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Are mathematical ability and mental illness linked?

Aspychata

Serenity waves, beachy vibes
V.I.P Member
Extreme cognitive styles map onto genius that autism is. And psychotic spectrum disorders such as bipolar, schizotypy, schizophrenia are disproportionately disgnosed in highly creative individuals.
The genius-madness debate is asking whether creative individuals are at a greater risk for developing mental illness then their noncreative peers.
A professor at UCLA dubs the Mad Genius Paradox as extraordinary creative individuals are more likely to exhibit psychopathology.
High productivity is associated with both intelligence and with high creativity, whether a schizotypal or autistic nature.
The normal process of demyelinatiin that begins in mid-forties leads to a weakening of executive networks that are neuroprotective. Myelin function impacts processing speed, so a highly intelligent person has a propensity to mental illness and may experince symptoms in this age range.Nash and Newton were both autistic and schizophrenic, proving that true genius represents an overdevopment of both.
What are your opinions?
 
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I’ve got ASD, bipolar and anxiety disorder. I’m very creative (although I often have trouble finishing a project), an musically talented and have great memory.
I suck at math, but I’m good at biology and great at medical science.
I wouldn’t call myself a genius, but I’m pretty intelligent. Now we’ll just have to see how my brain behaves as I age. I have noticed that my successive depressions have caused some cognitive issues that are yet to go away. I don’t know if they ever will.
 
Extreme cognitive styles map onto genius that autism is. And psychotic spectrum disorders such as bipolar, schiztypy, schizophrenia are disproportionately disgnosed in highly creative individuals.
The genius-madness debate is asking whether creative individuals are at a greater risk for developing mental illness then their noncreative peers.
A professor at UCLA dubs the Mad Genius Paradox as extraordinary creative individuals are more likely to exhibit psychopathology.
High productivity is associated with both intelligence and with high creativity, whether a schizotupal or autistic nature.
The normal process of demyelinatiin that begins in mid-forties leads to a weakening of executive networks that are neuroprotective. Myelin function impacts processing speed, so a highly intelligent person has a propensity to mental illness and may experince symptoms in this age range.Nash and Newton were both autistic and schizophrenic, proving that true genius represents an overdevopment of both.
What are your opinions?

You trying to spell Schizotypal?
 
I m somewhat creative. I think I may have eluded depression with a lucky combination of tons of therapy and working long hours to pay for tons of therapy. It cut down my worrying and gave me some manageable social contact. Also I more or less stopped writing poetry, that was a bit of a downer as an interest. So that's me stopping being creative to avoid mental health problems.

But I m still thinking about writing, especially now I am not working. It will keep me busy. So that's me using creativity to avoid mental health problems potentially.
 
Psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen researched the mad genius stuff in the 80s-90s. She expected to find a link with schizophrenia, but instead found a stronger link between creativity and mood disorders, both unipolar and bipolar. Psychologist Ruth Richards used one of those Scandinavian population registers to demonstrate that family members of mood disorder patients were more creative than the norm, suggesting a biological proclivity. Finally, Kay Redfield Jamison is a clinical psychologist who herself is bipolar and wrote a book on the link between madness and genius: Jamison, Kay Redfield (1993), Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, New York: The Free Press, ISBN 0-02-916030-8 (includes a study of Lord Byron's illness).

None of these authors included autism in their studies, at least as far as I am aware. Remember that our current understanding of Aspergers/Autism didn't really make it into broad-based clinical awareness until the mid-90s and later. I read quite a bit about bipolar and creativity in the 1990s but haven't dipped into that topic since. All the same, for those interested in this topic, the above authors are a place to start.
 
Incidentally, my dad was a mathematician, and I would bet my bottom dollar that he was autistic, though never diagnosed. He died in 2013 at age 87. His generation largely missed out on the autism concept. (We just thought of him as crazy.)
 
Walked into the middle of a classroom filled with creative people, when I was in my twenties. Found it astonishing, and a little scary. People who dressed oddly, or thought it was okay to put cabbage leaves on their heads, or throw fruit at canvases or use their air brushes to clean their tables and faces and hair after they ate lunch. Used to call it the people zoo.

Classmates who would suddenly begin singing or dancing or throwing their shoes at one another. Who liked being splattered with paint and glue and ink or eating charcoal or erasers. It seemed as if there was an active percentage of the class who were standing on one side of reality versus the ones living in something of a fantasy world at times. It made for some interesting and fun conversations, then and some three years later. I know that about six people from a class of twenty three, were and have been treated for psychiatric illnesses.
 
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The same question has been asked about artists - so many artists of all sorts have suffered from varying types mental illnesses.

Yes, there is a higher percentage of certain mental disorders or neurodiversity in those who excel in the arts and sciences, but it's nowhere near the actual number of people who suffer from those disorders or diversities. So, we can't say that "Oh, he's got something different going on in his head - he's going to be great!"

My own personal wild speculation follows...

I think it's just because they're different. They don't come at things with the same approach that everyone else does. Sometimes a different approach fails and there is no "greatness". Sometimes a different approach succeeds and we say, "This person saw something that no one else saw."

So, a small percentage of the time, someone with a different mode of thinking tries something new, and it works. For artists, it's a perspective that opens people's eyes up to new concepts. For scientists, it's an approach to a problem that no one else thought to try before.

And we call them "great", and then we wonder why so many of these great people have mental struggles.
 
I cant even do division.

Sums alot of it up pretty well in my case.

But yeah. Division is a nope. Algebra is a brick flung at you for trying to get me to do algebra. Anything further also gets the brick.

More I could say but I just woke up so....
 
One of the famous mathematical prodigies was Alexander Grothendieck. His father was a Russian Jew, and his mother was German. He innovated in pure mathematics, his work has applications in cryptography and coding theory. Using tools from algebraic geometry, category theory, and toplogy, he created an entirely new paradigm.
Autistic traits might play out in mathematical genius, as opposed to in computational savantism, which could be described as high intelligence devoid of creativity.
 
I guess the inability to filter out seemingly irrelevant information is a hallmark of both creative ideation and disordered thought. This state is called reduced latent inhibition, allows more information to reach awareness , which can in turn foster associations between unrelated concepts.
 

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