this allows them to excel at creative endeavours.
Individuals with a condition called schizotypal personality disorder have mild versions of some schizophrenia symptoms, such as slight paranoia or jumpy speech patterns, but not the hallucinations and delusions that characterise serious forms of the disease. They tend to perform particularly well on standard tests for creativity and are often related to people with schizophrenia.
Brad Folley and Sohee Park at Vanderbilt University in Nashville investigated the brain functions of these people by monitoring blood flow in the brains of normal volunteers, schizotypal and schizophrenic volunteers as they undertook creativity tests.
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During the tests schizotypal volunteers used larger regions of their prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for thinking and other higher cognitive processes, than either normal volunteers or people with schizophrenia. Brain activity was also more evenly distributed between left and right sides in the shizotypal volunteers. 鈥淭heir brains may be hard-wired for better creative thinking,鈥� Folley says. He presented the findings at a conference in Oxford, UK, earlier this month.
Schizotypal personality disorder is known to be linked with a thicker connection between the two sides of the brain. The creative abilities of people with the condition could also explain the enduring incidence of schizophrenia, which remains at around 1 per cent worldwide, despite people with the disorder having fewer children.
鈥淚 have no doubt that the genes for schizophrenia are associated with the genes for creativity,鈥� Shelley Carson at Harvard University says. 鈥淪omeone with lowered cognitive ability who has the genes could be psychotic, while a family member with the genes may be highly creative.鈥�