CREATIVITY AND MADNESScaused many counterfeiters to be hanged despite the objections of his
colleagues.
Newton was haunted by insanity. He spent hours trying to find hid-
den messages in the Bible, and wrote over a million words on religion
and the occult. He pursued the medieval art of alchemy, obsessively
searching for the philosopher’s stone, a mythical substance that alche-
mists believed had magical properties and could even help humans
achieve immortality. At the age of fifty, Newton became fully psychotic
and spent a year in an insane asylum.
Based on the evidence, it seems likely that Newton had elevated
levels of dopamine that contributed to his brilliance, his social prob-
lems, and his psychotic breakdown. And he’s not alone. Many brilliant
artists, scientists, and business leaders are thought or known to have had
mental illness. They include Ludwig van Beethoven, Edvard Munch
(who painted The Scream), Vincent van Gogh, Charles Darwin, Georgia
O’Keeffe, Sylvia Plath, Nikola Tesla, Vaslav Nijinsky (the greatest male
dancer of the early twentieth century, who once choreographed a ballet
that started a riot), Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, chess master Bobby
Fischer, and many others.
Dopamine gives us the power to create. It allows us to imagine
the unreal and connect the seemingly unrelated. It allows us to build
mental models of the world that transcend mere physical description,
moving beyond sensory impressions to uncover the deeper meaning of
what we experience. Then, like a child knocking over a tower of blocks,
dopamine demolishes its own models so that we can start fresh and find
new meaning in what was once familiar.
But that power comes at a cost. The hyperactive dopamine systems
of creative geniuses put them at risk of mental illness. Sometimes the
world of the unreal breaks through its natural bounds, creating para-
noia, delusions, and the feverish excitement of manic behavior. In addi-
tion, heightened dopaminergic activity may overwhelm H&N systems,
hampering one’s ability to form human relationships and navigate the
day-to-day world of reality.
For some, it doesn’t matter. The joy of creation is the most
intense joy they know, whether they are artists, scientists, prophets, or