Here's Why The Neurotic Are Also Creative
In a new study researchers claim that neurotic people tend to be creative as both phenomena could be linked through day-dreaming.
According to TIME, the study's author Adam Perkins argues that neurotic people tend to be brooders and dwell on a problem longer than most people. This eventually helps them find solutions to problems that others may not be able to solve. Through such efforts, arise creative solutions, the author argues citing examples of noted historical figures including Winston Churchill and Isaac Newton who were known to be neurotic.
Perkins' study took shape when he attended a talk by co-author Jonathan Smallwood. Smallwood had explained study where MRI scans of people who had spontaneously negative thoughts showed greater activity in the prefrontal cortex.
"It occurred to me that if you happen to have a preponderance of negatively hued self-generated thoughts due to high levels of spontaneous activity in the parts of the medial prefrontal cortex that govern conscious perception of threat and you also have a tendency to switch to panic sooner than average people, due to possessing especially high reactivity in the basolateral nuclei of the amygdale, then that means you can experience intense negative emotions even when there's no threat present," Perkins said in a press release.
"This could mean that for specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active imagination, which acts as a built-in threat generator."
