Why Creative People Are Eccentric (Scientific American)

Last month, I wrote a bit about my long-standing opinion that all writers are mildly schizophrenic. And last year, I mentioned how much I love it when research backs up something I’ve always known (or at least believed). Here we go again!

The new Scientific American has an article titled “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric“. It’s an interesting read if you’re interested in psychology, creativity, and/or why your neighbor wears polka dots exclusively and talks to his pet duck in Chinese; and it looks like the entire text is available online. So rather than discuss the article in detail here, I’d rather drive some traffic their way and have you go read the article for yourself.

But I will point out one of the conclusions drawn from the research discussed:

Harvard researcher Dennis Kinney and his team … suggested that schizotypal individuals may inherit the unconventional modes of thinking and perceiving associated with schizophrenia without inheriting the disease itself. … They found that the adopted offspring of schizophrenic individuals who themselves displayed signs of schizotypal personality had higher scores for creativity than the control subjects. The Kinney group also made a new discovery: some of their control subjects who did not have a family history of schizophrenia met the profile for schizotypal personality—and they too scored higher for creativity than other control subjects.

In other (over-simplified) words: highly creative people are, quite frequently, mildly schizophrenic. Or at least exhibit similar thinking styles.

Where have I heard that before…?

Breaking NYT News: Women cannot be geeks!

Okay, I’m a bit late to the ranting party, and there have already been many excellent blog posts about Ginia Bellafante’s New York Times “review” of HBO’s production of Game of Thrones. My good friend Kristen McHugh said several things better than I could on her Tumblr, and GeekGirlDiva is aggregating related posts on her blog. Go check some of them out.

My main purpose in posting here is twofold:

If you could pilot any vehicle, real or fictitious, what would it be? (via The Daily Post at WordPress.com)

The TARDIS, duh!

Why? Because it’s a time-traveling spaceship! Is any other reason needed? Oh, yeah, one other reason: it’s far bigger on the inside than on the outside.

So I could load ALL of my belongings into it, hop over to the UK, and move right on in. Live there for years, even decades, and return to the States (after all, I’d have to visit my family) five minutes ago. Not to mention visiting other planets; visiting other places on our own planet; or getting to talk to deceased people I admire, like Shakespeare, Milton Erickson, etc.

And no worries about affording the cost of living anywhere. I can either just live in the TARDIS itself, or go back in time a century or so, deposit a miniscule amount in a decent interest-earning account, and hop forward to collect my earnings.

ETA: Oh, forgot the most important reason: All that travel, with NO TSA!

Topic #97: If you could pilot any vehicle, what would it be? (F-35, Death Star, The Enterprise, an aircraft carrier, anything goes). Why? Where would you go? What would you do? Submitted by Adventurewriter’s Blog. … Read More

via The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Words Matter: Hens, cocks, etc.

*briefly wonders how much spam and how many misdirected clicks will result from that second-to-last word*

Today’s post over at Sleep Talkin’ Man (which is hilarious, by the way, and you should subscribe or add it to your RSS feed or whatever you do to track these things) highlights one of my enduring stances: the words we choose to use matter (I’ve been meaning to write more on this…maybe someday). I don’t care if it is “only” a text message or tweet or message board posting. Use a word incorrectly, spell it wrong, muck up your grammar, and don’t be surprised when you’re misunderstood. But I digress.

STM also reminded me of a story from my high school days. So I thought I’d break my chain of non-blogging days (#postaweek, ha!! …can I blame it on preparing to move?) by sharing it.

During my senior year, I took what was, I believe, the only psychology course (surprise, surprise) on offer in the entire school. One day, the teacher read us brain teasers, and we tried to answer them, discussing the logic involved, challenging our assumptions in thinking, etc. One of the teasers was:

“If Mr. Brown’s peacock lays an egg in Mr. Green’s yard, to whom does the egg belong?”

(I’ll put a break here in case you want to consider that for a second.)