CREATIVITY AND MADNESSsounded like nothing that had come before. If artists such
as Bob Dylan elevated pop and rock lyrics from doggerel
to poetry, Brian Wilson transformed the possibilities of the
music itself from three chords and a verse-chorus structure
to what Beach Boys publicist Derek Taylor is credited with
calling the “pocket symphony.”
The range of unusual creative connections suggests he
experienced low latent inhibition associated with high lev-
els of dopamine, but those high levels also may have con-
tributed to Wilson’s mental illness. “He hears voices,” his
wife Melinda Ledbetter told People magazine in 2012. “I can
tell if it’s good voices or bad voices by the look that comes
over his face. For us it’s hard to understand, but for him
they’re very real.” He was diagnosed with schizophrenia,
later changed to schizoaffective disorder, a combination of
symptoms of schizophrenia and abnormal mood, including
hallucinations and paranoia. In 2006, he told Ability maga-
zine that he started hearing voices at the age of twenty-five,
a week after he had taken psychedelic drugs. “For the past
40 years I’ve had auditory hallucinations in my head, all day
every day, and I can’t get them out. Every few minutes the
voices say something derogatory to me... I believe they
started picking on me because they are jealous. The voices
in my head are jealous of me.”
Wilson says that treatment to reduce the symptoms did
not significantly reduce his creativity. Contrary to popular
perception, the untreated pain of mental illness is a hin-
drance, not a help. “I used to go for long periods without
being able to do anything, but now I play every day.”