Creativity and madness: the science behind this relationship

How the mind of a genius works

Jul 30, 2025

🏷️ Categories: Creativity.

There’s something fascinating about the way the world talks about geniuses.

Always with that mix of admiration and fear. “Genius and madness.” “Brilliant yet tormented.” “Gifted but broken.” Aristotle said it 2,000 years ago: “Those who have excelled in philosophy, politics, poetry, and art have all had tendencies toward melancholy.”

And history keeps repeating itself.

Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Cobain, Anne Sexton, Mark Rothko… Brilliant minds, yes. But also fragile, melancholic, and tormented.

And then comes the big question…

Why are so many creative geniuses deeply afflicted?

Nancy Andreasen’s Question

Maybe one person holds part of the answer.

Nancy C. Andreasen is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist—but also a scholar of literature. This mix of interests led her to ask an uncomfortable question: What makes a creative mind different? Does their brain work in a different way? And why does there seem to be such a close link with mental illness?

Andreasen couldn’t let the question go—and so she decided to investigate.

She recruited writers from the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, including Kurt Vonnegut, and studied them in depth. What she discovered completely changed the way we understand creativity.

An Ancient Yet Persistent Myth

The link between genius and madness isn’t new.

Shakespeare explored it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Theseus says: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.”
John Dryden wrote: “Great wits are sure to madness near allied; and thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
Cesare Lombroso, in 1891, looked for extravagant physical traits in geniuses: left-handedness, stuttering, celibacy. Francis Galton, more rigorous, drew genealogical trees to show that genius had a hereditary component.
But it was Lewis Terman, in the 20th century, who carried out one of the most ambitious studies: he followed hundreds of children with extremely high IQs for decades. His findings were surprising.

A high IQ did not guarantee extraordinary creative achievements.

Thus arose the threshold theory: beyond an IQ of 120, extra intelligence doesn’t seem to make a difference in creativity. But Nancy Andreasen wasn’t satisfied with these findings and decided to study famous creatives—writers, artists, scientists.

Her first study with writers revealed something brutal:

80% of them had suffered some type of mood disorder.

Mostly depression. Occasionally bipolar disorder.

In the control group of non-writers, only about 30% had experienced something similar. Other studies reached similar conclusions.

Kay Redfield Jamison found that over 38% of famous British artists had received treatment for a mood disorder (Jamison, 1996).
Joseph Schildkraut found that half of abstract expressionist painters suffered from mental illness.

What Happens Inside the Creative Brain?

Thanks to neuroimaging, Nancy Andreasen was able to look closer.

She discovered that the key lies in the association cortices, brain regions that allow us to connect words, memories, and ideas. During REST states (Random Episodic Silent Thought), when the mind wanders, these cortices lit up intensely as they made associations between words or patterns (Andreasen, 2014).

“When the associations flying around the brain self-organize to form a new idea, the result is creativity. But if they fail to self-organize, or if they do so incorrectly, the result is psychosis.” — Nancy Andreasen

In short, creative brains are better at weaving connections between seemingly unrelated things. But that same openness and flow of ideas makes them more vulnerable to overload and mood disorders.

That is the delicate internal balance.

Recurring Traits

Beyond biology, Andreasen identified personality patterns:

Self-taught: Many prefer to learn on their own. Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg… and, looking further back, autodidacts like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, or Michael Faraday.
Polymaths: Extremely broad interests. Leonardo da Vinci combined art, engineering, anatomy, and architecture. Benjamin Franklin was an inventor, diplomat, and writer. Goethe was a poet, scientist, and statesman. These are just a few of many examples.
High persistence: They keep going despite rejection and doubt. Even when their projects lack support or are turned down, they try again. Much of genius is built on routine.
High tolerance for uncertainty: They dare to explore ideas or projects with uncertain outcomes, knowing that failure is a real possibility. In science and art, valuable work emerges on the edge of the unknown. It’s the idea that “if you want to be creative, you will doubt your own work.”

And here appears a paradox that Nancy detected.

Having too many ideas can be dangerous. Part of creativity is choosing which ideas to let grow—and which to let die.

Several study participants emphasized the difficulty of selecting, from a multitude of brilliant ideas, which ones to pursue and which ones to discard to focus on the chosen ones. This is the donkey’s paradox: the more ideas you have, the harder it is to decide.

Having ideas is important. But so is letting them go—and not falling in love with them.

Both are necessary skills.

The Edge Between Genius and Madness

John Nash, the Nobel Prize–winning mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia, put it bluntly: “The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way as my mathematical ideas. That’s why I took them seriously.”

Some people see things others can’t see… and they’re right.
We call them creative geniuses.

Others see things others can’t see… and they’re wrong.
We call them mentally ill.

And some, like Nash, are both at the same time.

Creativity feeds on diverse stimuli. On experimentation. On trying many things before specializing. This has implications for how we educate, how we raise children, and how we socially accept those who think differently.

Maybe pushing children toward early specialization is a mistake.

Maybe the true seed of creativity lies in allowing them to explore, to learn on their own, to connect dots no one else sees.

Creativity hurts.
But when it happens, it is pure joy.

✍️ Your turn: Do you think society encourages or stifles creativity by demanding early specialization and quick results? How would your career have been different if you had had more space to explore?
💭 Quote of the day: “Many personality traits of creative people make them more vulnerable, including high openness to new experiences, tolerance for ambiguity, and a relatively unprejudiced way of approaching life and the world.” — Nancy Andreasen

See you next time! 👋

📚 References

Aristotle. Problems.
Andreasen, N. C. (2014). Secrets of the Creative Brain. The Atlantic.
Andreasen, N. C. (2005). The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius.
Jamison, K. R. (1996). Touched with Fire. Simon and Schuster.