A Divine Madness: Creativity, Genius, and Mental Illness

this evening we welcome dr. Brian Stagner to present a divine madness creativity genius and mental illness doc dr. Stagner is president and professor of psychology at Rochester College Brian has been practicing clinical a practicing clinical psychologist for over 20 years and holds a PhD in that field he has won national awards and recognition for his psychological research and teaching he has served as a consultant evaluator for the Higher Learning Commission and also serves on the National missionary care task force of the missions Resource Network he and his wife Lisa have a daughter Katie Brian also enjoys reading exercise the outdoors college and NFL football and he is he and his family loved the Detroit Tigers Brian will play golf if asked please give a warm our HPL welcome to dr. Brian Stagner thank you very much I thank you for the warm welcome and thank you for being here tonight I want to apologize before we begin I'm just fighting off the last vestiges of the flu and my voice is actually the last thing to emerge victorious from this fight so I may have a little bit of a struggle tonight I'm gonna try to hold the mic very closely if you have trouble hearing me if you just wave or put your hand next to your ear or something like that I'll try to do the best I can to speak up I want to begin by acknowledging and expressing some gratitude for the experiences that I've had that are in many ways contributing to some of the things you're going to hear me talk about tonight as Teresa mentioned I've had the opportunity to work as a clinical psychologist in addition to the other hats that I wear for a couple of decades and I'll tell you that when I enter into a therapeutic relationship with people for me that is very much holy ground and the privilege to be invited into people's lives in the way that you're able to do in that setting is really a privilege unlike any other and the opportunity to work with people who have struggled with some of the kinds of difficulties that will describe tonight is an honor far beyond my ability to describe and I'm always grateful to the individuals that I've worked with for the way that they have opened up their lives to me as they've tried to deal with the difficult circumstances of their lives and I have immense respect for them and for the way that they deal with those struggles every day and as we talk about some of those struggles tonight what we'll try to do is a few things first of all I want to tell you just just a couple of minutes even though this is really not a series about mental illness it's a series about genius obviously what we're going to talk about tonight is about the overlap or the touch points or the intersections between mental illness and genius particularly creative genius but some other kinds as well but in order to do that I think it's really important to begin by talking first a little bit conceptually about some of the ideas that we have about mental illness and the way that we think about mental illness I think sometimes our thinking kind of makes it difficult to get a true sense of really what's going on with the human experience of mental illness and what I'm always most interested in both as a psychologist and as a human is the human experience of these things not only mental illness but also genius and creativity as you can see for a long time people have been talking about connections between mental illness and genius some thinking that at times perhaps there might even be such a strong overlap between mental illness and genius that being a little bit crazy might be an advantage there's some people who use that kind of conversation use that kind of when they talk about it I want to suggest to you that as well here's from the perspectives of some geniuses tonight you'll hear some of those geniuses say or you'll hear a report for them that they felt like it was an advantage at some level or another I'm gonna take a little issue with that and we'll talk about that a little bit as we go and I want to suggest you that there's some better ways to understand that but it's at least important to remember you know as we sort of provide some context and some general reference points for this conversation that we're talking about some ideas that go back a really long way now I want to suggest to you that the way we think about what it means to be normal and what it means to be mentally ill is a really good starting place and also is a problem for us all right first of all I'll tell you I don't really know what normal is other than statistically I can tell you what normal is okay statistically we can talk about normal it just makes sense statistically but in other ways normalcy is something that's a little bit tough for us to wrap our minds around I think what this diagram is trying to show us is that as I kind of put it together I thought you know the way that we tend to think about mental illness is that there are some people who are sort of in this mentally ill category right and then there are other people who are in the normal category and you're either in one or the other these are mutually exclusive categories and at some point in time you sort of move out of this and you move directly into that do not pass go do not collect $200 you're either in that category or you're not now interestingly I think you can make a strong argument in fact I would make a strong argument that much of the way our medical diagnostic system works is very much in that way of thinking I mean the reality is the way diagnostic systems work is you have a set of well-defined criteria and if a certain number of those criteria are met for a certain length of time then the individual gets that diagnosis it's almost like big stamp on their forehead and they have that diagnosis now they're in that category and before they weren't in that category and if they can just figure out a way to maybe get rid of that last criterion that they met that they that they maybe they don't meet that anymore and now man I've only got four of the necessary five well now all of a sudden I'm not in the category anymore and I'm very different from somebody else I want to suggest to you that that's not how human beings work people don't fit nicely into categories diagnostic or otherwise and it probably doesn't make sense to think about the conversation that we're having tonight as it relates to those categories I want to suggest to you that a better way to think about the sort of things that we're talking about here tonight is that if we think about mental illness and normalcy whatever that is we might want to even think about mental wellness instead of normalcy it probably makes more sense to think about it as a continuum at a minimum I think we could say it makes sense to think about it as a single continuum in fact there are a lot of people who conceptualize it as sort of multiple continua several different dimensions that you could sort of find yourself in a particular quadrant or a particular place in a certain quadrant but I think again at a minimum makes sense to think that you know probably we're all sort of if we pick a particular kind of mental distress we're all probably gonna find ourselves somewhere on this continuum somewhere at some point in time right anybody ever feel a little down anybody ever get the blues okay well are you clinically depressed well some of you my guess is if this is a group a group of this size chances are there's a significant number of you sitting here who have been a clinically depressed in fact sorry in fact maybe a quarter of you at some point in time but all of us have had the Blues right in fact if you haven't you're probably on another continuum for another disorder that we could talk about it another time all right so there's this there's this range that we find ourselves in and again I think it makes the most sense to think about human behavior as lying along those continua in some way or another so part of what that suggests is that we as we look at the experience of the people that we're going to talk about tonight it's important to think a little bit about maybe kind of where they were not only on a particular continuum but also how they might have moved back and forth across that continuum or those continua at different points in time in their lives because even the most severely mentally ill person has points in time in their life when they are relatively well and arguably one could say even than the most mentally well person has points in time their life or under certain conditions of stress or certain conditions of pressure they're not so well so if that makes sense I think it's sort of a good way to think about some of the important elements of these issues as we go forward so let's talk a little bit about how common these kinds of problems are these are from some data published ten fifteen years ago in the archives of General Psychiatry these are lifetime prevalence rates for different kinds of psychological disorders so a lifetime prevalence rate that means the numb the percentage of people who might have this problem at some point in their life okay so if you take a look at this if you look at the any disorder category we're talking essentially one out of every two people at some point in time has a diagnosed mental disorder okay some medically significant or psychologically significant problem for which they would require some kind of specialized treatment apologize for the coughing you're gonna continue to hear tonight if you look down a little farther down in the slide you see that bipolar disorder which used to be called manic depressive disorder there's actually two kinds of bipolar disorder that we'll talk about a little bit more later around a 4% lifetime incidence rate schizophrenia across different cultures is about a 1 percent lifetime incidence rate what that suggests is if this is a population like any other and there are a hundred people in this room there's probably one person who asked schizophrenia there's probably four or five people who have bipolar disorder now you can't add all these numbers up because there are there are dual diagnosis and there are many people who suffer from more than one of these depression and anxiety the most common kinds of disorders have a strong coincidence in fact most depressed people are anxious most anxious people have a propensity to be depressed and interestingly from a treatment perspective it's really important to understand clearly is it depression that's driving the anxiety or anxiety this driving the depression because the treatment is different depending on that although they could look very similar to each other but these are generally conceptualized bipolar disorder schizophrenia as the most severe of the mental illnesses and they are the mental illnesses that tend to be associated with psychotic features a point in time when people either perceive or think about reality in a way that is completely disconnected from reality the way most of us would see it from a truly statistically normal perspective and a lot of the people that we're going to talk about tonight had to deal with these sorts of issues at some point in time in their life now here's the other interesting thing about this again think about that continuum for a second so if I go to the doctor if I'd gone three days ago and they'd taken a blood sample they'd have found the flu virus in my boy right there's a blood test for it a whole bunch of other stuff you could take you can go on you can you could get a clear diagnostic indicator and therefore it would make sense to put you in that category right guess what there's no blood test for schizophrenia it's no blood test for bipolar disorder okay these are behaviors and histories that drive a diagnosis not clear medical tests so keeping that in mind that's sort of good news and bad news at one level what it does is it creates some gray areas and these diagnostic categories but at another level what it does for us is it allows us to kind of look back at behavioral descriptions and at histories and maybe but make some inferences about what people were dealing with at a time when maybe the diagnostic understanding of what they were dealing well it wasn't quite as well understood as it is now so let's do that a little bit if we were gonna come up with a list of the greatest geniuses who ever lived and I asked everybody to come up with a list of ten the vast majority of us would include Isaac Newton on the list somewhere incredible mind beyond I mean this is one of these people who it's it's almost beyond comprehension to think about the things that he understood okay this is a guy who discovered things in the 17th and 18th century that are still important and meaningful to us a guy who developed two technologies that are still important and meaningful to us but also a person who despite his amazing contributions apparently had some pretty significant psychological issues his biographer suggests that in 1693 when Isaac Newton who by the way lived his life very isolated in terms of social relationships certainly had friends but never developed this very serious romantic relationship that there's any good historical record of in his entire life he did have a very close friend with whom he abruptly ended a relationship in 1693 and according to his primary biographer in 1693 Isaac Newton suffered a nervous breakdown now here's the interesting thing about the nervous a nervous breakdown I'm a clinical psychologist I have no idea what a nervous breakdown US there's no such thing as a nervous breakdown in terms of a real technical description of something okay but it's this I mean you can you know what it is right if you could probably describe it right it is as the name suggests you know it is some severe event that someone experiences where they are unable to function in life at some level or another that happened to Newton now interestingly a huge number of the most meaningful contributions that Newton made to science came after that experience in 1693 he found a way to overcome it but I also have to say that for the entire latter portion of his life Newton was weird I mean like clinically weird okay he had strange sort of obsessive ideas he dabbled in the occult in some ways that were even sort of out there for that period of time he was fascinated by numerology and searched for all kinds of hidden messages and meanings in the Bible and some of you know about Newton's preoccupation with alchemy you may not know how preoccupied with alchemy he really was according to somebody who has done this I haven't Newton wrote approximately 10 million words okay that's pretty prolific all right 1 million of them were about alchemy okay that's weird even for the 17th or 18th century okay Newton spent the last 30 years or so of his life as the master of the mint in England a lot of people think one of the reasons that he was so interested in that position is because he was looking at at gold all this time and trying to understand how to make something else into it and he did some interesting things made some interesting decisions about like trade and exchange rates for gold and silver while he was in that role and a lot of people say you know kind of interpret that through a guy who sort of preoccupied in a strange way with alchemy all right all right there's something going on with him now obviously I never conducted a psychological evaluation of Isaac Newton nor of anybody else that we're gonna talk about here tonight and I do want to throw in a word of caution that you can't diagnose somebody from a distance okay so we're making assumptions based on behaviors and we could be wrong about all of these things okay but I want to suggest that even though we could be wrong if you put your money on the square that says Newton was a pretty weird guy you're gonna win okay and probably not just a sort of weird and eccentric character but probably somebody at least based on the report who dealt with some pretty severe psychological disturbance in his life speaking of great geniuses who were also pretty strange here's another guy that you may know about Nikola Tesla probably is responsible for any as anybody for alternating current made huge contributions in the development of wireless technologies Tesla kind of is now somebody who you maybe hear quite as much about but was clearly a genius and a fascinating character was quite a celebrity a significant part of his life but also spent his entire life with very strange and peculiar ideas he was actually his he died his estate was actually impounded for a period of time by the US military because he had reported that he had created an it's studied pretty extensively technology that would allow the development of death rays so he wanted to make sure the military want to make sure that they got a hold of this death ray technology that Tesla was talking about well they never found the death race okay maybe they're still out there somewhere Tesla was a very dapper individual very very meticulous about his appearance so meticulous that some people might have suggested that he had somewhat of a compulsive sense and he was very very rigid in his habits he worked the same period of time every day and lived in in fact lived in hotels after he after he got the patent for his alternating current technology lived in the Waldorf Astoria for quite some time moved from the Waldorf Astoria in New York to another luxurious hotel and proceeded to do that for a series of several different hotels for the last several years of his life by the way leaving a huge unpaid bill at each one before he left it for a long period of time he ate at Delmonico's restaurant promptly at 8:00 p.m. every night he would walk in at 8:00 p.m. and the head waiter would bring him his meal served privately at the same table every night he would eat that meal and then he would leave and go back to work in his lab or he would often work till 3:00 a.m. one of the assistants his assistants said it was nothing for Tesla to call him at 3:00 a.m. wake him up out of a sound sleep and share with him some exciting idea that he had developed in his lab Tesla claimed to sleep only two hours a night he became very interested later in his life in chess in poker in other kinds of gaming and there are a number of recorded instances where he spent 48 hours at a stretch at the gaming tables thinking nothing of it there's one recorded stretch where he worked 84 hours straight in his lab that is the sort of thing you might expect from someone who is experiencing a manic episode one of the characteristics of bipolar disorder the other thing Tesla had was some very peculiar obsessions beyond just his appearance he was meticulous about his eating he would eat that one meal a day for a long period of his life during his prime he was about 6 foot 2 145 pounds very lean almost the point of being emaciated he walked 8 to 10 miles a day religiously and he would have engaged in several different interesting rituals one of the things that he would do every night was curl his toes 100 times each he believed that this stimulated his brain hey he's the genius I'm not okay but he saw something to it you know he became a little bit again even much more difficult to deal with apparently had a strange sort of obsession with women's earrings and was kind of put off by women's earrings toward the last part of his life and unfortunately his behavior became so bizarre that he became very social isolation isolated toward the end of his life and died deeply in debt and again as a person who if you sort of trace his life it seemed to go from sort of odd eccentric peculiarities to very very strange bizarre kinds of behavior toward the end of his life a person that you probably know something about is John Nash John Nash became very famous subsequent to the Hollywood film A Beautiful Mind is anybody here who hasn't seen a beautiful mind okay a handful of you I want to suggest to you that you know Hollywood has been preoccupied with mental illness for a long time there are very few things that Hollywood has ever done that handle psychotic disorders better than the Beautiful Mind film the way it it the way that film sort of deals with the human experience that John Nash had is really important to take a look at so Nash was a precocious youngster won a Nobel Prize for in economics due to his mathematics work in a game theory primarily that Nobel Prize was actually based upon work that he did in his doctoral dissertation when he was in his 20s I reflected on that actually when I was working on my own PhD dissertation because at one point in time my adviser said to me in an in an effort to get me to finish the thing up so Bryan get your Nobel Prize later finish your dissertation now I said to him John Nash Tim you know Josh got it right the first time you know Nash during the time that he was first really working and developing some of his theories began to have psychotic thinking it seems very clear that Nash had paranoid schizophrenia and developed severe delusions actually wrote a number of letters suggesting that anyone I became very suspicious of anyone who was wearing a red necktie and believed that all the individuals who were wearing red neckties around him were involved in a plot against him became very terrified at that time and behaved very bizarre fashion Nash also one near the end of his life the a bell prize which is a prize awarded for mathematics there's just a handful of people ever who have lived who have won both a Nobel and an a Bell Prize Nash was one of those this is something Nash said about himself again he thought that the psychological disturbance that he had was a significant contributor to his genius now what I would suggest about that is he didn't have anything to compare it to right I mean psychotic thinking was even though not in this full-blown diagnostic sense until later in his life was probably something that he was dealing with the precursors of throughout his life and one of the things that we know about people who have schizophrenia is even though that disease doesn't sort of emerge in full-blown form until typically late adolescence or early adulthood generally you can think back and look back and observe with individuals particularly those with family histories and see indicators strange kinds of behavior strange sorts of social interactions or language distress or language idiosyncrasies that are kind of markers for the schizophrenia that is to come later peculiar thinking and certainly Nash exhibited those sorts of things not only did Nash deal with paranoid schizophrenia and have a remarkable career in spite of it Nash is someone who I think maybe this is as big a tribute to his genius as anything I think it's probably fair to say that if anybody ever did it John Nash outsmarted paranoid schizophrenia he actually went the last many years of his life without any treatment for his disorder and lived a relatively normal life and in his description of how he did that what he essentially said was I learned the stuff that I thought that was crazy and I stopped believing it didn't stop thinking it just stopped believing it now I will tell you that I've worked with people with severe mental illness who haven't stopped believing their delusions although they have been smart enough to to stop telling other people about their delusions they still act on them in their own life you know which gets them into trouble but they've learned when I sell somebody else I'm having this doing thinking this they think I'm crazy you know well Nash sort of figured out how to to work it out so I mean maybe he was genius enough to be smart enough to deal with one of the most severe mental illnesses that that one could possibly experience in life really a remarkable guy what some people don't know again schizophrenia is one of the disorders that clearly runs in families it's not a hundred percent genetic because there are identical twins where one individual has it and the other doesn't but there's a significant genetic component or a hereditary component to schizophrenia John Nash's son is in his mid-50s also has paranoid schizophrenia and it's also by the way a mathematician and apparently quite a brilliant one and some of you may know that Nash and his wife were tragically killed in a car accident years ago his son lived with them and survived he wasn't a part of the the accident but I I don't know what has happened to him and I couldn't find any news reports there were written much after the accident and after the accident he had friends who were saying yeah you know he's he's really struggling but it may be that he didn't quite have the genius that his dad did to be able to try to overcome the disease Nash resisted other kinds of conventional form of treatment because he believed this and he thought that those treatment action those treatments actually disrupted his ability to do his work now again I have had people with bipolar disorder as an example have patients with whom I've worked who had bipolar disorder who would refuse to take their medication and I and that's pretty common actually I'll never forget one patient of mine who told me one day that when he didn't take when he took his medication God stopped talking now picture yourself in the from the position of a therapist who has to convince the patient that you need to do whatever it is that we're telling you to do so God will stop talking to you okay that's not a very appealing prospect okay and although Nash didn't talk about it in exactly that way I think it was a similar kind of perspective that he that he probably had so here's some data related to general truth many of you may know that Albert Einstein's son Edward had schizophrenia and just statistically if you look at the close relatives of highly creative people they have higher rates of schizophrenia than your relatives okay or my relatives okay so higher rates of schizophrenia and the close relatives of creative people higher than the normal population the converse is also true people who have schizophrenia tend to have more creative relatives than people who do not have schizophrenia so again there's a statistical link here wouldn't want to say that there's causation going on there that one thing is necessarily causing the other but there clearly is a statistical relationship and statistical connection between these different kinds of phenomena so here's kind of a summary statement about that mental disorder is more common in close relatives of creative people than in creative people themselves okay now again we want to be this is not a conversation about how all really geniuses are all people who have mental disorder or if you want to become a genius you know try to get mentally ill it's not the message okay the reality is people who have full-blown illness usually have trouble getting their act together well enough to be successful in anything okay and if you see some of the creative people that we will talk about they are people whose lives typically are marked by huge peaks and valleys in productivity and it's hard to go back and reconstruct exactly what these folks were dealing with in terms of their psychological issues but we could easily speculate that some of those peaks and valleys were directly related to the significance or the severity of the emotional psychological distress that they were dealing with at different times so just as an example of how this kind of plays itself out let's talk a little bit about this phenomenon called schizo Tippie okay schizo Tippie or schizotypal personality it's just that it's a personality characteristic or a constellation of characteristics people who have schizophrenia are people who have hallucinations or delusions they have significant thought disorder in other ways they also have significant disorders in social interactions and in language people who have schizophrenia have a larger number of relatives who have schizotypal personality traits okay and here are some examples of schizotypal personality traits you probably know some people who are a little bit odd or a little bit eccentric yeah no need to raise your hand people who report really unusual experiences sometimes people report very peculiar religious experiences sort of outside of the of what we would consider like the normal range I know some people who are very superstitious okay people who are sort of preoccupied with conspiracy theories are really big now right hands somebody with schizotypal personality you know of a free day on the internet and watch the smoke okay because some of these things are really fee on each other a lot of interpersonal suspiciousness and not just suspiciousness but you see people who are skits a typic who will be very vigilant very hyper vigilant these are the neighbors that notice every car that goes up and down the street okay these are the people who know every strange person who ever drove by oh why are they a strange person they just seemed strange to them okay and often these are people who are very socially withdrawn okay now again I know some people that probably have all of these things that function perfectly well in life okay they're they're perfectly productive members of society they're content with their life and their experience you know they raise their families some of you are probably sitting here tonight okay god bless you it's great you know but again if you think about these kinds of issues and you kind of compare it to schizophrenia and this sort of full-blown sense what you're seeing is somebody who's sort of moved farther on the continuum in all of these areas you know who's gone to extremes and these different in these different ways I mean it's one thing to have an odd idea okay it's one thing to think well you know I think maybe the government has too much information about me okay now we could have a long conversation here tonight about whether that's even that an odd idea or not okay but some of us would probably say that's an odd idea okay like I'm a little creeped out about the things the government knows about me okay that's one thing it's quite another thing to say as a patient that I worked with once said yeah the FBI has implanted a transmitter in the walls of my house and they are monitoring every move that I make and in fact they froze all of my financial assets which is why the large check that I wrote for that necklace at the jewelry store bow which by the way is why I'm in getting a psychological evaluation in prison right now okay so again that's sort of a more extreme example of how it works so I think as we look at some of the folks that we that we see kind of to back up again often you're talking about people who are probably at some point in time when they've been able to be productive when their genius has really been able to flourish they were kind of maybe in this less severe stage of maybe a place in their life where they might ultimately end up being enough in a far more severe state here's a fascinating study guy named Ron Coe published a book about creativity in 2014 and he summarized a set of studies that were done in the early 2000s and if he can kind of read this he puts down here on the on the x-axis indicators of schizo Tippie so those sort of things that I put up there moving along an extreme to where you would be called someone with a schizotypal personality as just supposed to somebody who has some of those indicators and again taken out farther to the extreme to someone who has schizophrenia and then up here is creative achievement this is a summary of studies that were published over a period of time all again in the early 2000s if you look at the graph notice that having some indicators of schizo Tippie actually seem to bolster creative achievement at the subclinical level but the more clinically significant it gets the more the creative achievement suffers okay I think that's a pretty good kind of capsule ization of that however there may be some people whose genius was so great that they might have even been in conflict with that sort of data here's an example many of you know the story of Virginia Woolf brilliant writer and a person who led a real tragic life and if you go back and think a little bit about all the societal and cultural issues that were in pinching up on her a woman who was a strong feminist when it wasn't cool to be a feminist and therefore dealt with extreme pressures as a result of that probably from all the best indicators experienced significant sexual abuse during her teenage years and dealt with severe bipolar disorder for her entire life her mother passed away at a when Virginia was 13 and at that time according to the best records that we have she really began to develop the first I probably had what we would call a manic episode at that time really began to act out in these sort of very agitated and unpredictable ways when her father died several years later wolf tried to commit suicide herself she actually threw herself out of window upon the death of her father she recovered from that and became extremely productive was and I think you know there are people here who know a lot more about literature than I do but it's appropriate to talk about this in the library I mean I would I would call Virginia Woolf a historically significant writer as well as a great writer someone who I think probably uh shirred in the age of modernism and literature to a great extent and someone who made incredible contributions to literature Woolf committed suicide and I mean the it sounds strange to even say this because any suicide is horrific but Woolf committed suicide in a particularly horrific way some of you know the story she waited for her husband he gone for a period of a time a period of time put on a heavy coat filled both of the pockets of the coat with heavy rocks and waded out into a river near her home and drowned herself weighted down by those rocks her body was not found for a few weeks in the river and if you think about I mean as I think about you know the symbolic significance of the way people choose to take their life I just find that to be her horribly heart-wrenching when you think about the despair and when you think about the the utter resolve of that as well I mean that that's that's sort of the the apex of hopelessness if you can think about it in a way Woolf was keenly aware of her psychological distress had great insight into the the mental illness that she had understood that she had this mental illness and obviously had she had periods of being an invalid due to the severity of her psychological distress at various times in her life and said this about it as an experience madness is terrific I can assure you and not to be sniffed at and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about it shoots out of one everything shaped final not in mere driblets as sanity does and the six months not three that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about it what is called oneself okay now you can read that paragraph and see she's a great writer right but again think about how her creative process is so completely entangled in her by in her description of her madness I find her to be an incredibly compelling character when you think about the the connection between genius and mental illness I also find her to be incredibly heartbreaking character because of that because she was unable to ever really release herself from the incredible restraints of what she was dealing with these are my favorite James boys these are the brothers James fellow on the left is William James the first great American psychologist and on your right fellow on this side on your left is Henry James the best description that I ever heard and I can't remember who said it okay but the source is out there somewhere I didn't make this up but someone described these two as saying William James was a psychologist who wrote like a novelist Henry James was a novelist who wrote like a psychologist it was meant to be a compliment for both of them by the way and both of them were again I would say incredible geniuses both experienced those nervous breakdown things again in their life William James spent an extended period of time essentially shut down where he could not function spent periods of time in hospitals dealing with emotional distress and not just William James and Henry James but essentially everybody in the James family struggle at one level or another with different kinds of psychological distress primarily mood disorders this is just a truncated version of the James family tree this is the the father Henry senior actually probably a genius himself to a prolific writer but very eccentric and dealt with recurrent depression as did William as did Henry Garth he was they called him Wilkie by the way somehow you overcame that he's the only one about whom we really don't know much in terms as it relates directly to some severe psychological disturbance he however was wounded pretty severely in the Civil War and dealt with the health effects of that for the majority of his life Robertson James had bipolar disorder and Alice James the the sister also brilliant in her own right dealt with significant depression again so we've got a whole family of incredible intellectual capability here who dealt with severe depressive or bipolar illness for their entire life at one level or another and again people who somehow work to overcome it and if you read Henry James and you read Henry James's novels thinking about this work is coming from someone who was dealing with significant psychological distress I think it's a it gives you a very interesting perspective on some other things that he wrote similarly if you read William James I'm fascinated by I read William James stuff all the time even now a lot of his books are still in print and I continue to be fascinated by his ability to look deeply within himself and kind of use his own psychological distress as a way to generate ideas about the human condition so again somebody who not only had a deep connection between their personal genius and their psychological distress but someone who found a way to transcend it here is George Gordon Lord Byron who led an incredibly adventurous but also extremely unstable life I think it's fair to say this is the famous quote about Lord Byron he was called someone who was mad bad and dangerous to know it was actually a former lover of his who said that about him it's probably not what you want an old you know friend to say about you but it was pretty accurate seems Byron is a good candidate and again someone who a brilliant poet will read a little bit more of an excerpt from one of my favorite poems of Byron's a little bit later to kind of illustrate some important things I think but from all indications Byron Kaymer from a family that a history of bipolar disorder again not very well understood at that time but he was someone who was prone to serious rages violent outbursts one of the reasons why he was dangerous to know is because he he might go off on you and when he went off on you was serious and and it did it in this sort of unpredictable and explosive sort of fashion he managed to channel that into some constructive ways it became you know a pretty prominent military figure and kind of Chambal channeled some of that aggression into that but it played havoc in his personal relationships and his personal relationships were a mess and just an unmitigated mess and again continue to somehow transcend some of that in his poetic work so part of Byron's mess of a personal life included several children many of whom we would now describe or would have then been described as illegitimate turns out he had one child born within the bounds of wedlock her name was ADA and ADA was a genius ADA some of you may not know the story of ADA Byron King Countess of Lovelace but you probably if you haven't ever heard of ADA you may have heard of Charles Babbage who is probably the person who we could say developed the computer essentially well guess what I think it's not unfair to say that ADA was the brains of the outfit for Babbage's work ada wrote the first algorithm for Babbage's machine she's the one who programmed the thing and became a many people who you know about know about computer programming describe Ada as the first computer programmer here's a cool little piece of trivia the US Department of Defense has a specialized program language it's called ADA after her okay guess what she also had bipolar disorder and again lived a tragic life as a result of that but somehow managed to transcend that in some remarkable ways this is an important book from which by the way a few of the examples that I'm talking about tonight have come but Mike a psychologist named Kay Redfield Jamison it's called touch with fire I want to throw it up here because this is a book that specifically deals it's a much kind of narrower focus in our conversation tonight specifically talks about the artistic temperament and bipolar disorder and looks at examples like Lord Byron looks at ADA looks at Virginia Woolf to a great extent and again summarizes a lot of the research related to the connection between these two kinds of characteristics and in this book here's a list of several other individuals we won't take the time to go through each one of them but these are individuals who it seems pretty clear and you'll know some of these stories just as you kind of skim through the list these are individuals of people who were brilliant creative artists who also dealt with significant mental illness at some point in their life you probably are very familiar with the story of Vincent van Gogh who spent much of his adult life in and out of various mental hospitals as primitive as they were at that time ultimately took his own life and some very bizarre circumstances Ernest Hemingway you also know someone who committed suicide and came from a family of individuals who many of whom had committed suicide and again you look at several others on the list who other dealt either dealt with severe kinds of psychological distress that's been well documented or tragically took their own lives and again Jamison kind of flushes out all of these examples particularly as it relates to the creative and artistic temperament and if time permitted us we would talk about some of the specifics of each of these lives here's the really fascinating thing about Kay Redfield Jamison she has bipolar disorder it's a clinical psychologist by the way PI polar disorder type 1 which means she has full-blown manic episodes clinical psychologist professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School it's been consistently identified as one of the most important people in the in work and clinical of practice related to bipolar disorder during her time in graduate school she had a full psychotic break and found herself running around half clothed in a parking lot and in her own she writes about her own experience in a book called an unquiet mind which is worth your time and it's worth taking a look but there's probably no better scholar of the kinds of things that we're talking about than Kay Redfield Jamison and there may be no better current example that illustrates not only the connections that we're talking about but also how an individual might be able to overcome these things here's somebody else I want to talk about a little bit because I think she's a great illustration of how sometimes the particular kinds of psychological or neurological distress someone deals with might contribute to their work this is Temple Grandin I just find Temple Grandin to be both a charming and a heroic figure okay she's there's been a film about her life in Hollywood if you haven't seen Temple Grandin's TED talk you need to look it up okay it's worth your time all right so Temple Grandin some of you may not know her story but Temple Grandin would describe herself as being on the autistic spectrum she's a professor of animal science and Temple Grandin is primarily responsible for a profound change in the meat packing industry on how animals are treated during the process of slaughter so that we can eat them so that they are now treated in a much more humane fashion primarily due to Grandin's work her work is based on her observations and Temple Grandin will say the reason I could do my work is because I think like a cow what do you mean by that okay well what she says is because of her autism she says about herself that she does not process that information verbally she processes it visually and apparently so do cows now I can't vouch for whether cows actually process information visually although I can say I I would put a lot of money on the fact that they don't process information verbally okay now think about cows and horses for a second okay as an example okay think about how visual cows and horses are okay anybody raise horses or around horses a lot okay how do you sneak up on a horse you can't sneak up on a horse right a horses field of vision is 350 degrees okay so if I'm coming up on a horse right here they don't have to turn their head to see me human field divisions about 180 degrees okay well apparently a cow's field of vision is about 330 degrees okay so they're seeing a lot of stuff around them and processing a lot of visual information what grant and says is I'm hyper vigilant visually and I'm processed and visual for information like that all the time okay it's fascinating me here to talk about the way that she thinks she says an example she likes to use this says okay think of a church steeple okay now if you just thought of a church steeple many of you probably thought of some imaginary prototype of a church steeple right what Grandin would say is I do not have an imaginary prototype of a church steeple if I want to think of a church steeple I have to think of a specific church steeple that I know and she says that her mind works like Google Images so if you were to if you type church steeple into Google images what do you get you get an array of pictures of church steeples right well that's how Grandin's mind works when you say think of a church steeple somehow cows apparently you know process information in this visual way the same way so all sorts of things would happen like Gillette Grandin would say you know to to a cow a standing person and a person on horseback are two different people even if it's the same person to you and me and the cow was gonna process information differently so she uses this peculiar way of thinking again she's on the autistic spectrum and she uses that neuro a typical characteristic that she has to drive a thinking process that essentially made a huge change in the way our society and culture thinks about what we do that's a pretty remarkable connection between neuropsychological disorder and genius I think check out her TED talk she's pretty remarkable person so why do we think all this happens okay let's spend a few minutes talking about this so one thing we know is that intellectual ability has a bunch of different characteristics okay there's all sorts of different things that we would say we were talking about statistics and if we were talking like psychologists talk which is not like normal humans talk but if we were going to talk like that we'd say there's all sorts of things that contribute to the variance and intellectual ability so people differ from each other and intellectual ability that means there's variance in it and there's all sorts of things that contribute to those differences okay so think for a second okay let's just play a little thought experiment right now let's say I said to you I want you to think just just kind of compiled lists in your mind here for a few minutes about all the different things that you think contribute to someone's intelligence just make your little list okay if I gave you enough time could you come up with 50 items could you come up with maybe more than that okay would you say there's probably some things that contribute more than others yeah probably okay so imagine that this circle right here contains all those things that you just thought up okay now over here is a circle that relates to psychotic mental illness psychotic thought disorder okay so imagine that you could come up with a similar list of all those things that would contribute to psychoticism okay potentially and imagine that we put all those things in this circle okay what you'll notice in this diagram is there's overlap in those circles okay that's purposeful because the reality is there are things that high IQ and psychotic thought share in terms of the things that create differences among them so novelty seeking is an important element of intelligence it's also something that occurs at a high level and people who are psychotic other kinds of variables like risk-taking impulsiveness nonconformity people who are conformist don't tend to be geniuses okay self-confidence work addiction all those things are associated both with IQ and with psychoticism so those would all be things that would fall into this part of that diagram okay so it could be if we're trying to explain some of the things that we've talked about here tonight it could be that one of the reasons that we exceed so many examples of the correlation or the coincidence between genius and mental illness is because they share a lot of characteristics that contribute to variability in both of those things there also seems to be a connection to some things that are going on in the brain in both of those things so let's talk a little bit about brains all right so here's a profile of your brain most of your brains aren't quite this big but general idea okay here's the front here's the back okay this outer layer part here that's the that's the cortex this front part up here that's the part that's most different in the human brain than other mammals okay that's the part where you do algebra and you if you're Isaac Newton you do calculus and where you do all sorts of other things that relate to higher mental processes okay well if you move right down from that frontal corner to cortex you have these really important structures that are part of something called the dopamine circuit dopamine's a really important neurotransmitter that is strongly connected to all sorts of things the dopamine circuit is the physiological connection to substance abuse addiction because what dopamine one of the biggest things that dopamine does for you is it enables you to experience pleasure and when people are addicted to different kinds of substances they get accustomed to the experience of the pleasure that that sussed that that substance brings and that triggers activity in this circuit and it is a very dynamic system well so it's associated with that it is also a place where and again this is tough to sometimes make direct connections to but one of the things we know about people who have who are really good at solving problems people who are really good at creativity is that when they we put them on a functional MRI and you kind of take a look at what's going on in this part of their brain when they're thinking this area is lighting up like crazy okay very active dopamine circuits okay anybody ever see the old movie called awakenings Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro okay so based on a true story written by a neurologist named Oliver Sacks who by the way Oliver Sacks was very likely on the autism spectrum so if you remember the story you'll remember that the Robert DeNiro character had this parkinsonian like disorder right and they found a treatment for the disorder that would reduce his tremors and the treatment was a synthetic form of this brain chemical called l-dopa right you remember what happened when they were giving him too much of it he became psychotic and in fact people with schizophrenia have too much dopamine in their brain and too much activity in this circuit ok so again there's a connection between creativity and psychoticism and substance abuse addiction and other kinds of intelligence even really to certain kinds of motor functioning so again I think we're living in an age where everybody wants to attribute everything to the brain and everybody wants to say everything's key no chemicals really to the brain be careful about what you believe when you hear that ok you know I hear some people say well you know I'm I'm really anxious but it's only chemical people say that sometimes I've never heard anybody say I'm really intelligent but it's only chemical that's true for why it's true for the other ok so be a little careful about how you you know interpret that sort of information but what I would say about that is that we don't want to reduce all this to a strictly a brain chemistry explanation but there's clearly something going on here at the level of the brain that relates to that psychological variance that we're talking about before so there's real demonstrable overlap between genius and certain kinds of mental illness at this level not at the level of you know something that we think of more behavioral there are certain kinds of thinking phenomena that tend to be associated with both severe psychological disorders and what might be really important for certain kinds of creative genius this is reputed to be a picture of the actual apple tree that Newton observed the Apple falling off of have no idea if this is really the apple tree or not the skeptical part of you says not likely ok and by the way the story probably is it wasn't like just you've seen the cartoon we're like one Apple drops on his head and all of a sudden the world changes well he probably was watching apples off that tree for a long time before he kind of put it together okay but the reality is great thinkers make connections that the rest of us don't somehow Newton made a connection between the Apple falling to the ground and the trajectory of planets he made that connection I'm sorry I'll confess it I too never made that connection okay but so it takes this kind of ability to see to pull things together well over-inclusive thinking pulling things together with it don't necessarily belong together that's an indicator of mental illness but a little bit of that over-inclusive thinking may allow you to make connections between things that allow you to really discover things that are remarkable okay so again there's probably something going on when and I mean the reality is if you think about somebody like so here's here's the most extreme example or over-inclusive thinking okay certain people who have certain kinds of psychological psychotic thought processes believe that the radio is talking to them at a very personal level okay so if they hear if you hear the radio say are you feeling tired and you think the the radio is it is addressing you personally that's over-inclusive thinking okay that's psychotic thinking okay but so again that's characteristic of these severe disorders but it could be the little dose of that helps you make connections you know in a way that you know might help contribute to some amazing discoveries here's one of my favorite examples there's this thing called apophenia which is seeing patterns where no patterns exist if you I'm a big fan of a science fiction writer named William Gibson Gibson has a series that really is kind of based on the idea of apophenia one of the books is called pattern recognition okay well so some of you may have seen this picture you know the this is the face on Mars you may have seen this before guess what I don't think it's really a face but if you think it's a face it kind of becomes one right yeah you might see a real pattern there where there is no pattern you know by the way the human brain is is disposed towards seeing faces and perceiving faces so that helps this a little bit too okay but it's a tendency to see patterns between things that were there really are patterns that creates all superstitious behavior that's how superstition starts right two things co-occurred in time it was a coincidence and all of a sudden they became causally linked in the mind of somebody okay and again seeing those patterns okay well we know you know how about that helicopter that was flying over I think that was the same helicopter that was flying over me this time yesterday and the day before right okay well maybe the helicopter wasn't looking for you all right but you might see that pattern and make an assumption about that pattern okay again that's characteristic that's characteristic of certain kinds of psychological disorders if you increase the dopamine levels in people's brains their apophenia goes up it'll also make people hallucinate more okay and again the ability to see patterns where other people don't see patterns may be pretty strongly related to creativity may be pretty strongly related to scientific discoveries right think about all the amazing scientific discoveries that happen because some people made a connection you know Pavlov who everybody knows because of classical conditioning was studying the digestive system discovered classical conditioning quite by accident because he put together a pattern that occurred and the behavior of his animals when his lab assistants were coming in to feed him and all of a sudden hey I got something here okay which he did so it could be that there's a connection here between things that really sort of drive both the process of genius and sometimes mental illness so a lot of people think that Michelangelo may have been on the autism spectrum again it may be that his eccentricities his Sal I mean if you think about how prolific Michelangelo's work was how do you do some of the stuff that he did unless you're pretty solitary most your life I mean Michelangelo didn't have a lot of time to sit around playing cards okay he's busy painting the Sistine Chapel okay so again some of the things that we look at you know when I when I here when I read descriptions of Michelangelo I think he's probably kind of a pain to work with you know and are sort of a really difficult personality he doesn't sound crazy to me though it's not like somebody who's really dealing with some at that level so again you want to always be careful as you think about you know how people project on to the past what was going on with people but I hope what we've done tonight is kind of tried to lay it out you know there's there's a real human experience out there where there are these deep connections between these kinds of variables that we're talking about and what's most remarkable to me here's an example of some of those correlations that I was talking about before what's most remarkable to me is how people somehow managed to overcome these things some of you know the work of Walker Percy he's one of my favorite novelists and Percy came from a long line of mental illness both his father and grandfather committed suicide and for a long if you if you look back in his family history which he knew a lot about you can go back seven or eight generations from Walker Percy and find severe psychological disturbance and it appears that Percy found a way to overcome and rather than kind of be dominated by these things to rather kind of find a way to to to overcome them this is a passage from a novel called the second coming that some of you may know Percy didn't write this about himself reputedly you know but you know novels characters are sometimes autobiographical here's the full quote that one of his characters says death in the form of death Gene's shall not prevail over me for death genes are one thing but it is something else to name the death genes and know them and stand over against them and dare them I am different from my death genes and therefore not subject to them my father had the same death genes but he feared them and did not name them and thought he could roar out old route 66 and stay ahead of them or grab me and be pals or play Brahms and keep them the death genes happy so he fell prey to them death in none of its guises shall prevail over me because I know all the names of death so Walker Percy figured out that he and the words of Albert Sachs was a who and his psychological distress was a what and his identity was not to be defined by the what and for so many people the tension and life is is the who going to be overwhelmed by the what or is the who ultimately going to prevail over the what Percy found a way to assert his humanity in the face of that as did the other people that we've talked about perhaps someone who said it as well as anyone was the poet that we spoke about earlier Lord Byron this is from the tenth canto of his poem Don juin and if you know the poem you know what's Don doing right he says man fell with apples and with apples rose if this be true before we must deem the mode in which Sir Isaac Newton could disclose through the venn unpaved stars the Turnpike Road a thing to counterbalance human woes forever since immortal man hath glowed with all kinds of mechanics and ful soone steam engines will conduct him to the moon great tribute to Newton and wherefore thus exordium why just now in taking up this paltry sheet of paper my bosom underwent a glorious glow and my internal spirit cut a caper and though so much inferior as I know to those who by the dint of glass and vapor discover Stars and sail in the winds eye I wish to do as much by possi in the winds i I have sailed and sail but for the Stars I own my telescope is dim but at least I have shunned the common Shore and leaving land far out of sight would skim the ocean of eternity the roar of breakers has not daunted my slight trim but still seaworthy skiff and she may float where ships have foundered as Duff many a boat I think it's fair to say that byron truly did sail in the winds eye as so many of the folks that we've talked about here tonight Jamison in sir book with these kinds of reflections and I would say that the the human woe that Newton's work counterbalance the folks we've talked about tonight got that more than their fair share of it but as I think about these connections I'm not only fascinated by how the different psychological manifestations of different things can express themselves in so many ways I am ultimately impressed and amazed and humbled in the amazing courage in the strength and the character of the people who so incredibly overcame such incredible incredible obstacles to make such amazing contributions from which we all still benefit so thank you so much for being here tonight if you want to throw down this email address real quick if you want to take a look at my references I'll be glad to provide those to anyone who requests just shoot me an e-mail I'll be glad to send those along to you if you want to read further about the stuff you've heard me recommend a couple of books to you

Channel: RochesterHillsTV

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Keywords: Rochester, Hills, Government, city, local, michigan, oakland, county, innovative, divine, madness, creativity, genius, mental, illness, brian, stogner, college, library, university

Id: y7K1VjXHN3s

Length: 80min 17sec (4817 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2019