Janusz Rybakowski, Paulina Klonowska, Amelia Patrzała, Jan Jaracz

Psychopathology and creativity             37-47

Summary

The process of creativity may be connected with psychopathological features of mood disorders, mainly bipolar, and psychosis-like thought abnormalities. Patients with bipolar affective illness and members of their families exhibit similarities to creative persons, as to increased indexes of creativity and such temperamental features as cyclothymia, neuroticism and openness. An association was also found between the dimension of "psychoticism", schizotypal features and the measures of creativity. A neurobiological model of generating ideas and creative drive assumes a dominant role of the frontal lobes, temporal lobes and the mesolimbic system. The dopaminergic system neurotransmission, especially its mesolimbic and cortical pathways are mostly connected with elevated mood and psychotic thinking. Neurobiological, molecular-genetic and pharmacological evidence has been accumulated pointing to an involvement of these pathways in motivational, emotional and cognitive processes, and indirectly, in the processes of creativity.