There’s a good side to being neurotic: you can become a creative genius.
Tell us what you dream, so we could tell if you’re a creative genius – this is the saying that could better sum up the conclusions that scientists have reached during their most recent experiment. Adam Perkins, a psychologist at the King’s College from London has strong reasons to believe that neurotic people, that is, people who worry more are more creative.
Adam Perkins has teamed up with Jonathan Smallwood, a neuroscience expert to find why some people are more creative than others. Their initiative has been praised, considering that people have always tried to understand the genius of famous people like Isaac Newton, Isaac Asimov, Winston Churchill, etc.
The new theory starts from the recent finding that Smallwood has made related to people’s daydreaming activities. He has performed a series of MRI scans on various respondents to determine the brain region that is activated when people start imagining. Based on results, the medial prefrontal cortex that is responsible for memory recollection becomes highly active during daydreaming sessions.
Some respondents were much more active during tests than others. By comparing the MRI scans and the information that Perkins has collected from participants, the two researchers have concluded that neurotic people are generally creative geniuses.
Adam has explained that neurotic people are usually much more worried than other categories of individuals. They tend to become anxious, scared, unhappy and even angry if something goes wrong.
Their emotional expressions can be more or less powerful, depending on their extrovert or introvert nature. When confronted with a problem, introvert neurotics linger as much as possible in their memories until they find the answer they were looking for. These practices make them true creative geniuses, scientists have concluded.
History has confirmed the new finding on many previous occasions. Some of humanity’s brilliant minds were neurotics in that they could not leave a problem unsolved. Isaac Newton himself stated that he could stay for days on end thinking of the possible solutions to a math problem.
There are still many questions that need to be answered and many studies that need to be conducted before scientists can all conclude that neurotic people are creative geniuses.
The current study was published in the journal of Cognitive Science.
Image source: www.omdukblog.com