Madness Redefined: Creativity, Intelligence and the Dark Side of the Mind

Men have called me mad. But the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence. Whether much that is glorious, whether all that is profound does not spring from a disease of thought. Madness is terrific I can assure you not to be sniffed at How sad is it Insanity to the sane seems so unnecessary Madness the sublimity of all intelligence backward at people who are now dead and confidently say that they suffered from madness of some order that no greater stigma still exists than mental illness and here you are Nash the mathematician Well I think and the those areas of the brain thought to be involved in helping create Psychologists to accept is that you could incur brain damage and end up better off after the brain damage and this could happen in a number of systems and so one of the systems involved is the frontal lobe all of the sudden they have never been creative then all of the sudden they become creative and something seems to be released so these areas of the frontal lobe are thought to be involved not only and you can see here this is just for bipolar those areas in red the upper parts of the brain tend to be turned off in people with bipolar where as the areas in blue down below are the things that are always turned on and they have a lot to do with negative affect and stress and these all turned off dopamine, dopamine makes you feel good and in the case of depression it turns it off in taking both the kind of neuro anatomy of depression and the neuro anatomy of what we know so far of creativity and we put of them together in the next slide my own pathology I'm absolutely mad about pictures so the interaction of bipolar disorder in creativity you can see those areas are also the areas that interact so-called creativity circuits and you can see here positively associated with mood and creativity and the switching to the blue position switching back and forth is thought to have a lot to do with bipolar but also swings in creativity like we heard people are only creative like bipolars are only creative when they're coming out of it but what they're getting down there that deep water that people don't want to go to is something the rest of us can't access the way it's expressed when these upper areas are turned on I was really surprised when I put these together that there was this nexus between these circuits probably as many roads to creativity to I think it will be fair to say that depression is mostly associated with creative not actually no about a year ago showing that in fact primary associations with bipolar illness

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Keywords: Madness Redefined, Creativity Intelligence and the Dark Side of the Mind, tortured genius, mad scientist, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, science of mental illness, science is reexamining brilliance and madness, James Fallon, Kay Redfield Jamison, Susan McKeown, Elyn Saks, Cynthia McFadden, Big Idea Series, criminal mind, New York City, NYC, world science festival, full program, World, Science, Festival, 2012, Big Ideas Series

Id: sPiah-8pCQk

Length: 95min 31sec (5731 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 10 2014