
Why So Many Artists Are Highly Sensitive People - pmcpinto
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/artists-sensitive-creative_567f02dee4b0b958f6598764
======
_yosefk
Answering a personality questionnaire is always a great opportunity for me to
appreciate my talents. Take the question "Do you have a rich, complex inner
life?" Well, I certainly do, and thanks for reminding me to dwell on this
fact.

~~~
fbonetti
What a vapid and narcissistic comment. Only on hacker news.

~~~
fche
The PuffHo article is vapic & narcissistic the same way.

~~~
pzone
Not really. It's just a crappy / flashy exposition of some very routine
psychological research.

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fitzwatermellow
A more interesting line of inquiry is why so many of those blessed with the
highest instincts for creativity have so little empathy towards those around
them. As if they are so in thrall with their own genius they have little
capacity for the smallest kindnesses. Or are so focused on manifesting the
perfect visions contained in their minds, any quotidian concerns seem far
beneath them and an utter waste of time. Consider Tolstoy and his wife Sofya,
or Picasso and his muses. Einstein even referred to a "glass pane" separating
himself from the norms of society.

~~~
MawNicker
They're unique in their local environment. They have a sensibility that annoys
people. When their environment fails to _immediately_ satisfy them it gets
tired of feeling their negative emotions. They're expected to be happy or shut
up. The more they develop this component of themselves the more they're denied
empathy. They get tired of giving and not receiving. What we call empathy
nowadays is actually just sympathy. These people know that but you apparently
don't... We collectively _suck_ at empathy. As you have just demonstrated.

Try giving them some real empathy sometime instead of just pandering to their
"genius". You'll see a human emerge before you. We like to call them
_narcissists_ at this point. "See!", we say. They can do it if they want to.
They're just self-centered. This is a defense of our own egos and an instance
of fundamental attribution error. Empathy costs _much_ more than sympathy.
Imagine if empathy were all you could give. Imagine being that alone.

~~~
tiler
I think much of what you've said can be applied to other types of social
outcasts e.g. drunks, gamblers, etc.

~~~
jsprogrammer
What was said applies to the labelers, not the labeled.

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calibraxis
Is it just because it's an excerpt, or do these researchers have serious
blinders on? How about other hypotheses like:

\- Michael Jackson's father beat him for mistakes.

\- Performers try to connect with their audience. "Sensitivity" is a bundle of
things which helps chances of success, at least if you don't have a big
professional team creating your songs.

\- People with some experience of unalienated labor ("imagining things and
then bringing them into being" and a balance of imaginatively creating both
people and artifacts [1]) don't have to deaden themselves as more alienated
laborers must.

[1] From David Graeber's "Direct Action: an Ethnography" and "Dead zones of
the imagination".

~~~
mei0Iesh
This was research? I saw a romanticizing of celebrity musicians as cute little
kittens, where it went on and on about, "Aww, look how adorably sensitive they
are."

For one thing, anyone who trains in music develops a heightened awareness to
subtleties in sound. It is not surprising at all for a musician to report an
awareness of richness in sound that others don't bother with. Just like a
carpenter probably would report a deep awareness of grain in wood and how it
affects the structural integrity or something similar.

Performance art is where people put their emotional extremes on showcase.
Obviously the ones with the most extremeness are going to get the most
attention from people who want to see that sort of thing. People who are
"highly sensitive" are an extreme, and their display of emotions are going to
appear more intense, and thus more exciting for performance art consumers.

How about doing research on the types of people who would be so obsessive
about watching other people's pain and joy? Why do they get so wrapped up in
the "charisma" of a performer, and needing to see something private put on
display in an artificial way?

~~~
pzone
Um, yes, it's certainly research.

The "heightened sensitivity" of musicians isn't just about being more aware of
the richness of sound. The musician will likely score as more sensitive on
_every item of that test._

The third paragraph you write seems to be in perfect alignment with what the
article is saying. I don't know what you are trying to get at in the fourth
paragraph.

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zschuessler
The described sensitivity is easily related to by software engineers. It's
often difficult to receive an annual review or feedback from code commits.
It's a feeling of wanting feedback to continue growth, and fearing it due to
sensitivity.

One book I've enjoyed which equips confidence is " _Thanks for the Feedback._
" It's a book by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation
Project.

Prepare to read one chapter every few days. It's a heavy read. Well written,
it's an abundance of information: you may need to take time for brain rewiring
as I did.

Amazon link:

 _Thanks for the Feedback_ \- [http://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedback-Science-
Receiving-Well...](http://www.amazon.com/Thanks-Feedback-Science-Receiving-
Well/dp/0670014664)

~~~
treve
Sorry, but engineers are not artists. People need to stop elevating their
profession and job titles to something they're not and take pride in what you
actually are; which is pretty great in itself.

~~~
pzone
I agree that it's very unlikely engineers are more sensitive than the average
person, but engineers can also be highly sensitive and perhaps it's useful to
provide some advice for handling career-specific situations.

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rquantz
Wow, artists have a rich inner life? Yo-Yo Ma feels happy, but also sometimes
he feels sad? Isn't this just describing a human being?

~~~
pzone
Yeah, the emotional life is part and parcel of human experience. But this
article is talking about a heightened sensitivity, take all of the above and
multiply it a few times over. Not everyone needs to sleep for a week after
going on vacation, cries during movies, or spends the rest of the weekend
alone after going to a party Friday evening. Those are the sorts of
personality traits the article is talking about.

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dpflan
According to this article, a creative person experiences heightened
sensitivity to stimuli and exhibits paradoxical behavior. Then he/she chooses
a medium for expression to channel the chaotic sensory and emotional
experiences into one that is controlled more so by themselves, else how can we
deem someone as creative until they create. Seems like we need to understand
creativity a bit more, because as many users are commenting, some descriptions
and questions from this article are vague and highly applicable the basic
human experience (we're all creative! :))

_

I looked for some resources by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (MC) who was referenced
for studying creativity.

Here is what appears to be chapters 2 and 5 of his book _Creativity_ (hosted
by CS7601: Computational Creativity, host by Georgia Tech):

1\. Ch. 2. - "Where Is Creativity?":
[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers/csikszentmihalyi-
whereiscreativity.pdf)

2\. Ch. 5 - "The Flow of Creativity":
[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/papers/csikszentmihalyi-
flowofcreativity.pdf)

3\. Class Website:
[http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2013/cs7601_spring/)

_

Csikszentmihalyi also wrote _Flow_ , which is about the psychology of optimal
experience.

1\. TED talk by MC:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?la...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en)

2\. Flow - coined by MC:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\))

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Retric
Because they are expected to behave that way. I have know several artists who
played back and forth on the highly sensitive spectrum over time. A few
stooped behaving this way when they gave up on being artists.

The thing is stereotypes attract people to behave like X, and they promote X
in borderline peope. Programmers often get to behave introverted and you can
see shits when someone moves from say sales into programming.

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return0
Who said that openness and sensitivity are contradictory? Is the article
building a straw man?

~~~
goodJobWalrus
From the article:

> Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified openness and sensitivity as
> oppositional personality elements that not only coexist in creative
> performers, but form the core of their personalities.

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tedmiston
I was hoping for a scale on the "temperamental sensitivity" and "rich inner
life" quiz at the end.

I found myself at 18/24 and anecdotally, I'm highly sensitive to abrupt noise
changes and lighting in physical spaces. Presumably I'm not the only here that
keeps their home office only dimly lit with consistent white noise from the
central air fan.

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127
If you rephrase this quoestion as: "What benefit do acute senses give an
artist?" you already have your answer.

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funkyy
Better title would be "Why so many sensitive people are artists" imo. Small
change on the first glance but important one.

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thiswasprobably
But, there's quite a big difference between 'sensitive' and 'highly
sensitive'. The latter being someone who most would perceive to be _too_
sensitive.

Otherwise your suggested change definitely makes the title less click-baitish.

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hellofunk
This helps to underscore that the field of mathematics is also an art form,
since the behavior symptoms high-level math researchers are indistinguishable
from "artist types"; Goedel, Riemann, Turing, and others come to mind. The
"sensitivity" and "complexity" suggested in this article are not isolated to
artists.

~~~
tkmh
No I don't think this is quite right. The romantic artistic image of the
mathematician is a prevalent one now, and we choose to see examples to fit the
type. But it hasn't always been this way. Before the early 1800s the
mathematician was scene as a pragmatic, man of the world sort. Or so Amir
Alexander argues in his book Dual at Dawn: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Duel-Dawn-
Mathematics-Histories-Tech...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Duel-Dawn-Mathematics-
Histories-
Technology/dp/0674061748/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451831347&sr=1-3&keywords=amir+alexander)

I agree with you that sensitivity and complexity are not isolated to artists,
and a agree to some extent that mathematics is an art form, just wanted to
point out that 'mathematician as tortured artist' is a relatively modern
trope.

~~~
jerf
It's hard for a "man of the world" to make time in the 21st century to learn
enough about mathematics to make meaningful contributions to the field which
still doing the other things being a "man of the world" requires, except
perhaps in a few isolated places that happen to overlap something practical.
Or, in other words, we programmers probably overestimate the ability for non-
mathematicians to contribute to the field because we happen to be sitting in
the very best such place already.

Same reason we don't get true renaissance people anymore; one can not even
know everything about genetics, to say nothing of biology, let alone half-a-
dozen other disciplines.

Are these traits truly associated with "artistry" and "creativity", or are we
simply in a place where we've done so much than moving things forward requires
monomania?

~~~
tkmh
Yes, no one is a renaissance person any more. But I don't think that there
were as many renaissance people in the past as we think. Admittedly I don't
have much evidence for this. In the case of maths, I think our idea that many
more mathematicians used to be polymaths in the past is slightly skewed dues
to the fact that until about 2 centuries ago, 'mathematician' and 'physicist'
were not distinct categories. We think of Gauss and Euler as polymaths, but
Euler was by all accounts a terrible philosopher.

EDIT: I just remembered that Gauss was an extremely competent philologist, so
maybe the above is no longer valid.

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oliv__
I like how the whole piece is just one big ad for their upcoming book.

"Read more from the upcoming book here: This Science-Backed Trick Can Unlock
Your Creativity In Just 5 Minutes"

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ck2
Sometimes I tell myself I am not crazy enough to be a really good coder.

But then I see other really good coders who seem perfectly sane.

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unusximmortalis
What you are asking is not what the article is saying. So...?

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enginn
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you:
I am here to live out loud”

― Émile Zola

A true artist is one who never calls him/herself an artist is my stance. It is
usually when society sees a person's works and starts to give positive reviews
that the inner artist is unleashed on the world. Sensitivity plays a part, but
only insofar as the artist can channel art through the correct medium. If I'm
electrosensitive (I constantly get electric shocks for example), then
computers are probably the best medium. Someone with an ear for sound would
likewise choose musical instruments to mirror back the sound of nature..

~~~
mei0Iesh
> If I'm electrosensitive (I constantly get electric shocks for example), then
> computers are probably the best medium.

This statement appears as mystical as tarot cards. What connection is there to
getting electric shocks and using a computer other than some vague mystical
correlation not founded on anything logical?

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hengheng
This reads like the wrong combination of shoes and floor, resulting in huge
ESD problems. Highly individual, too.

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enginn
Nope..Cork sandals will produce the same effect. It's not highly individual,
it is highly reported many times by many people, but usually cast off as
irrelevant or unimportant to people's daily life...

~~~
xenophonf
Dude, you really need to make sure your gear is grounded properly. You should
not be getting electrical shocks from touching stuff. I can't begin to tell
you how many times we've had screwball problems with equipment that had
floating voltages due to poor earthing---problems that went away the minute we
fixed the wiring. (The guys maintaining said equipment though nothing wrong of
the fact that they were getting shocked and said nothing about it for months!)

