人的创意从哪儿来

原作者：
来源What\'s Going On in Brains of Creative People? （瞧那些创意天才）
译者Swingwalker

What's Going On in Brains of Creative People?

人的创意到底从哪儿来？

Joan Arehart-Treichel

作者：琼.艾尔哈特-特雷克儿

Even if psychotropic medications stifle the creativity of individuals with mental illness, most would probably be willing to settle for less creativity if the medications improved other aspects of their lives.

尽管抗精神病类药物抑制了精神病病人们的创意思维能力，大部分人宁愿牺牲这一部分来换取药物对他们生活其它方面的帮助。

What is creativity?

究竟什么是创意？

This question has long fascinated Nancy Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa, she acknowledged at the APA annual meeting in Honolulu in May. Andreasen obtained a doctorate in English literature before becoming a psychiatrist. Moreover, she has conducted studies on the subject of creativity since becoming a psychiatrist.

爱荷华大学的精神病学系的安德鲁H.伍兹主席南茜安德瑞森医学博士对这个问题一直很感兴趣，她在5月檀香山举办的美国心理学会（简称APA)年会上承认了这一点。安德瑞森在成为精神病学家之前拥有一个英语文学的博士学位，而且，自从成为精神病学家之后她还从事着创意学科方面的研究。

Creativity, Andreasen believes, is “the ability to perceive or produce novel ideas or products that are useful to society.” And it seems to start, she said, by a person plunging into a state of deep concentration, of dissociation. She once interviewed the American playwright Neil Simon, and he reported that he goes into a dissociative-like state when he creates his plays.

安德瑞森相信，创意，是指“能察觉到或者创造出对社会有用的崭新的思维或作品的能力”。她认为它始于一个人陷入一种聚精会神，抑或是分裂的状态。她有次会见美国编剧家尼尔西蒙，他也坦言自己在编剧时会进入一种类似精神上分裂游离的状态。

Once people descend into that state of dissociation, they then probably experience heightened activity in the association cortices of the brain, such as certain frontal regions and inferior temporal regions, Andreasen reported. She came to this conclusion after conducting a brain-imaging study of people in a resting state that showed that the association cortices of their brains were especially active at this time. Further evidence, she suggested, comes from a study she and her colleagues conducted that used neuroimaging to examine the brains of highly creative artists and scientists and of a group of not-so-creative subjects during an experimental task (a word-association task). That study indicated a lot more activity in the association cortices of the former group than in the latter.

安德瑞森报告说，当人们逐渐陷入这种分裂的精神状态，他们的大脑联合皮层的活动就开始增强，例如在某些额叶和颞下叶区域。她得到这个结论是因为在此之前进行的一项人类休息状态下大脑成像的研究，她发现大脑联合皮层活动在那时尤其活跃。其推论的另一个证据来自于她与同事们在一个实验中（字词联想测试），用神经影像技术去检测极具创意能力的艺术家及科学家们的大脑，同时对比一群并没有多少创意的实验者，结果表明前者的大脑联合皮层活跃程度比后者多得多。

Once the association cortices are activated, Andreasen is not sure what happens next in the creative process. But the cortices probably send messages back and forth to each other and produce new ideas, she conjectured.

一旦联合皮层被激活起来，安德瑞森并不确定在创意的进程中接下来会发生什么。但她推测皮层之间或许会反复互相发送信息并因此产生新的思维。

The reason why certain people tend to be more creative than others is not due to I.Q., Andreasen pointed out. Many years ago, a Stanford University scientist conducted a landmark longitudinal study in which he followed high-I.Q. subjects at 10-year intervals. He found that while the subjects tended to possess numerous positive attributes—for example, good marriages, good income, and good mental health—“they did not actually make creative contributions.” Yet brain characteristics other than intelligence level explain why certain people are especially creative, she said. For example, creative people may have larger right brain hemispheres than noncreative people, and creative people are often ambidextrous or left-handed.

安德瑞森指出有些人之所以比别人更具创意思维，并不是因为智商。很多年以前，一位斯坦佛大学的科学家进行了一项具里程碑意义的纵向研究，他每隔十年对同一群高智商实验者进行追踪报告，发现他们都倾向于表现出一些好的特征，例如良好的婚姻，可观的收入，以及健康的心理状态。“他们实际上并没有什么创新的贡献。”然而大脑的特征比智商更能解释为什么一些人们更具有创意，她说，譬如创意者们的右大脑半球体积比没有创意的人要大，而且他们通常双手通用或是左撇子。

Indeed, a number of people with mental illness are also ambidextrous or left-handed (Psychiatric News, March 20, 2009), which raises this question: If both creative people and people with mental illness more often tend to be ambidextrous or left-handed, are creative people also more often mentally ill?

事实上，一些精神病患者也是双手通用者或左撇子（精神病学新闻，2009.3.20）， 那么问题就出来了：如果有创意的人们和精神病患者都倾向于是双手通用者或是左撇子，那么创意者们是否也容易成为精神病患者？

The answer may be yes, Andreasen said. For example, she once recruited 30 well-known writers from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and 30 control subjects (hospital administrators) and compared mood disorders among the writers and their relatives with mood disorders among the control subjects and their relatives. She found far more instances of mood disorders in the writers and their relatives than in the control subjects and theirs.

“答案也许是肯定的，”安德瑞森说。举个例子，她曾经徵集了30位来自爱荷华作家研讨会的有名气作家，以及30位用于对照的实验者（医院的管理者），然后将作家及他们亲戚们的情绪障碍程度，与对照组及亲戚们的情绪障碍程度作出比较，她发现作家们与亲戚的情绪障碍发生率要比对照组高得多。

Anecdotal evidence also links creativity with schizophrenia, she pointed out. For example, the English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell had many family members with schizophrenia. The English mathematician Isaac Newton was chronically suspicious and had a psychotic breakdown. Physicist Albert Einstein “clearly had schizotypal traits. He was aloof and cold and had a son with schizophrenia.” The co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, James Watson, has a son with schizophrenia. And then there is the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, Ph.D., who has schizophrenia and a son who suffers from the illness as well (Psychiatric News, July 6, 2007).

她指出即便在传言中创意能力也是与精神分裂症相关联的。比如，英国数学家及哲学家伯特兰罗素有很多家庭成员患 有精神分裂症；英国数学家艾萨克牛顿长期性猜疑并发生过一次精神崩溃；物理学家阿尔伯特爱因斯坦很明显拥有精神分裂性特质，他是一个冷漠无情的人，并有一个患精神分裂症的儿子；DNA结构的共同发现者之一詹姆斯沃森也有个精神分裂的儿子；就连诺贝尔奖获得者数学家约翰纳什博士也是位精神分裂症患者，而他的儿子亦有着相同的疾病（精神病学新闻，2007.7.6）。

The link between creativity and mental illness should not be surprising, since both offer new or unique views of the world, Andreasen noted. Or as Nash once said, “The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”

安德瑞森觉得，创意思维与精神疾病之间的联系一点也不令人出乎意料，因为它们都为人们提供了看待世界的崭新或独特的视角。或许正如纳什所说：“那些超自然现象的想法与数学的灵感以同样的方式进入我的大脑，所以我将它们当真。”

So, just as some people who are creative tend to be a little different, so are some people who are mentally ill. And they may often be one and the same, Andreasen said. And this conclusion, she added, raises an important question: Could treating creative, mentally ill individuals with psychotropic medications stifle their creativity? Not necessarily, she replied. For instance, the American poet Robert Lowell continued to write great poetry after receiving lithium for his bipolar disorder and was grateful to have a treatment that seemed to be a miraculous cure after years of suffering. “I think most mentally ill creative people are grateful to be treated with medications if the medications improve their lives,” Andreasen declared.

于是，正如有创意的人们总会有一点点与众不同，一些精神病病人也一样，他们或许是同一个人，安德瑞森说。而且她认为这个结论引发了一条重要的问题：在创意的问题上，使用抗精神病药物是否抑制了精神病病人的创造力？她说未必，例如美国诗人罗伯特洛威儿在接受碳酸锂治疗躁郁症之后，仍然继续创作出伟大的诗篇，而且数年后通过治疗庆幸的获得了奇迹般的康复。安德瑞森表明：“如果药物能改善他们的生活，我认为大多数富有创意的精神病病人都很愿意接受药物治疗。”

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