CREATIVITY AND MADNESScomposing lines about a hopeless lover is not so different from the phys-
icist scribbling formulas about excited electrons. They both require the
ability to look beyond the world of the senses into a deeper, more pro-
found world of abstract ideas. Elite societies of scientists are filled with
artistic souls. Members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences are
one and a half times more likely to have an artistic hobby compared
to the rest of us. Members of the U.K. Royal Society are about twice
as likely, and Nobel Prize winners are almost three times as likely. The
better you are at managing the most complex, abstract ideas, the more
likely you are to be an artist.
This similarity between art and science became especially impor-
tant when a computer programming crisis occurred at the turn of
the millennium. Computer programmers had developed the habit of
abbreviating years by using only the last two digits (e.g., 99 for 1999) in
order to conserve then-expensive memory space (and a few keystrokes).
The programmers weren’t thinking ahead to the next millennium,
when 99 might mean 2099. Thousands of programs were at risk of
crashing; not just web browsers and word processors, but also software
that controlled airplanes, dams, and nuclear power plants. The Y2K
problem, as it was known, affected so many systems that there weren’t
enough computer programmers to fix them all. By some reports, a few
companies recruited out-of-work musicians because they were able to
learn programming so easily.
WHY GENIUSES ARE JERKSMusic and math go together because elevated levels of dopamine often
come as a package deal: if you are highly dopaminergic in one area,
you’re likely to be highly dopaminergic in others. Scientists are artists
and musicians are mathematicians. But there’s a downside. Sometimes
having lots of dopamine is a liability.
High levels of dopamine suppress H&N functioning, so brilliant
people are often poor at human relationships. We need H&N empathy
to understand what’s going on in other people’s minds, an essential skill