http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/stories/person/1584 Stories and external links referencing a person (RSS) en http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/culture-society/articles/brains-behind-writers-block <!--paging_filter--><p>"It's likely that writing and other creative work involve a push-pull interaction between the frontal and temporal lobes," Harvard Medical School neurology instructor Alice Flaherty speculates. If the temporal lobe activity holds sway, an aspiring scribe may turn out 600 logorrheic pages. If the temporal lobes are restrained by frontal lobe changes, the result might be pinched and timid. Most academics regard the study of creativity as what Flaherty calls "intellectually unhygienic." So Flaherty, who has herself experienced a compulsion to write, is doing it herself. She and Shelley Carson, a psychologist at Harvard, have tried using light to break writing blocks and prod creativity. As autumn wears on, many people experience a dip in productivity and originality, not dissimilar to the gloomy seasonal affective disorder (SAD) that depresses some people when the days get darker and colder. SAD can be relieved by sitting in front of light boxes that provide an indoor equivalent of a sunny day. Flaherty and Carson have begun trying to up the creativity of college students with the same treatment. Flaherty is the author of "The Midnight Disease" (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), in which she writes about the mental aspects of writing.</p> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:34:58 -0400 70652986 3491 at http://harvardscience.harvard.edu http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/links-between-creativity-intelligence-and-mental-illness <!--paging_filter--><p>"Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked, particularly in artists, musicians, and writers," notes Shelley Carson, a Harvard psychologist. "Our research results indicate that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought predispose people to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishments under others." Carson, Jordan Peterson (now at the University of Toronto), and Daniel Higgins did experiments to find out what these conditions might be. They put 182 Harvard graduate and undergraduate students through a series of tests involving listening to repeated strings of nonsense syllables, hearing background noise, and watching yellow lights on a video screen. The students also filled out questionnaires about their creative achievements on a new type of form developed by Carson, and they took standard intelligence tests. When all the scores and test results were compared, the most creative students had lower scores for latent inhibition than the less creative. "Getting swamped by new information that you have difficulty handling may predispose you to a mental disorder," Carson says. "But if you have high intelligence and a good working memory, you are more likely to be able to combine bits of new information in creative ways."</p> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:32:36 -0400 70652986 3431 at http://harvardscience.harvard.edu