With these words of Aristotle, contained in his work “Problem xxx. Wisdom, intellect, wisdom“, A link between genius and madness was probably traced for the first time in history. A relationship that has always fascinated western thought.
Aristotle’s work opens with this question: Why are all extraordinary men melancholy?
The object of the XXX problem is melancolia as a pathological affection and temperamental arrangement, however recognized by the author as capable of determining, in the people who are affected, performance out of the ordinary in various areas of knowledge and human action.
Aristotle notes that most of the most eminent people of his time were affected by what he himself had diagnosed as “malincolia” and presented behavioral characteristics of clear pathological nature, as an instability of mood, impulsiveness, high risk of suicide.
All factors who, in reality, are peculiar of patients suffering from maniac-depressive disease, one of the most widespread mental disorders. This is characterized by the presence of strong mood changes that may vary, even abruptly, between extreme happiness (known as “mania”) and severe depression, “Malincolia”.
The text, surprising in its modernity and descriptive accuracy, formulates the thesis of the correspondence between melancolia and geniusrepresenting the first reference of a long tradition that has questioned the relationship between madness and inspiration, disease and talent, melancholy depression and creative ingenuity from antiquity to today.
Also according to Petrarch, who focuses on the issue in the epistle in Zoito, “there is no ingenuity if not mixed with madness”.
It is not easy to establish as far as this assumption has actual foundation. An Irish psychiatrist, Michael Fitzgerald, claimed that “superior spirits” cannot fail to have any measure of any mental disorder.
It followed that in over 30 years of Fitzgerald activity he diagnosed Asperger’s autism and syndrome to about a thousand people, including Mozart and Beethoven.
And many of these “crazy” are men that we today study in the books of history, art, literature, such as “artists” or “genes”. Because there is a limit, a Subtle and sometimes invisible border between genius and madnessand the genes are those who live on that border, making their madness their strength.
Is it just a myth or is there true in this belief?
That whimsical and creative people are also a little crazy is a conviction of many. Whether there is a relationship or that it is mere coincidences, the image of madness as a result of the genius has repeatedly expressed itself in the history of the western world.
The theme awakens great interest especially in Renaissance and even becomes central during romance. The romantics believe that the unruly of passion, the same that in the past had tormented Michelangelo and Caravaggio, at the same time foods the creative fury and the torment of madness.
It was believed that genius and madness they formed the binomial necessary for creative producing.
During positivism, the alleged relationship between genius and madness is investigated with the intent to verify whether it rests on scientific data that can actually be found and quantifiable.
The object of interest were the conclusions to which Cesare Lombroso, Italian psychiatrist, father of modern criminology came. In one of his best known books, “The Man of Genius” (1889) supports the thesis that crazy, genius and criminal would be united as deviant types compared to the Municipality.
The tendency to excess and to get out of the canons would have a hereditary basis that contaminates the descendants of the most gifted families and would explain to resort to the same families of eminent personalities for creativity or bizarre.
The examples in the art world
Painting
Starting from the world of art, there are numerous examples of great painters who have combined elements of high creative capacity with well -recognizable psychopathology.
How to forget Edvard Munchthe author of the famous “scream”. Precisely this picture, its most famous, is a symptom of that pathological anguish that pursued him throughout his life: a man, on a bridge, in an unreal atmosphere that arouses the same feeling of anxiety and pessimism in society that pushed the author to paint the work, so much so that the first exhibition in which he was exposed was closed for the sensation aroused.
Vincent Van Gogh He was the crazy artist par excellence: the painter suffered from hallucinations, paranoia and suicide ideas that would materialize in the extreme gesture that, at 37 years old, led him to death.
He himself, a year earlier, in an excess of anger after a violent discussion with the painter Gauguin, had talked his left ear, as evidenced by one of his self -portraits.
Very often his painting has been studied with the intent to find out how and how much his psychic disorders have poured into the works. His paintings enclose a world made of distorted figures, of those colors and those shapes that drowned his mind, defined by himself.
The prevalence of yellow, the alienating use of colors and shapes, has been considered the fruit of its hallucinations and the distorted perception of reality.
And we could still remember others, from Salvator Dalìtormented by paranoia, to Claude Monet, whose depression obsessed him throughout his life.
The literary world
But not only the world of the figurative arts includes in itself a vast number of people with mental disorders; Literature is also studded with writers loaded with manias and obsessions.
English Edgar Allan Poe He fell into a deep state of depressive anguish following the death of his wife, also aggravated by the alcohol who destroyed him in his last years.
His suffering has poured entirely into his works, classics of fear and exasperated tensions.
They belong to this group, among the Italians, too Manzoni and Leopardi. The first affected by agoraphobia, so frightened by the crowd and open places that they never leave the house. The second affected by numerous physical diseases that led him to depression and very frequent changes in mood, passing from euphoria to total despair.
Even a great modern mathematician was suffering from mental disorders: John NashNobel Prize for the economy in 1994, was for all his life obsessed with the ghosts of his mind, imaginary characters who appeared real.
His incredible story became, in 2001, also a film, “A Beautiful Mind”, winner of four Oscar prizes.
The writer Alda Merinisuffering from bipolar syndrome like many other writers, including Hemingway, Woolf, Byrondefined the madness “a greater acuteness of the senses”.
There is true in this statement, because it is thanks to that madness that all these men and women have been able to perceive that detail necessary to solve impossible problems, to create incredible works, exploiting a higher sensitivity, a different perception of the world.
What does science tell us today?
Today, the legendary connection between genius and madness is no longer just anecdotal. Recent searches show that These two extremes of the human mind are really connected – And scientists are starting to understand why.
Sociological interpretations attribute the creativity/mental illness to a selection process in choosing the profession.
Since the activities of this type can be discontinue and therefore compatible with the irregularities of these pathologies, it is possible that these suffering subjects choose professions that feel more suited to them.
From a neurobiological point of view, it seems that creativity is fundamental on the dopamine neuromodiator, a substance found in the meso-limbic area, where the part of the brain dedicated to gratification is located (said precisely ‘circuit of gratification’).
Dopamine is responsible for the birth of positive moods, but also of everything that concerns maniacality. “A large number of studies states that compared to neutral mood, the positive mood (exemplifiable in happiness) is associated with the increase in originality”, support Greg Murray (of the Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia) and Sheri Johnson (of the University of California, Berkeley, United States) in a revision article on the subject, Published on Clinical Psychological Review.
James Fallon, neurobiologist of the University of California-Irvine, observing that people affected bipolar disorder tend to be creative when they come out of a profound depression, has related to the improvement phase of mood with a change also of the brain activity which, in the phase of overcoming the depressive state, turns off at the bottom of a region of the brain called the frontal lobe in the upper part of that lobe.
Surprisingly, the same change occurs when people have creativity imits, thus establishing a link between the activities of the brain circuits and intellectual performances.
The link, however, is not linear, because those who suffer from the most serious obsessive shapes is less capable of generating creativity than those suffering from lighter forms.
In short, To be creative you have to be crazy, but not too much. Just a slight touch of maniacality.
Do creativity and madness have the same genetic roots?
Various epidemiological studies have observed that among the family of people who suffer from mental disorders, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, there are more artists, whether they are musicians or painters or writers, than in the normal population.
Could there be a common genetic root in these cognitive processes? This was the starting hypothesis of various research, among which we report that conducted in Iceland by Kari Stefansson, which, in the study published in “Nature Neuroscience” in 2015, found that the subjects carriers of the genetic variants more commonly associated with mental disorders also have a greater probability of being artists, in particular actors, dancers, musicians, photographers and writers.
A research by the Karolinska Institute of Stockholm also seems to find a relationship between these two dimensions of the individual. The study, published in the “Journal of Psychiatric Research”, is very long and in -depth.
It was conducted on 1.2 million patients in Sweden, together with their relatives (reaching the second grade cousins) and lasted forty years. The results highlighted in particular for writers a greater risk of psychiatric disorders, dependencies on alcohol and drugs and suicide. All this refers to the image of the alienated writer immersed in a fictitious world whose behavior falls into madness as the protagonist of Shining, played at the cinema by the masterful Jack Nicholson.
Beyond the numbers and statistics, the fact that thinking outside the box is the paradigm of anyone who is characterized as an innovator in the arts and science.
A characterization sometimes so marked as to generate the stereotype of the “crazy scientist” or the artist “weird”, people so taken from their work that they forgot the surrounding world.
Moreover, if as an old adage says “nobody closely is normal”, perhaps the artists are less than all of all.
