Consider a brick. What can you do with it?
Your answer to that question can be a measure of how creative you are. Örjan de Manzano, a PhD student at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, is using the query to explore the potential neurological link between creativity and psychoses.
Highly creative people and those with mental disorders are usually better at seeing novel connections between ideas or objects—at thinking laterally. But creative people also have a slightly higher familial risk of developing disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. De Manzano is probing dopamine receptors scattered throughout the brain that may point to a molecular link between madness and creativity.
De Manzano sought a correlation between the density of dopamine D2 receptors—which control neural signaling—and creativity by studying positron emission tomography (PET) images of 13 people’s brains as they answered specially designed personality questionnaires that measured “divergent thinking,” or intellectual ...
