During an episode of the long-running comedy hit Saturday Night Live, in 2021 guest host and rebellious genius Elon Musk announced publicly what others had long suspected, that as a personality type, he belongs with those having Asperger's syndrome. Asperger's syndrome was once, but is no longer classified on the autism spectrum in the definitive diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. Those with Asperger's characteristics are said to be socially awkward, fail to understand conventional social rules, fail to make eye contact, and fail to show empathy for others. But at the same time, they are also said often to possess an exceptional ability to concentrate and the power to analyze in depth how systems work. To some degree, they seem to be outsiders. They seem to think and experience the world differently. In addition to Elon Musk, other trans-formative figures of the tech world who have been said to have the characteristics of Asperger's include: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Bill Gates, and Apple's Steve Jobs. Silicon Valley Tech Guru, Peter Teal has gone so far as to say in an article in Business Insider that having Asperger's, "Happens to be a plus for innovation and creating great Companies." Viewing Asperger's as a subset of autism, Hans Asperger; the psychologist after whom the syndrome was named in the 1980s, is reputed to have said that, "For success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential." Is that true? Is some so-called aberrant or abnormal type of personality essential to creativity? That's often the public perception. Remember our discussion from Week 1, the stereotyped of the genius that developed in the West during the 19th century, during the Romantic period. That the genius is a loner, a disordered outsider characterized by unbalanced behavior, even a mad genius. But again, is this image accurate? Is there in fact, a greater incidence of mental disorder, even suicide among geniuses, or do a few sensational cases such as Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and Robin Williams distort our view? Well, those psychiatrist who work with this issue of mental disorder and creativity, most specifically doctors Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa and Kay Jamison at Johns Hopkins do find a connection between creativity and mental disorder between creativity and psychic turmoil. Extracting data from several studies involving bipolar disorder, severe depression, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders, there proves to be a 1-2 percent incidence of manic depressive illness and a five percent incidence of major depression among the general population. The numbers among creative types however, are much higher. Ranking them low to high but consistently higher than the general population scientists actually show the lowest incidence of psychopathology compared to the general population at about 17 percent. Maybe scientists and mathematicians deal in logical precepts and rational limits and right answers rather than emotions and feelings. The rates of disorder for composers, writers, and artists are higher, writers significantly so at 46 percent by one study. Poets come in consistently at the high end of the spectrum. But I'm not sure I'd place too much importance on the specific numbers here. But according to the psychiatrist, apparently there is truth to the notion that creative people experienced the world abnormally. Maybe that's why we say, they think outside the box. My own assessment of the issue. Of the approximately 100 exceptional people I've studied over the last two decades, about 1/3 of them are large portion were or are seriously affected by mood disorders. They include: Hildegard of Bingen, Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Tesla, Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Dickinson, Picasso, Sylvia Plath, Winston Churchill, mathematician John Nash, JK Rowling, Yayoi Kusama, and Kanye West. Well, quite a distinguished list actually. Of course geniuses are not all unbalanced. Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky, McCartney, seem to be well centered composers just by way of example. But looking broadly, many great creative geniuses do seem somewhat off center. The important question is, is this correlation between creativity and mental disorder causal or collateral? Is the capacity to create caused by the disorder, or does the disorder happen at the same time but independent of the psychosis? Vincent van Gogh had many disorders, but he also, his letters affirm, had a well-thought-out, rational, yet wholly original way of thinking about painting. He may have created great original art at the same time as he was suffering mentally. Or he may have created original art because he suffered mentally. His tortured mind provided him with feelings that he could paint. Virginia Woolf, the writer of course, specifically says that she toggled back and forth between insanity and reality, extracting from her psychotic episodes, characters, and experiences that she could then write about. Woolf's mental unbalance met the clinical criteria for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. During several hospitalizations between 1904 and 1914, as her husband, Leonard reported, she talked incoherently, heard birds speaking in Greek, and at one point, threw herself out a window but survived. When she sat down to write her famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf created a character, Septimus Smith, who hears birds singing in Greek, thinks the staff wishes to harm him, and escapes by jumping out a window to his death. As Woolf said before her suicide in 1943, "As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava, I still find most of the things I write about." With Woolf, mental disorder is clearly a help mate of creativity. Similarly, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose installation sell for millions of dollars around the world, has acknowledged the causal relationship between disorder and creativity. Kusama experiences obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks. She has become famous for her obsessive paintings, particularly those of infinite polka dots, and is called, "The first obsessionalist artist." Since 1977, Kusama has lived in a mental institution in Tokyo. "My art", she says, "Originates from hallucinations that only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings. All my works in pastels are the products of obsessional neurosis and are therefore inextricably connected," again, "inextricably connected to my disease. By translating hallucinations and fear of hallucinations into paintings, I have been trying to cure my disease." With Kusama, as with Woolf, artistic creativity seems to be the byproduct of a need to exorcise personal neurosis. Let's move on to other geniuses, geniuses with what we would call not mental but rather physical so-called disability or simply conditions. Stephen Hawking was afflicted with ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which forced him into a wheelchair, eventually unable to speak so he concentrated. When I ask Hawking's friend and biographer, Katie Ferguson about Hawking's ability to concentrate, she said to me, "I would say that his disability probably didn't increase his capacity to concentrate but it did increase his inclination to concentrate, to finally grow up, focus, and quit wasting time." Thomas Edison experienced about scarlet fever as a child which left him mostly deaf in both ears. Overcoming that handicap may have served as a catalyst to two of his greatest inventions. The carbon telephone speaker receiver and the carbon diaphragm for the phonograph, both involving the amplification of sound. Blind musicians. There have been many over the centuries, Francesco Landini, blind Tom Wiggins, blind Lemon Jefferson and in modern times of course, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. Here the plasticity of the brain, the capacity of the auditory neuron to expand into the area of the dysfunctional visual cortex may account for the success of these individuals as hearing and as composing musicians. Deaf musicians. Well, here we have only one, Beethoven. But it's important to understand that Beethoven did not completely lose the capacity to hear until he was about 43 years old but at least fully, by around 43 by which time he had already written many of his greatest works. But Beethoven gradually did lose his hearing and that gradual loss did affect the way he heard music inside his head and thus the type of music that came out from his head. Ironically, deaf Beethoven's contribution to music was that he discovered musical sound. That's to say, his music privileges, not so much the musical idea, a catchy melody for example, but rather it emphasizes the same sound, tune or chord or rhythm repeated over and over again as he increases the volume with each iteration. This incessant repetition leads to powerful pounding, grand crescendos, and thrilling climaxes. Let me play a couple of examples for you. Here's one from Leonore Overture Number 3. In the second example of Beethoven turning up the volume. Even Beethoven's most famous work, the beginning of Symphony Number 5, seems to express his frustration with hearing the very medium in which you work sound. I cannot hear, I cannot hear. Well, thinking in terms of how Beethoven might have experienced his music as someone with a hearing impairment may explain why the music of Beethoven sounds a unique way it does. Let's turn to paint. Although we've talked about Van Gogh, it might be worth mentioning that one of the unusual maladies with which Van Gogh may have been afflicted is a condition called xanthopsia. Xanthopsia causes the subject to see the world with jaundiced eyes. The recently deceased artist, Chuck Close could not see faces. Or at least he could not make sense of the faces that he saw. Close, suffered from a condition called prosopagnosia, in which the fusiform face area within the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe fails to function, resulting in a highly fragmented image of the subject. Close, became famous for his painting out his disability for transferring to paint how he saw the world. This image of former President Bill Clinton today hangs in the US National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. Who doesn't love those large, amorphous water lilies of Claude Monet is thought to be among his greatest creations. But how much of the cloudy, indefinite quality here is owed to the fact that these are Monet's last paintings were done when he was past the age of 80 and experiencing cataracts over his eyes. Cataracts, I can attest cause one to see the world as a hazy blur. Finally, we all know Edvard Munch's famous painting The Scream. Actually, he painted the experience four times each time, pretty much the same way. Here's what Munch had to say about an experience he had in 1892, ''One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord. The sun was setting and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature. " Munch, spent much of his life battling anxiety, paranoia, and panic attacks. What to do? Send Beethoven to an auto Lauren Cardiologist to be operated on to correct his growing deafness. Send an eye surgeon to remove Monet's cataracts, send Munch and Kusama to a psychiatrist. Actually, Kusama did undergo psychoanalysis but it didn't work. She called it the talking cure. Here's what happened. To quote, her, ''Ideas stopped coming out no matter what I painted or drew because everything was coming out of my mouth,'' end quote. Virginia Woolf, as we have seen, said enthusiastically, madness is terrific I can assure you. Later, the brilliant comedian philosopher Robin Williams, another victim of suicide, said, ''You are only given a little spot of madness, and if you lose that you are nothing.'' So do we really want to cure or maybe remove these disabilities, maybe these so-called maladies, these afflictions are really not harmful things at all? Maybe so-called disabilities are merely part of the full panoply of the human experience. Maybe they are enablers, drivers of exceptional human accomplishment, of genius. What happens if we eliminate them? Well, then we have no more Ode to Joy of Beethoven. No more water lilies of Monet, no more screen on my t-shirt at home. No more starry night on my coffee mug and no more Left to Die jokes of Robin Williams. With these creative people have wanted to be cured. Cured at what cost? Similarly, with the process of gene editing today, now we can remove certain heritable diseases such as sickle cell anemia, Down syndrome, and Huntington's disease. But at the same time, we might reduce the extent of human diversity. How far do we go with genetic engineering? How far do we go with curing quote on quote, '' Our geniuses"? The likes of a Van Gogh, Kusama, and the Beethoven? You make the call.
