Walking the (fine) line

There’s a fine line between madness and creativity. It's hard to know exactly where it is, but it becomes pretty obvious once it has been crossed (think of Vincent Van Gogh lopping off his lower lobe, Ernest Hemingway pulling the trigger or Sylvia Plath turning the oven on).

I was perusing a friend's Facebook page the other day when I noticed a link to an article titled 'Creativity - similar to schizophrenia?' The article states that studies have shown "striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia." As someone who has known both highly creative people, as well as those with varying degrees of mental illness, I can't say I disagree.

While watching The View the other day (that's right, you heard me, The View!) author Stephen King made an interesting statement. He said that when he sits down to right a book he goes into a kind of trance. Once he's done, he's not even sure where his ideas came from.

He goes into an altered state of consciousness, one might say.

It's not surprising (to me, at least) that people able to write sentences poignant enough to elicit tears, paint paintings beautiful enough to take your breath away, or write music so powerful it literally brings you to your knees, have a little more going on up there than the rest of us.

We are all assaulted with a battery of sensory information - some might even call it overload - on a daily basis. Both schizophrenics and creative geniuses have a lower level of latent inhibition (LI). This means they don't filter, or discard, the information as readily as most.

The difference between schizophrenics and creative geniuses is what they do with the surplus. 

The creative ones are able to manipulate it without being overwhelmed by it while the truly mad ones simply allow it to seep into their consciousness, unable to distinguish between internal and external stimuli.

Creativity does have it's dark side though, with creative types more prone to depression, bipolar disorder and even schizophrenia. "People who have mental illness in their family (also) have a higher chance of being creative." 

As my spirit animal Jack Kerouac wrote in The Bible On the Road: the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

Cue tears.