Researchers have found that a key brain system is similar in creative, mentally healthy people and people with schizophrenia, bolstering the notion that the factors that contribute to mental illness may also confer benefits.
Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet found commonalities in the brain’s dopamine system between people with schizophrenia and creative, non-schizophrenic subjects. Specifically, both creative and schizophrenic people tended to have a relatively low density of dopamine receptors in the thalamus. Study author Fredrik Ullén explains that this might lead to “a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information” — which would in turn give rise to both “the ability of healthy highly creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the mentally ill.”
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