Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

Many of us have shaken hands with innovative people who seemed crazy at times. How often have you questioned the fine lines between creative and crazy? It likely hits home faster when a fellow worker fits Einstein’s belief that … Imagination is far more important than knowledge.

The mad genius according to Dr. Ellen Winner, professor of psychology at Boston College … has scientific basis. Exactly how the elements of genius and madness connect in the human brain though … is far less understood. Let's face it ... these connections will likely either inspire your curiosity or take you out ... whenever they hit your workplace. And it's rarely insignificant when Jeckel meets Hyde.  

Is creative genius inextricably mixed together with crazy, or is it

coincidence? Scientists often speak and write about links between madness – such as manic-depressive illness - and the arts. My questions is … Does  madness result from too much focus on certain areas of the brain – to the exclusion of other areas? Let’s say you spend 10 hours daily writing poetry or painting landscapes. You’d ignore many intelligences such as your interpersonal intelligence which craves close relationships to keep the brain balanced.

William James saw the real genius as a combination of superior intellect and psychopathic temperament. Is it that simple to you? What about famous people with bi-polar illnesses, of whom Lord Byron said … “We of the craft are all crazy”?

Interestingly, research shows fewer links between scientific achievement and madness. Nobody seems to offer a reasonable explanation for arts that add craziness and sciences that do not. That only adds to my curiosity….

Are people with creative genius really mad or is it mere eccentricity?  Look back through history … where you see poets struggle more than most with manic-depressive illness... and you also see horrid deaths through mental tragedy. Why?

Geniuses over time - asked the same questions people like you and I ask today. Edgar Allan Poe said it best ... "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 disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night"

Vincent Van Gogh offered another example of artistically creative genius with emotional instability. How does it happen? Dr. Winner claims the earlier phases of manic-depressive illness ... foster faster thought patterns ... that extend ordinary concepts in unusual ways. Does that work for you? Apparently, this unique mental trend may also encourage heightened creativity.

If Winner is correct, then artistic people who suffer manic-depressive illnesses might be more creative because of their illness, rather than in spite of it.  Interesting. Do you believe that? I'm not sure....

This link between crazy and creative should be more measurable it seems ... if Winner's claim is correct …. For instance, certain  mental treatments should be found to diminish an artist's creativity. Interestingly, it’s simply not so to date. Just the opposite… treatments help many mad artists to survive things like mood swings in order to preserve their creativity with less of the crazy parts slipping into the mix.

Do you work with a creative genius? What have you observed at work?