THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYvulnerability reacting to stress is corroborated by research conducted in
Southeast London by James Kirkbride at the University of Cambridge,
which revealed that rates of psychosis are higher in poorer, more crime-
ridden neighbourhoods.
A history of emotional or physical trauma could also be the key ingre-
dient that makes unusual experiences pathological. In 2005, Maarten
Bak interviewed thousands of people – none of whom had had a
psychotic experience – to find out whether they’d been abused in child-
hood. Three years later, the same participants were contacted again. By
this time, a minority had had a psychotic experience. Crucially, whether
or not they’d found that experience distressing depended largely on
Schizophrenia and creativity
From an evolutionary perspective, you’d think that schizophrenia would
be a disadvantage. This is borne out by the fact that people diagnosed
with schizophrenia tend to have fewer children than average. It is,
therefore, an enduring mystery why schizophrenia remains stubbornly
prevalent at around one percent of the population in most cultures
of the world. How come the genes responsible for predisposing
people towards schizophrenia haven’t become progressively rarer?
One theory proposed by Daniel Nettle at Newcastle University is that
the relevant genes manifest in some people as an embryonic, harmless
form of schizophrenia called schizotypy – a condition associated with
enhanced artistic creativity. In turn, Nettle predicts that these creative
types may have more children than average, thus propagating their
schizophrenia-related genes. What evidence does Nettle have for this?
In research published in 2005, Nettle and his colleague Helen Keenoo
surveyed hundreds of people, including poets and artists, and found
that those who reported having more unusual thoughts and experi-
ences – questions included: “Do you believe in telepathy?”, “Does your
mood go up and down easily?”, and “Does a passing thought ever seem
so real it frightens you?” – also tended to be more creative and to have
had more sexual partners. Further support came in a 2006 survey, also
conducted by Nettle, of hundreds of patients with schizophrenia, plus
non-schizophrenic poets, artists, mathematicians and other healthy
controls. The creative types reported just as many bizarre, psychotic-
like experiences as the patients. However, unlike the patients, they
didn’t score highly on “introvertive anhedonia”, which manifests as a
lack of emotion and motivation. Curiously, the mathematicians had
fewer unusual experiences than the other controls did, yet they scored
highly on “introvertive anhedonia” – the opposite pattern to the artists
and poets.