

Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia' - Arun2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/10154775.stm

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tom_ilsinszki
_"Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present
that drives them on to make changes."_

Guess a lot of entrepreneurs feel the same way. Not saying, that everyone who
starts a small business is a genius, but I think most people who do, feel
uncomfortable in "normal" society. Otherwise why would they risk it all, while
eating cheap food and working a lot more than at a 9 to 5?

I read the biography of van Gogh. He was in constant mental pain (based on his
letters to his brother) and did not fit in anywhere. He tried learning math
(if I remember correctly) 18 hours a day, also tried being a dedicated pastor,
etc. He just did not fit in anywhere, until he started painting and drawing.
Of course, he didn't fit in the mainstream painting trends either, but I don't
think that matters, because the mental discomfort would not have stopped even
if he got rich or famous.

Also Dali has wrote a diary, which I heard about before. I will definitely
pick it up at the library and read it.

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hernan7
Well, you don't need to be a genius to be creative. Also, who is to say that
some entrepreneurs aren't geniuses? Just because they apply their intelligence
to business instead of writing novels or proving theorems, doesn't mean they
can't be smart.

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stretchwithme
I think human beings, and animals for that matter, are naturally
entrepreneurial. In the wild, those that aren't would die a quick death. Its
only when there was work that could be done by non-entrepreneurs that they
began to thrive. Well, subsist anyway.

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Groxx
More reason to be conservative with brain-altering medication.

Unless you _want_ a world without creativity. It'd be easier to control, at
least.

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JoeAltmaier
Engineers are frequently ADHD (citation?) Can Engineers be called creative? Or
is it an entirely different mental illness?

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rubinelli
Those who suffer from ADHD are notoriously known as "idea people": highly
creative, but poor in execution. Like schizophrenia, it's been suggested that
their inability to consistently filter out distractions is the cause, though
it seems that different areas are affected.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
There are also phases of hyper-focus. I use those to find devious bugs, design
tricky parts of code, architect. The rest of the time I fill in code, test,
document, package etc.

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amichail
Are creative people unemployable?

~~~
nostrademons
It depends where. There're several companies that thrive on hiring creative
people and then giving them nearly free reign - Google, finance, think tanks.
They tend to be fairly hard to get into, because there are a limited number of
positions open for creative knowledge workers and a lot of people who think
they're creative.

Also, in many cases you have to "pay your dues" before you can do high-level
creative work. This is not because management is cruel, but because "thinking
outside the box" requires knowing where the box is. If you take a bunch of
random people with no experience in a field and ask them to dream up wild-eyed
solutions to outstanding problems, many of them will come up with the same
wrong answer. If those people then learn a little about other ideas that
people have had and why they didn't work, _then_ they can come up with novel,
original contributions that actually work.

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HSO
"[F]inance" or "think tanks" is kind of broad. You probably mean small- to
medium-sized hedge funds in finance (or their equivalent prop desks, as far as
they still exist, in investment banks) because otherwise I can't think of
finance as a place for creative natures. Most bank divisions and asset
managers have set rules and procedures for everything and force you into using
their software (environments), like Excel or Matlab or C# or Windows. I'm not
saying those are bad in general, it's just I myself hate them and there's
absolutely no way I could work for an operation that uses them, which
precludes me from practically 98 percent of firms in the industry (ok, I
pulled that one out of a hat). Also, although I generally agree with Merton's
point that "first you have to show you can do it like them, then you can show
you can do better", I think more and more this applies only outside of
"paradigm shifts" in Thomas Kuhn's sense. During such shifts, or to propel
them, one may do better by totally disregarding the viewpoint of the old guard
and "just do".

EDIT: Of course, one would still need to have thought enough about the "old"
way of doing or explaining things that one would know why the "old" way
failed, in a fundamental way. For example, I think in economics and finance,
the fundamental failure is not so much in the statistical assumptions (that is
actually a pretty cheap shot to make, theory-wise, Herr Taleb!) but in
aggregation.

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settrans
Again? At least this article doesn't even purport to be backed by any
published research. Mention some brain scans, toss up a CG image of a brain,
and for good measure, start 'em off with a nice photo of Salvador Dali.

~~~
Arun2009
The article drops a couple of names. E.g., Fredrik Ullen, from where I got
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100518064610.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100518064610.htm)

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garply
Regarding losethos's message:

I'm really curious how that nonsense text is generated. Presumably it's not
totally random - and perhaps "Incurable" and "Pays the bills" are frequently
queried search terms. I wonder what else went into that algorithm. At the same
time - what's the point of a post without a url?

~~~
jey
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Markov_chain#...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_generators)

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ajslater
Exceptionally creative people are frequently eccentric. Eccentric people are
not frequently exceptionally creative.

