ARE YOU OUT OF MY MIND ? !
Creativity May Be Genetically Linked with Psychiatric Disorders - http://www.livescience.com/51125-creativity-genetically-linked-psychiatric-disorders.html
The study revealed that the people in these artistic societies were 17 percent more likely to carry those variants linked with the mental health conditions than were people in the general population, who were not members of these societies.
"The results of this study should not have come as a surprise, because to be creative, you have to think differently from the crowd," study author Kari Stefansson, the founder and CEO of deCODE, a genomic analysis company, said in a statement. "And we had previously shown that carriers of genetic factors that predispose to schizophrenia do so." - (link above)
My brief comments: This is a Ven Diagram overlap. It is a partial correlation - and certainly not a causation. That means that not every mentally ill person is creative, and not every creative person is mentally ill - or even POTENTIALLY mentally ill. Far from it. Reporters on scientific studies can often be misleading in their generalisations.
However, there is some correlation. Which is FINE. For one thing, as the article stated, creative people must think outside the box. That means, statistically, a higher preportion of creative people will, e.g., have weird jobs, enjoy unusual pets, have odd names, eat different foods, and: have some potential mental illness. That's how stats work.
And that's how EVOLUTION works. Looking at creativity as a positive trait, beneficial to the species, if not to the individual, (like altruism), then creative people may also carry traits which are not so beneficial as well, (in the same way that people who resist malaria may also have sickle-cell anaemia, and so forth). If I was born with large legs for running after prey, e.g., then it would matter less how strong my arms were, and such. But, chance may also give me both.
Similarly, MANY creative people, as luck would have it, are gifted, as well, with astute mental abilities, or people skills, or associative abilities - which, too, may feed into creativity itself, just as, alternately, mental illness may. We are talking about norms, not absolutes.
And, what of idiot savants, or some autistics? You see, there is balance in all life. And society benefits from difference as it does from sameness, depending on the times. And...
The Surprising Reason Why Some People Smile More - http://www.livescience.com/51127-genes-affect-laughing-smiling.html
People with two copies of the short allele laughed and smiled the most; those with one short and one long copy were in the middle, and those with two long versions of the gene smiled and laughed the least, stated the study, which was published online on Monday (June 1) in the journal Emotion.
"People with the short allele have higher highs, and they also have lower lows. They kind of have amplified emotional reactions," Haase told Live Science.
The new finds suggest the short version of the gene makes people more sensitive, to the both good and the bad in their lives, Haase said.
Search also: "niceness gene"; ".......... forgot..... tbc
The study revealed that the people in these artistic societies were 17 percent more likely to carry those variants linked with the mental health conditions than were people in the general population, who were not members of these societies.
"The results of this study should not have come as a surprise, because to be creative, you have to think differently from the crowd," study author Kari Stefansson, the founder and CEO of deCODE, a genomic analysis company, said in a statement. "And we had previously shown that carriers of genetic factors that predispose to schizophrenia do so." - (link above)
My brief comments: This is a Ven Diagram overlap. It is a partial correlation - and certainly not a causation. That means that not every mentally ill person is creative, and not every creative person is mentally ill - or even POTENTIALLY mentally ill. Far from it. Reporters on scientific studies can often be misleading in their generalisations.
However, there is some correlation. Which is FINE. For one thing, as the article stated, creative people must think outside the box. That means, statistically, a higher preportion of creative people will, e.g., have weird jobs, enjoy unusual pets, have odd names, eat different foods, and: have some potential mental illness. That's how stats work.
And that's how EVOLUTION works. Looking at creativity as a positive trait, beneficial to the species, if not to the individual, (like altruism), then creative people may also carry traits which are not so beneficial as well, (in the same way that people who resist malaria may also have sickle-cell anaemia, and so forth). If I was born with large legs for running after prey, e.g., then it would matter less how strong my arms were, and such. But, chance may also give me both.
Similarly, MANY creative people, as luck would have it, are gifted, as well, with astute mental abilities, or people skills, or associative abilities - which, too, may feed into creativity itself, just as, alternately, mental illness may. We are talking about norms, not absolutes.
And, what of idiot savants, or some autistics? You see, there is balance in all life. And society benefits from difference as it does from sameness, depending on the times. And...
The Surprising Reason Why Some People Smile More - http://www.livescience.com/51127-genes-affect-laughing-smiling.html
People with two copies of the short allele laughed and smiled the most; those with one short and one long copy were in the middle, and those with two long versions of the gene smiled and laughed the least, stated the study, which was published online on Monday (June 1) in the journal Emotion.
"People with the short allele have higher highs, and they also have lower lows. They kind of have amplified emotional reactions," Haase told Live Science.
The new finds suggest the short version of the gene makes people more sensitive, to the both good and the bad in their lives, Haase said.
Search also: "niceness gene"; ".......... forgot..... tbc