The Dark Side of Creativity

When he was in grad school, Dean Simonton wanted to study creativity and genius, but the way he went about it almost spelled his failure. Simonton had grown up reading the World Book encyclopedias, which his parents thought necessary for the child’s success in life. Between the covers of the venerable tomes, he discovered history’s most exalted artists and trailblazing inventors, and a question took root inside his mind: how does one become like those people?

The question wouldn’t go away and so for his doctoral thesis Simonton proposed to look at creativity not by studying college students in the lab, as was the norm, but by immersing himself into the lives and times of dead geniuses. He had a hard time convincing the psychology department at his university to take him seriously but in the end an advisory committee was scrambled together and the research went ahead.

One idea that Simonton examined was that of the mad genius. Looking at the data, he found a curious correlation between the mental health of highly creative people and the constraints under which they worked:

There’s a study published on this where you can compare Nobel prizes in physics with Nobel prizes in literature, and they are not cut from the same cloth.

Writers and poets, for example, create in an almost unbounded field; there are very few limits to…