Speaker 1: Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
Speaker 1: From How Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, did you ever watch Tales from
Speaker 1: the Dark Side back in the day? What do you
Speaker 1: remember about it? Um? I remember it was creepy tails,
Speaker 1: and remember my brother and I love stuff like that
Speaker 1: as well as Tales from the Crypt, so like anything
Speaker 1: that we could amass of the horror genre, we were there.
Speaker 1: Of course, Talles from the Crypt you had to have
Speaker 1: HBO access for that. Yes, in our neighbors you have
Speaker 1: a Harrison's Thank you, Harrison's See. I had to watch
Speaker 1: it half scrambled, so it was sort of half imagination
Speaker 1: of what was going on with the Tales from the Crypt.
Speaker 1: But then Tails in the Dark Side that came on
Speaker 1: at like three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon or something
Speaker 1: on cable, and that one always creep the heck out
Speaker 1: of it, maybe more so than Tales from the Crips.
Speaker 1: I think Tales from the Crip came later for me
Speaker 1: and and there was always that fun, campy, you know,
Speaker 1: old school classic horror comics motif and all the puns.
Speaker 1: It kind of disarmed you, like right from the get go,
Speaker 1: you knew that you were entering a world where horrible
Speaker 1: things were gonna happen. It was okay because it's just
Speaker 1: the vibe, but tales from the Dark side. The intro
Speaker 1: I remember as being like super creepy because it had
Speaker 1: like this really haunting music that was like bum bum
Speaker 1: bum bum bum bum bump, and then this this really old,
Speaker 1: terrifying narrator would come on and we would talk about
Speaker 1: how how we live in this surface, sunlit world, but
Speaker 1: there's a dark side everything, and that's when these these
Speaker 1: colorful scenes of like rural America suddenly turn negative, like
Speaker 1: photo negative on you. And then the titles come up
Speaker 1: and they melt, and then some dark story begins, and
Speaker 1: sometimes the story was really scary as well. But that
Speaker 1: intro was always great because it was it was just
Speaker 1: setting you up for this reverse side of everything you
Speaker 1: take for granted and think is wholly and normal in
Speaker 1: your life. So for you, it was the psychological aspect
Speaker 1: of it that really sort of arrested your imagination. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: right from the from the get go, because the narrator
Speaker 1: was saying everything you think, there's a reverse side to
Speaker 1: it that's creepy and awful and it will totally rock
Speaker 1: your understanding of reality. Okay, So we're going to attempt
Speaker 1: to do the same thing here. We're going to give
Speaker 1: a photo negative image of creativity the dark side, right,
Speaker 1: because creativity is one of those things that we tend
Speaker 1: to hold up at least, you know, in our society
Speaker 1: and in our lives. We hold up creativity is this wonderful,
Speaker 1: awesome thing and if you've got it, it's the best
Speaker 1: thing in the world, right, I mean, it's it's the
Speaker 1: stuff of art and the movies and music and everything.
Speaker 1: All the media we consume is born out of creativity.
Speaker 1: The jokes you hear somebody tell over dinner born out
Speaker 1: of creativity, the dishes you eat creatively presented to you.
Speaker 1: It's it's the font of everything that you want in
Speaker 1: your life. So how could there be this dark side
Speaker 1: to it? How could the tails from the dark Side
Speaker 1: narrator come in and mess this up for us? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, because there are hundreds of books about creativity
Speaker 1: and how to bolster your creativity. And we've talked about
Speaker 1: it in an evolutionary sense too, that this was important
Speaker 1: to be a creative thinker for our own survival and
Speaker 1: also to attract mates and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1: And we've seen this in nature, we've seen creativity and animals.
Speaker 1: So yeah, how could it be dark? Well, there's this
Speaker 1: idea that the dark side could emerge because of our
Speaker 1: creative tendencies to be wonderful, fabulous, because essentially, when we're
Speaker 1: being creative, we're creating a kind of lie, right, we
Speaker 1: are altering our reality to a certain degree and telling
Speaker 1: a story about how things are or how they seem. Okay,
Speaker 1: like a fictional novel is essentially a lie about something
Speaker 1: that happened, even at like a finely prepared meal. You know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't taste like fish, because it's kind of lying
Speaker 1: to you that it's it's not really a dead animal
Speaker 1: that watched up on the shore. It's something else, delightful
Speaker 1: and wonderful. Umn just go down the list of things.
Speaker 1: Any actors performance, it's really convincing. They're kind of lying
Speaker 1: to you because they are putting on a show for you.
Speaker 1: They're pretending to be something there or not Yeah. We've
Speaker 1: even talked about this with language and semantic distance. We've
Speaker 1: talked about when we talk about our cuts of meat,
Speaker 1: we don't necessarily say a hey, i'd love a cow burger,
Speaker 1: I'd love a hamburger. The way that we sort of
Speaker 1: cloak what something means to us or try to portray
Speaker 1: it to another person as something else, and then we
Speaker 1: have all these these different words for lies and different
Speaker 1: shades of lies to like take hyperbole, which I love
Speaker 1: to watch hyperbole and science headlines, particularly space science, and
Speaker 1: I've been on both sides of this. I've also helped
Speaker 1: craft some rather outrageous space headlines before. But it's all
Speaker 1: you can't just you know, because you want people to
Speaker 1: see that headline and read the article. So it tends
Speaker 1: to get out of control really quickly, and you get
Speaker 1: you get headlines like mo Ster, black hole gobbles down.
Speaker 1: You know, we we tweak the language enough to where
Speaker 1: we're creating an image of this thing that is not
Speaker 1: the actual scientific content of the article. But that's not lying,
Speaker 1: and nobody argues that it's lying. But but there are
Speaker 1: all these different different levels of dishonesty, even in a
Speaker 1: creative headline on an otherwise scientifically accurate article. Well, it
Speaker 1: requires a novel approach rights draws directly on creativity. And
Speaker 1: so what we're going to talk about today is creativity
Speaker 1: in the sense of, um, you know, could could a
Speaker 1: creative individual be more dishonest than another person? And we're
Speaker 1: going to explore the idea of creativity and madness. We've
Speaker 1: touched on it before. Um, we're going to look at
Speaker 1: mental illness through the lens of creativity. But before jumping
Speaker 1: into all of that, I did want to mention that
Speaker 1: a good example of being an excellent, fabulous but perhaps
Speaker 1: someone who is going beyond the bounds of storytelling facts
Speaker 1: is someone like Jonah Laire, who I think is really
Speaker 1: a great journalists in a sense that he is such
Speaker 1: a good storyteller. And I don't know if anybody has
Speaker 1: heard about this dust up about some of his journalistic practices.
Speaker 1: It started off as a dust up. I think it
Speaker 1: kind of ended up as more of a blow up.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, sort of Adam bomb. Now, he
Speaker 1: had actually written a book called Imagine How Creativity Works,
Speaker 1: and it was withdrawn from the market by Laire's publisher
Speaker 1: when they discovered that he had fabricated some quotations in
Speaker 1: the book, most notably one from Bob Dylan on his
Speaker 1: creative process. And he's worth noting at this point, he's
Speaker 1: already made a name for himself. He's already big news.
Speaker 1: He's been on Radio Lab multiple times at this point.
Speaker 1: I think he'd already been on Colbert. I mean, he's
Speaker 1: he was out there. He's a you know, he's a
Speaker 1: good looking young guy. He's well spoken. He's very much
Speaker 1: in the same vein of the sort of the Eagleman's
Speaker 1: and the Neil deGrasse Tyson's of the world where they're
Speaker 1: they're great at communicating science, both in print and in person. Right.
Speaker 1: And that's what I think is sad about the story,
Speaker 1: because here's someone who's really committed to the story of science,
Speaker 1: and he finds all these different gems and he kind
Speaker 1: of makes this the whole sort of theme of science
Speaker 1: sparkle for people. Um. And he does this because he
Speaker 1: is such a good storyteller. Again, though, the problem is this,
Speaker 1: he's going to be on the boundaries of storytelling and
Speaker 1: he has, you know, dabbled in some plagiarism um as
Speaker 1: well as recycling of his work, and people are are
Speaker 1: sort of awe struck by this, and I think I
Speaker 1: am too, because here's someone who is a Rhodes scholar,
Speaker 1: incredibly smart, and somehow got into this, I guess you
Speaker 1: could say, this vortex of lies that sort of spun
Speaker 1: out of control. And so we want to look at
Speaker 1: that a little bit today. Why would someone jump into
Speaker 1: that scenario when they had all the tools at their
Speaker 1: disposal and all the creativity that they wanted. Why would
Speaker 1: they sort of rationalize this step into the darkness? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean another big story out of the ear
Speaker 1: was the Mike Daisy affair with the whole apple and
Speaker 1: uh Mr Daisy visit the Apple factory, which is part
Speaker 1: of a spoken word piece that he did on This
Speaker 1: American Life. But the ultimate excuse there, whether you buy
Speaker 1: either or not, was that he's a storyteller first that
Speaker 1: sort of found himself wandering into journalistic territory, whereas Joann
Speaker 1: Hlaire was already in the journalistic territory. He was just
Speaker 1: using storytelling a lot to it to his advantage, and
Speaker 1: then it all fell apart from there right almost In
Speaker 1: Layer's instance, you could kind of see him saying it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be awesome if if Dylan said this, or you know,
Speaker 1: amended his quote with this to make that story even stronger.
Speaker 1: In some ways, I see that with Daisy, But I
Speaker 1: think what's intriguing about both of them is that I
Speaker 1: think we can all relate to this. There have been
Speaker 1: instances in our lives where we maybe took some creative
Speaker 1: license and we distorted the truth. So it's sort of
Speaker 1: interesting to look at why we might do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because when Wired actually hired a journalism professor, Charles to
Speaker 1: look into his work for Wired, I found various instances
Speaker 1: of recycling this is right. This is lair recycling, which
Speaker 1: of course is just using bits from one article you
Speaker 1: wrote for another, often for any different employee, getting paid
Speaker 1: twice right. Press release plagiarism, which of course is your
Speaker 1: sent a press release and it it is a write
Speaker 1: up of something that somebody did, and then you're supposed
Speaker 1: to take that information and make it your own to
Speaker 1: gather some other sources, get some quotes, etcetera. But it's
Speaker 1: then just taking from the press release. And that's something
Speaker 1: that I guess can sometimes be lost on people who
Speaker 1: aren't actually handling press releases. On one side of the other,
Speaker 1: acquisitions of plagiarism, the quotation issues that we mentioned and
Speaker 1: some factual issues as well. So the errors there that
Speaker 1: were found by this guy, that they ranged from some
Speaker 1: things that some listeners may be surprised to learn that
Speaker 1: that's a problem, because, after all, what's wrong with reusing
Speaker 1: something you've said? We do it every time that we
Speaker 1: tell a joke and it works right, and then you
Speaker 1: maybe tweak it a little but reuse the same joke
Speaker 1: later on. But it's different if somebody is paying you
Speaker 1: for that joke and then you are re selling the
Speaker 1: same joke to someone else who thinks it's also bears uniquely. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think the problem too is that he was
Speaker 1: looking at something like eighteen different writings that were published online,
Speaker 1: and I don't I believe that he just sort of
Speaker 1: cherry picked them. I don't think that he potentially chose
Speaker 1: these ones, and you discovered that fourteen out of the
Speaker 1: eighteen had the recycled content in them. So, um, you know,
Speaker 1: this is not a condemnation of Layer, because again, I
Speaker 1: think this is someone who is incredibly talented, and I
Speaker 1: hope that he bounces back from this. It's just a
Speaker 1: good example of what we're talking about today. And in fact,
Speaker 1: some would actually say that Lair's predicament is really more
Speaker 1: of an indirect result of how things are published these days,
Speaker 1: because back in the day, you know, even twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: the content would have gone through at least five different
Speaker 1: people for you know, fact checkers to editors to make
Speaker 1: sure that that all of that was correct. So in
Speaker 1: some ways we have a much wider scope in which
Speaker 1: we can operate because of the technology available to us.
Speaker 1: And you'll see that across all sorts of fields like accounting,
Speaker 1: there's you know, there's a little bit more margin for Air.
Speaker 1: I guess you could say, right, yeah. And also he
Speaker 1: was obviously a big name, and so when he began
Speaker 1: to fall, a lot of eyes went on to his
Speaker 1: work and picked him to pieces. So you can also
Speaker 1: say that, say that there there are plenty of other
Speaker 1: cases of people committing the same journalistic crimes, if you will,
Speaker 1: out there. They just don't have as many eyes on
Speaker 1: what they're doing. All right, So enough of these transgressions,
Speaker 1: let's talk about where it all happens as creativity in
Speaker 1: our brains. Yeah, I guess the best place to start
Speaker 1: is with the old idea of left and right brain,
Speaker 1: and this came out of nineteen seventies. There are various
Speaker 1: studies of split brain patients looking at this idea that
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere of control creativity and that the left
Speaker 1: hemisphere is the seat of logic and mathematics. And also
Speaker 1: everyone loved this. I mean, there's the duality of it
Speaker 1: is is kind of beautiful. There's this star bellied sneeches
Speaker 1: kind of aspect of it too, where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: are you are you part of Team Edward or team
Speaker 1: what's the other team Jacob? Team Jacob? You know, are
Speaker 1: you Team Creatives? You're pretending like you don't know what
Speaker 1: the other team is? I know, yeah, you can't see
Speaker 1: my T shirt. So everyone loved this idea. It was
Speaker 1: so bullet resonated and people like to try to decide
Speaker 1: which team they were on. But since that time, there
Speaker 1: have been a lot more studies into looking at exactly
Speaker 1: how the brain works and how the brain works with creativity.
Speaker 1: This whole field in fact of neuro aesthetics, right, which
Speaker 1: is a scientific attempt to understand the human brains aesthetic
Speaker 1: perceptions of art music. Yeah, at the neurological level. Um,
Speaker 1: there's an interesting study from the University of South Carolina,
Speaker 1: and again it just it exploits this idea that it's
Speaker 1: not just a you know, two party system in the brain,
Speaker 1: that it really takes the two halves of the brain
Speaker 1: to tango when it comes to creativity. And Lisa as
Speaker 1: the z A who is the assistant professor of neuroscience,
Speaker 1: and her team scan the brains of architecture students. And
Speaker 1: they did this because obviously architecture students are engaging what
Speaker 1: you would say is both sides, right, there's an art
Speaker 1: side to it, and then there's also engineering to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's the spatial part of it. So they were showing
Speaker 1: three shapes, a circle, a c in an eight, and
Speaker 1: they were then asked to visualize the images that could
Speaker 1: be made by rearranging those shapes. So this takes a
Speaker 1: little bit of creativity, right, because for example, a face
Speaker 1: could be made with the eight on its side to
Speaker 1: become the eyes. The sea could be a smiling mouth
Speaker 1: or a frown, and then the circle could be a nose. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that requires a little bit of your brain to say,
Speaker 1: oh what, you know, what could I paint with these objects?
Speaker 1: It's interesting when you said those I kind of intentionally
Speaker 1: misheard C. Instead of picturing the letter C, I pictured
Speaker 1: an ocean, and so I imagine like this figure eight
Speaker 1: tower rising out of an ocean, and in the circle
Speaker 1: is an eye at the top of it. That's because
Speaker 1: you're a crazy divergent thinker, which we'll talk about later, okay,
Speaker 1: or my hearing sucks one of the two. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's possible as well. Um, but I also sometimes talked
Speaker 1: really fast, yes, so that could be a problem. But anyway,
Speaker 1: they were then asked to engage in what would be
Speaker 1: a more spatial sort of task, and so they were
Speaker 1: asked to piece together three geometric shapes with their minds
Speaker 1: to see if they formed a square or a rectangle. Now,
Speaker 1: the creative task, even though it was mainly handled by
Speaker 1: the right hemisphere, lit up the left hemisphere hemisphere more
Speaker 1: than the non creative task. And this was really a
Speaker 1: surprise to them because you would think that the spatial reasoning,
Speaker 1: the geometric part of it, would engage less of the
Speaker 1: left side, but in fact they found that even the
Speaker 1: left side was there. Um, that it was more prevalent
Speaker 1: too in the creative side. So again you see that
Speaker 1: it's not just one seat of the brain where creativity
Speaker 1: is occurring. And it's lending again to this idea of
Speaker 1: neuraesthetics that there's a lot more to creativity than we know.
Speaker 1: In effect, duality is kind of a misnomer, especially as
Speaker 1: far as the brain is concerned, that than any kind
Speaker 1: of creative or even engineering task is not one side
Speaker 1: of the other, but both sides working in some degree
Speaker 1: of harmony. Right. And then to add to all of this,
Speaker 1: you have different aspects of what is happening inside of
Speaker 1: the brain affecting how data is being perceived and interpreted.
Speaker 1: And again this is where we have novel ideas being generated.
Speaker 1: So this is when we begin to talk about mental
Speaker 1: illness and creativity, because you know, this is a subject
Speaker 1: that has been explored a lot more like, hey, there's
Speaker 1: that ban go and so creative, but have this unfortunate
Speaker 1: side effect of hallucinations and cutting off his ear and
Speaker 1: so on and so forth. Yeah, I mean, it's the
Speaker 1: idea of the unhinged creative types and old notion, and
Speaker 1: we continue to to carry it along with us. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we use it as a means of forgiving our own
Speaker 1: problems or or to sort of to make sense of
Speaker 1: the catech lives of individuals whose whose lives are illuminated
Speaker 1: by the fame they've a missed. Yeah, and so I
Speaker 1: mean it just here's the thing. Being creative does not
Speaker 1: mean that you are mentally ill, right, What it means
Speaker 1: is that there are some markers that mentally ill people
Speaker 1: have with creative, highly creative people, and then vice versa
Speaker 1: as well. And I mean, certainly just like the average
Speaker 1: person who has some sort of severemental illness, it's not
Speaker 1: gonna translate directly into creative output. And will explore that
Speaker 1: a little more. Again, we're talking about is stimuli and
Speaker 1: the interpretation of that. Here's something that's interesting. High creative
Speaker 1: skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in
Speaker 1: people who have mental illnesses we've talked about. But the
Speaker 1: connection here, they think has to do with the dopamine system.
Speaker 1: Because researchers at the Swedish Medical University Carolinska Institute is
Speaker 1: to it have managed to show that this dopamine system
Speaker 1: and healthy highly creative people is really similar in respects
Speaker 1: to people with schizophrenia. Specifically when we talk about mental illness,
Speaker 1: and it all has to do with the thalamus, which
Speaker 1: is a part of the brain that acts as the
Speaker 1: relay center, filtering information before it reaches the cortex or
Speaker 1: reasoning and cognition occur. So it turns out that people
Speaker 1: who are highly creative and schizophrenic people have fewer dopamine
Speaker 1: receptors in the thalamus than other people. And this is
Speaker 1: really important because, uh, again, this is sort of telling
Speaker 1: us about how data comes through our brains and how
Speaker 1: it is interpreted. Now, when I talk about highly creative
Speaker 1: people in this day of what we're talking about are
Speaker 1: healthy individuals who have been tested on divergent psychological tests.
Speaker 1: And this is certain kinds of tests that are looking
Speaker 1: at how you solve things. So it would require a
Speaker 1: novel approach, right, and this is how they sort of
Speaker 1: weed out who's highly creative and who's not in this
Speaker 1: particular study. So the idea is that the fewer D
Speaker 1: two receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree
Speaker 1: of signal filtering and then a higher flow of information
Speaker 1: from the thalamus. This is why you see this correlation
Speaker 1: between people who are schizophrenic and people who are highly
Speaker 1: creative or highly imaginative, because what you're seeing is again
Speaker 1: a flooding of stimuli to the brain and then this
Speaker 1: idea that you have to sort through it. Right, This
Speaker 1: is similar to what we've talked about in the way
Speaker 1: children perceive the world, the idea that their their brains
Speaker 1: are sponges and it's just stuff just flowing in and
Speaker 1: then they have to make sense of it all. So
Speaker 1: I guess this brings us to the question, then, what's
Speaker 1: going on in the rest of the brains? Right? What
Speaker 1: what do the muggles have going on that that prevents
Speaker 1: them from seeing and creating the magic in the world
Speaker 1: around them or from suffering from severe schizophrenia. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean part of it is that, again, you have so
Speaker 1: much stimulation there and and if you can cherry pick
Speaker 1: from that stimulation, you begin to make bizarre associations because
Speaker 1: you're simply aware of that much stuff in your brain.
Speaker 1: And in fact, it reminds me just you know, a
Speaker 1: little side trip here reminds me of the cognitive psychologists
Speaker 1: Alice and goth Nick when she was talking about infants
Speaker 1: having this lantern awareness versus adults having flashlight awareness, because
Speaker 1: she's saying that infant are far more conscious than adults
Speaker 1: because they're taking in everything and if you look at
Speaker 1: their brains you can see that that, you know, neurotransmitters
Speaker 1: are squirted all over that brain, marinating in it, and
Speaker 1: it allows them to have the neural connections to process
Speaker 1: all of that data. Okay, and so she's made that
Speaker 1: comment before of you know, this is perhaps the reason
Speaker 1: why some creative thinkers um have the breakthroughs that they can,
Speaker 1: because they are sort of holding onto a bit of
Speaker 1: that infant brain in that lantern awareness. Yeah. So, so
Speaker 1: to take us back to our unrealistic caveman examples, you
Speaker 1: have a grown up caveman who has who has completely
Speaker 1: grown up, not creative at all. That he's he's very
Speaker 1: much focused on what's important. Is that a tiger over
Speaker 1: there behind those bushes or is it a gazelle? Am
Speaker 1: I about to be eating? Or am I about to
Speaker 1: score some dinner? Whereas in everything else kind of fades
Speaker 1: into the background, right only focused on what's most important
Speaker 1: to survival at this moment, whereas his friend, who's more
Speaker 1: creatively in Clauden caveman might look over at a tree
Speaker 1: and link himself. I wonder if that tree is a
Speaker 1: woman who was somehow petrified by a god or something,
Speaker 1: because it kind of looks like a woman, and so
Speaker 1: he's staring at this tree, risking consumption by the tiger
Speaker 1: or missing out on a meal, whereas the the hunter
Speaker 1: is focused on what is actually occurring. Hey, you can't
Speaker 1: be uh, you can't be painting little happy trees in
Speaker 1: your mind and that scenario. But but on one level,
Speaker 1: you can sort of say, okay, well, one caveman is
Speaker 1: daydreaming and one is serious about the task at hand.
Speaker 1: But then you can also look at it in terms
Speaker 1: of one has shut off unnecessary stimuli and the other
Speaker 1: one is remaining open to stimuli even if the input
Speaker 1: of said stimuli is not immediately relevant to basic survival. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what you're talking about is a process called latent inhibition. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh. University of Tennessee psychology professor Jordan's Peterson says, quote,
Speaker 1: the normal person classifies an object and then forgets about it,
Speaker 1: even though that object is much more complex and interesting
Speaker 1: than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast,
Speaker 1: is always open to new possibilities. So again, here's this
Speaker 1: idea that you're able to look at these objects and
Speaker 1: pay more attention to them than your counterpart. Right. It
Speaker 1: also reminds me of vampires. I guess vampires have no
Speaker 1: latent inhibition, because there's the old idea that you could
Speaker 1: leave like something with an intricate weave pattern out for
Speaker 1: or not, and they would have to sit there and
Speaker 1: untangle it, even though the sun is about to come
Speaker 1: up and melt them. Well, in speaking of of of vampires,
Speaker 1: we should talk about how this plays into personality. Because
Speaker 1: there's something called the schizotypical personality. Now this is um
Speaker 1: sort of typified by illuminaries like Albert Einstein or Tesla,
Speaker 1: right um, and it kind of points a little bit
Speaker 1: more to their preoccupations which some people might think are odd.
Speaker 1: Right Um. I'm thinking about Nicola Tesla in his obsession
Speaker 1: and with Well this is more towards the end of
Speaker 1: his life, so there might have been more going on
Speaker 1: with it. But his obsession with a certain pigeon that
Speaker 1: he fell in love with. Whoa yeah, but he fed that,
Speaker 1: he fed her day in and day out and uh,
Speaker 1: and was sort of obsessed with us, just as he
Speaker 1: was obsessed with many of his scientific discoveries and his endeavors.
Speaker 1: But at play, here's this idea that these people may
Speaker 1: be engaging in a kind of more magical reality than
Speaker 1: the rest of us. Yeah, there's an article by Margharita
Speaker 1: Tarakovski in psych Central where she actually goes through some
Speaker 1: of the forums that schizotypical personalities take, and for instance,
Speaker 1: there's magical thinking. There's one possibility, and she points out
Speaker 1: that you had the composer Schumann who believed that Beethoven
Speaker 1: was channeling music to him from beyond the grave. Another
Speaker 1: form that this condition takes unusual perceptional experiences, and she
Speaker 1: draws the analogy here to Dickens belief that he was
Speaker 1: being followed by characters from his novels. That's right, didn't
Speaker 1: he used an umbrella to poke away at the little
Speaker 1: street urchins? Yeah, imaginary street urchins. There you go. And
Speaker 1: then there's also a preference for solitary activities, which obviously
Speaker 1: you see in a lot of creative types. And the
Speaker 1: author here pointed out Emily Dickinson tesla Isaac Newton, you know,
Speaker 1: anybody who likes to shut themselves away and work on something.
Speaker 1: You could also throw a J. D. Salinger, any number
Speaker 1: of authors and artists into that pot. And then finally
Speaker 1: another form of takes his mild paranoia. And there are
Speaker 1: various examples of this where authors, artists, creative types begin
Speaker 1: to have peculiar ideas about what is threatening them in
Speaker 1: the world and where those threats lie. So, this schizotype
Speaker 1: personality is not obviously a full blown schizophrenia disorder. It's
Speaker 1: just someone who is who processes things a little bit
Speaker 1: differently right now. And it's yeah, it's not to the
Speaker 1: point where it's necessarily just really tapping down on your
Speaker 1: ability to function, but it is certainly changing the ways
Speaker 1: in which you function in an otherwise normal situation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Researchers at Vanderbilt University have actually looked specifically at the
Speaker 1: schizotype to try to figure out how their brains work,
Speaker 1: particularly in conjunction with or i should say, in contrast
Speaker 1: to a schizophrenics brain. And then someone who was quote
Speaker 1: unquote normal, Brad Foley in so he Park, actually published
Speaker 1: their findings in the Journal of Schizophrenia Research. And so
Speaker 1: they looked at these three groups, the control this, the
Speaker 1: schizotypes in the schizophrenics. And in the first experiment, they
Speaker 1: showed research subjects a variety of household objects and they
Speaker 1: asked them to make up new functions for them, and
Speaker 1: the schizotypes were better able to creatively suggest new uses
Speaker 1: for the objects, while the schizophrenics, interestingly enough, and the
Speaker 1: average subjects performed similarly to one another. And so what
Speaker 1: they think is that it's that the schizophrenics were unable
Speaker 1: to generate new uses because their thought processes are very
Speaker 1: often disorganized to the point where they can't be creative
Speaker 1: because they can't get all of their thoughts in one
Speaker 1: coherent place. So the normal person is more again the
Speaker 1: flashlight view of reality, but then the schizophrenic individual, it's
Speaker 1: that lamp view, but the lamp is turned up so
Speaker 1: much that there's just too much information coming at them
Speaker 1: and it's just a dipping around in their mind. It's
Speaker 1: such a chaotic way, right, yeah. Yeah, So well sort
Speaker 1: of like the normal person has the flashlight and the
Speaker 1: schizotype and the schizophrenic have the lantern. But the difference
Speaker 1: is that the schizotype can really pick out the things
Speaker 1: that matter because they can sort of have some of
Speaker 1: that focus and make those connections, whereas you say, there's
Speaker 1: so much going on in the schizophrenic brain that they
Speaker 1: can't really make a coherent story there. So they did
Speaker 1: a second experiment. They are asked to identify uses for
Speaker 1: everyday objects again, but as well, they performed a basic
Speaker 1: control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes were monitored.
Speaker 1: So they found in these brain scans is that all
Speaker 1: groups used both brains for creative tasks. Again, here's this
Speaker 1: idea of both brains being engaged. But the activation of
Speaker 1: the right hemispheres of the schizotypes was dramatically greater than
Speaker 1: the schizophrenic and the average subjects. So this suggests that
Speaker 1: there is a positive benefit to schizoph to schizo tippy
Speaker 1: and that again their brains are accessing information in a
Speaker 1: different way and that there are a lot more able
Speaker 1: to sort of go between both hemispheres and and work
Speaker 1: a little bit more diligently to produce novel concepts. So
Speaker 1: here's another interesting thing. Peter Brewger is a Swiss neuroscientist,
Speaker 1: and so he's kind of said, like, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that these schizotypes are different thinkers, and I think that
Speaker 1: you know, the part of the brain that says, hey,
Speaker 1: that's a car key on your key chain, and you know,
Speaker 1: identifying that is a little bit different with the schizotype
Speaker 1: brain because they can imagine different fates for that, you know,
Speaker 1: car key or whatever, But he is saying that there
Speaker 1: is a disproportional number of schizotypes and schizophrenics that are
Speaker 1: neither right or left handed dominant right and they instead
Speaker 1: use both hands for a bunch of things, for a
Speaker 1: bunch of tasks. And so he's saying again, I think
Speaker 1: that this, you know, the motor function and the mind
Speaker 1: function are interwoven here, and that they're recruiting both sides
Speaker 1: of their brains for these tasks, and there's something a
Speaker 1: little bit different going on with the schizotype. So there's
Speaker 1: a little insight into what's going on inside the creative
Speaker 1: process inside the human mind, and also how this crosses
Speaker 1: over into the territory of mental illness. So, as promised,
Speaker 1: we are going to discuss this link, this idea that
Speaker 1: creativity and dishonesty are actually linked together. There's some cross
Speaker 1: over here, and it's after what we've discussed. What do
Speaker 1: you think, ignoring the study that we've we've both read
Speaker 1: and and have notes about, would you be convinced at
Speaker 1: this point that that these individuals we've discussed might also
Speaker 1: have a particular flare for dishonesty. Um, I think that
Speaker 1: it makes total sense that if if you're creative and
Speaker 1: you make up stuff that that it would lend itself
Speaker 1: to fibbing every once in a while, or sort of
Speaker 1: moving the goal post of what you think is appropriate,
Speaker 1: either behavior or um or just even what you report
Speaker 1: in life to be truth. I'll buy that. Now. That's
Speaker 1: not to say I don't think that, you know, all
Speaker 1: creative people are dishonest, and certainly nobody in the study
Speaker 1: that we're about to look at is arguing that that
Speaker 1: this is a rallying cry to go and collect the
Speaker 1: creative types and keep them under tight watch because they're
Speaker 1: just lying their faces off NonStop. It's just showing that
Speaker 1: there's a certain correlation between the two. Well, and what
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss um our studies that were conducted
Speaker 1: in the lab under very specific circumstances, and just as
Speaker 1: we found in our laing podcast How Line Works, um
Speaker 1: there there is a bunch of motivating factors here for
Speaker 1: why people lie were engaged in creative storytelling. I eve line.
Speaker 1: So the studying question comes to us from Francesca Gino
Speaker 1: and Dan Airley. It's a fascinating five part study where
Speaker 1: they where they basically did five different experiments to to
Speaker 1: test creative and non creative types and see what their
Speaker 1: propensity for falsehood happened to be. Yeah, because there are
Speaker 1: a bunch of different studies out there looking at creativity
Speaker 1: and dishonesty. But as the author Scott Barry Kaufman in
Speaker 1: his article The Dark Side of Creativity on Huffington Post
Speaker 1: points out, they are really after pinning uh, dishonesty to
Speaker 1: creativity and to creative types. And they really aren't, I
Speaker 1: mean not because they have some sort of vendetity created
Speaker 1: war and the creative Let me say that they are
Speaker 1: very thorough in investigating this idea, perhaps more throw than
Speaker 1: some other studies, as you say, at the five part study,
Speaker 1: and in the first of their studies they administered a
Speaker 1: variety of different measures of creativity, assessing a person's creative personality, behaviors,
Speaker 1: and cognitive style. So first they weeded out what they
Speaker 1: thought was were more creative people. Yeah, because you have
Speaker 1: to get that sort of down for your test subjects.
Speaker 1: These are the creative people in U in Block A,
Speaker 1: these are the Mogels and block B right, as you say,
Speaker 1: the mos. Yes, The participants also completed a visual perception task.
Speaker 1: In this task, participants were presented with a bunch of
Speaker 1: squares that were bisected by a diagonal line. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's a square cut down the middle the next two triangles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and on either side of the line there are an
Speaker 1: array of dots. Yeah, like a scattering of red dots
Speaker 1: that seem almost random, like somebody just threw them up there.
Speaker 1: So that in some cases you might have it might
Speaker 1: be kind of ambiguous as to which side of the
Speaker 1: square had more dots. And in other cases it's very
Speaker 1: obvious when you look at it that most of the
Speaker 1: dots are in one side or the other. Now, the
Speaker 1: participants don't know this, but all of the dots on
Speaker 1: the right hand side are going to be less than
Speaker 1: the left in every single instance. And if they report,
Speaker 1: and then in the participants findings, if they report that
Speaker 1: the right side has more dots, they actually are going
Speaker 1: to get ten times the amount in money. I think
Speaker 1: it's oh, it's okay, okay, well yeah, let me let
Speaker 1: me back up. Um, if they report that it's the
Speaker 1: left side that has more dots, they'll get a half
Speaker 1: a cent. Okay. Now, if they report that it's the
Speaker 1: right side, they'll get It's important to point this out
Speaker 1: that it's you're talking about a piddling amount of money
Speaker 1: involved here, right, It's it's nothing. Right, So it's not
Speaker 1: a huge motivate. You're not gonna walk a right away
Speaker 1: from this study saying, oh man, I'm quitting my job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: No matter what financial problems lead you to take part
Speaker 1: in this blow a Saturday and this scientific study, for
Speaker 1: these guys, this is not going to make a difference. Okay.
Speaker 1: So they're getting five cents for reporting on the right,
Speaker 1: they're getting half a cent for the left, and this
Speaker 1: is creating a conflict between providing the correct answer right. So,
Speaker 1: as you said, some of these arrays are really obvious.
Speaker 1: It's like, yes, there's no doubt that the right side
Speaker 1: only has three dots and the left side has fifty dots.
Speaker 1: But some of them were more ambiguous, and that's where
Speaker 1: they see the line happening the most. And it's kind
Speaker 1: of a brilliant way to construct or design this experiment
Speaker 1: because I wanted to point this out. We've talked about
Speaker 1: this before that we are all sort of born accountants.
Speaker 1: We can look at a rays of dots like this,
Speaker 1: and even if it's a little bit ambiguous, you can
Speaker 1: already tell which pot has more dots in it, which
Speaker 1: array it has more is more populated. That's just going
Speaker 1: to become obvious. But the fact that there's just you know,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit into question, is a little bit ambiguous,
Speaker 1: gives people this license, particularly creative individuals, to interpret the
Speaker 1: data so that it suits them. Yeah. In other words,
Speaker 1: there when it's ambiguous enough, they're willing to air on
Speaker 1: the side of me getting a nickel as opposed to
Speaker 1: being factually accurate. And you get it from the study
Speaker 1: that it's this is really occurring on almost like a
Speaker 1: really subconscious level. It's not like somebody saying, all sides
Speaker 1: being equal, I'd rather get that nickel. I'm going to
Speaker 1: vote for this one. They've kind of programmed them ahead
Speaker 1: of time with the knowledge that all things being equal,
Speaker 1: one side is more advantageous, even if it we're talking
Speaker 1: again about just a nickel's worth of advantage. Well, and
Speaker 1: then you might think to yourself, Okay, so the creative
Speaker 1: individual is more prone to lying or being dishonest. Um,
Speaker 1: what about someone with high i Q. Could they perhaps
Speaker 1: try to figure out a way to deceive better? After all,
Speaker 1: you know, you would think that they'd be able to
Speaker 1: sort of navigate the waters of dishonesty a little bit better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's where the second study cames, and they add
Speaker 1: in intelligence as a possible predictor of dishonesty, and they
Speaker 1: found it when it was intelligence versus creativity, creativity was
Speaker 1: still the better indicator on who was going to be
Speaker 1: dishonest on this test. So again, in the first study,
Speaker 1: we had the creatives and the non creatives, as judged
Speaker 1: by some of the initial weeding out process, Right, So
Speaker 1: now you have more than just creative and uncreative. You
Speaker 1: have high i Q low i Q thrown in. And
Speaker 1: again they're they're finding that if you were gonna bet
Speaker 1: money on which ones we're going to feel a little
Speaker 1: when the ambiguity hits, it's going to be the creative people.
Speaker 1: Book on the creative people instead of trying to book
Speaker 1: on the highly intelligent people. Okay, So in their third
Speaker 1: study they stiff the kniphone just a little bit deeper
Speaker 1: by saying, Okay, what if someone just engaged in the
Speaker 1: act of creativity itself, would that make that person more dishonesty?
Speaker 1: What if we just sort of buttered them up and
Speaker 1: made them feel a little creative, you know, because even
Speaker 1: non creative types you feel that you may wake up
Speaker 1: one morning and you're you're feeling like, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna going to work them, I'm gonna paint, you know,
Speaker 1: because maybe you saw a documentary on painting last night
Speaker 1: and that's what did it. So they couldn't actually show
Speaker 1: someone a documentary on painting here, But what they did
Speaker 1: is that they had participants construct sentences for on a
Speaker 1: list of grammatically correct words, so they had a bunch
Speaker 1: of words to choose from that. The words that they
Speaker 1: had to choose from, most of them were creative in
Speaker 1: some sense, like creative innovative imagination, So they were priming
Speaker 1: them to think in a creative sense. And so the
Speaker 1: question was, will this make people more inclined to cheat
Speaker 1: on on our little dot test if they just are
Speaker 1: thinking about creativity? It did, It did, It did. And
Speaker 1: that's the kind of awful realization that comes into play here,
Speaker 1: is that it's not just you know, a creative person
Speaker 1: is more prone to be dishonest. It's that engaging in
Speaker 1: creativity will actually lead to the possibility in this in
Speaker 1: this example, at least of someone again sort of recasting
Speaker 1: what reality is telling a different story telling a lie essentially.
Speaker 1: Their fourth study was again another variation on this theme
Speaker 1: of the visual perception task, the Dota raise, but instead
Speaker 1: of now priming them with creative terms, they now just
Speaker 1: had them go through divergent thinking tasks. Now, divergent thinking
Speaker 1: again is something that will ramp up creativity. They saw
Speaker 1: the same thing again and again the people who are
Speaker 1: engaging in the creative divergent thinking task were prone to
Speaker 1: be more dishonest. Their fifth study, as if they hadn't
Speaker 1: made the case already, they had an online survey of
Speaker 1: seventeen departments and a corporation, and they had those people
Speaker 1: talk about different instances where they could be more honest
Speaker 1: or dishonest, basically going through these sort of like integrity
Speaker 1: scenarios um and then so they have those people sort
Speaker 1: of say what they would do in these certain situations,
Speaker 1: and then they had the people rank what they did
Speaker 1: in their job, and it was found that those people
Speaker 1: who were the more creative types in the creative departments
Speaker 1: again were more prone to be dishonest in these scenarios
Speaker 1: that they laid out for them. The last one particularly
Speaker 1: I found kind of interesting because I wondered what extent
Speaker 1: of it is just a matter of having a creative
Speaker 1: enough mind too to put yourself in the shoes of this, uh,
Speaker 1: this hypothetical individual that you're being surveyed about. You know,
Speaker 1: you think they're drawing on their empathy. Well, I wonder
Speaker 1: to what extent it's kind of an empathy test as well,
Speaker 1: because I find that they're I will hear hear horrible
Speaker 1: cases or you know, read a book about a particularly
Speaker 1: horrible character, and if it's if it's you know, if
Speaker 1: it's well presented in the novel, or you get enough
Speaker 1: details about the the human side of an individual, then
Speaker 1: you I find on some level I can empathize with
Speaker 1: them and maybe not agree with them completely. But I'm
Speaker 1: more I'm less inclined to say, oh, ship that person
Speaker 1: to the bottom of the sea. Well, okay, I think
Speaker 1: the takeaway from here is that if, particularly if you
Speaker 1: are a human resources person and you're listening to this
Speaker 1: and you're just about to batten down the hatches on
Speaker 1: all the creative types in your company, don't do it. Um.
Speaker 1: The point is is that, uh, you know, creativity have
Speaker 1: got to have if you want some sort of novel
Speaker 1: way of approaching the world. And problems. It's it's central
Speaker 1: to us as humans. But I guess you could say
Speaker 1: that you have to have things pretty well, the boundaries
Speaker 1: pretty well set in a work situation, so that it's
Speaker 1: very apparent what the rules are and what they aren't
Speaker 1: because again we're talking about here's interpretation, right, because again,
Speaker 1: where did we see the dishonesty arising? It was in
Speaker 1: this um, this area of ambiguity, the idea of what.
Speaker 1: I don't know if there are more dots on one
Speaker 1: side or the other, but I can I'm gonna use
Speaker 1: my creative thinking to sort of skew it in my advantage.
Speaker 1: If you avoid this moral gray area, it's gonna make
Speaker 1: it a lot easier for people to do the right thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I will say, you know, for our own department,
Speaker 1: I would say there are a lot of creative types
Speaker 1: in it. But everybody, I want to say it has
Speaker 1: a ton of integrity, and I think some in part
Speaker 1: because we have a ton of work and we have
Speaker 1: really strict deadlines. There's no really, it's pretty obvious what
Speaker 1: the boundaries are well. And also it comes down to
Speaker 1: the yogurt in the fridge example. Here you just throw
Speaker 1: some tasty looking yogurt in the fridge. There's a chance
Speaker 1: somebody's going to eat that. But if you put your
Speaker 1: name on it, it's it's a it's a rarer individual
Speaker 1: who will eat your yogurt because it's there's the name
Speaker 1: right there, that is that is Sarah's yogurt. And if
Speaker 1: you eat that yogurt, you were stealing from Sarah. You
Speaker 1: were messing with her, her her yogurt vibe. You can
Speaker 1: no longer objectify Sarah and the yogurt. Yeah, you can't
Speaker 1: say I took a yogurt, I borrowed a yogurt. No,
Speaker 1: it's I took Sarah's yogurt. And it's a different thing entirely.
Speaker 1: It's a less gray, ambiguous zone. And we saw this
Speaker 1: too in the Lying podcast, is that people who were
Speaker 1: forced to read a statement of integrity and then sign
Speaker 1: it and then take a test were less likely much
Speaker 1: much less much less likely to cheat because they had
Speaker 1: gone through the active This is what the rules are.
Speaker 1: And do you agree with these rules? Yes? I do
Speaker 1: so again, Yeah, just not too much ambiguity either. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, let's call the robot over all, right,
Speaker 1: and we have a little listener mail here from our
Speaker 1: mechanical f and this one comes to us from Brian.
Speaker 1: Brian says, Dear Roder and Julie, I enjoyed your podcast
Speaker 1: on comfort, well done as always, it was bittersweet, however,
Speaker 1: on the first day back to work and college in
Speaker 1: about five hours after a nice long holiday weekend, inserts
Speaker 1: sad trombone here. I don't know, that's not really there.
Speaker 1: You go anyway, The big reason I wanted to send
Speaker 1: out an email was a correction, not a mean one.
Speaker 1: I'm not one of those listeners. Don't worry. The end
Speaker 1: quote that Robert mentioned that was from Aristotle is actually
Speaker 1: from a poem by Philip James Bailey. As much as
Speaker 1: I love Aristotle, I figured Philip James Bailey shouldn't have
Speaker 1: his thunder stolen. Uh. There's my two cents, maybe one
Speaker 1: cent to help you guys out, keep up the good
Speaker 1: work and thank you for all your efforts. And indeed,
Speaker 1: the quote in question so everyone doesn't have to rack
Speaker 1: their brain to figure out what I said was we
Speaker 1: live in deeds, not years, in thoughts, not breaths, in feelings,
Speaker 1: not in figures on a dial. We should count time
Speaker 1: by heart throbs. He most lives, who thinks most feels
Speaker 1: the novus acts the best, And yes, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: that is a Philip James Bailey quote, not an Aristotle quote,
Speaker 1: which I think I picked that up from the Psychology
Speaker 1: Today blog post that had it. Apparently that quote is
Speaker 1: applied incorrectly to Aristotle and a few different sources. But
Speaker 1: that's my bad for not checking our primaries on that one.
Speaker 1: See that sounds more like a Brady Bunch or a
Speaker 1: grown up on Peanuts. Want So, if the rest of
Speaker 1: you would like to chime in with corrections, with praise,
Speaker 1: with examples of creativity in your own life, we'd love
Speaker 1: to hear about it specifically. Well, what do you think
Speaker 1: about this crossover between creativity and dishonest? If you're creative person,
Speaker 1: do you feel like you're a little more inclined to
Speaker 1: be dishonest if you are? If you're not really creative?
Speaker 1: More of the logical, mathematical side of things, what you're
Speaker 1: approach to all this? What do you think? Do you
Speaker 1: just trust the creatives in your environment? Or are you
Speaker 1: actually the greatest liar of them all? Even it's that
Speaker 1: good that these tests aren't catching you, I don't know,
Speaker 1: write us let us know about it. We'd love to hear.
Speaker 1: You can reach us on Facebook, you can reach us
Speaker 1: on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind and
Speaker 1: both of those, and we're also on Twitter where our
Speaker 1: handles blow the mind and you can always send us
Speaker 1: a line at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve Toyota Camera. It's ready, are you