Creative Or Defective?
At the IONS international conference in September 2003, the Institute's research department conducted a pilot survey exploring relationships among bodily sensitivities, creative expression, transformational practices, and transpersonal experiences. From 500 returned questionnaires, we were able to determine predictors of transpersonal experience. By "transpersonal" I mean a broad brush of numinous experiences, everything from telepathy to encounters with angels or UFOs. We found that people are likely to have experienced some aspect of the transpersonal if they are (a) feeling types (as compared to thinking types), (b) practice one or more of the creative arts, (c) engage in some form of mental discipline (like meditation), (d) are open to unconventional claims, and (e) are interested in possibilities more than facts.
These factors resemble creative personalities in general, suggesting that the perceptions and experiences of the highly creative minority differ--sometimes dramatically-- from the experiences and resulting worldviews and belief systems of the less creative majority.
Creative perceptions can be challenging to conventional minds. Indeed, from an orthodox perspective, creativity gone wild is synonymous with madness. For many academic psychologists, the public's persistent belief in the paranormal, for example, is explained by one of three hypotheses: ignorance, defect, and/or deprivation.
The "ignorance hypothesis" asserts that people believe in the paranormal because they're uneducated or stupid. The "deficiency hypothesis" asserts that such beliefs arise because people are mentally defective in some way, ranging from low intelligence or poor critical thinking ability to full-blown psychosis. The "deprivation hypothesis" proposes that these beliefs exist to provide a way to cope in the face of psychological uncertainties and physical stressors.
Studies conducted to examine these hypotheses have produced mixed results. Some authors claim that their results show that paranormal beliefs do indeed provide a feeling of control over life's uncertainties, but that such control comes with a high price: the tendency toward dissociative experiences, anxiety, and more serious psychopathologies. Other investigators report complex relationships between personality factors such as extraversion and beliefs about precognition. Still others have examined traditional beliefs about the so-called "religious paranormal" (miracles as described in religious doctrine) versus the "secular paranormal" (telepathy or UFOs) and found no support for any of the traditional explanations. There have even been studies of belief and reported paranormal experiences among psychotic populations (both manic-depressives and schizophrenics) and healthy people. Again, no clear picture has emerged from these studies.
So perhaps there's another, simpler reason for the persistent belief in the paranormal: Maybe some of those experiences are real. And maybe the reason that creative people report higher levels of belief in the paranormal is that they see things that others don't.
A recent experiment supports this idea. In 2003, Harvard University psychologists Shelley Carson and Daniel Higgins, and University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson, published an interesting study in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They examined a property known as latent inhibition, which refers to an unconscious process that degrades our future ability--and possibly our need--to pay attention to stimuli that have had no consequences in the past.
Imagine, for example, that Pavlov's dogs were exposed to ringing bells without being fed. The dogs will quickly learn to ignore ringing bells, because the sounds have no meaningful consequence (no association with food). Pavlov then decides to train his dogs to salivate whenever they hear a bell by ringing those same bells and then feeding them. Unfortunately, these dogs have already learned to ignore bells, so they're going to have a very hard time learning that there is now a meaningful association between bells and food. Dogs that hadn't previously heard the irrelevant bells will quickly learn to salivate.
Latent inhibition serves an important perceptual function in our brains. It allows us to talk on a phone, sip coffee, and drive a car on a busy highway, all at the same time and without a second thought. If we hadn't previously learned what is worth paying attention to while driving, we'd quickly become overwhelmed with information and paralyzed with uncertainty.
Latent inhibition is robust in healthy people, but when it goes wrong it can lead to serious problems. It has been studied extensively in schizophrenic patients because a key symptom of that disease is perceiving meaningful relationships everywhere, even when there aren't any. Distorted associations are associated with low latent inhibition because it reveals that the mind is having trouble ignoring irrelevant information. The 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind, about the life of Nobel Laureate John Nash, suggested how this might appear from a first-person perspective. The tagline for the movie was "He saw the world in a way no one could have imagined."
That line is also a good description of creative people in general, so perhaps they, too, exhibit low latent inhibition. Previous experiments have indeed shown that low latent inhibition is associated with the personality trait "open to experience," which is in turn associated with divergent thinking and creativity.
But not all creative people are, or become, psychotic. Carson, Higgins, and Peterson proposed that "some psychological phenomena might be pathogenic in the presence of decreased intelligence . . . but normative or even abnormally useful in the presence of increased intelligence." They tested this idea on Harvard undergraduates who were given creativity measures, IQ tests, personality tests, and a latent inhibition test. They found that the high-creativity group had significantly lower latent inhibition scores than the low-creativity group, and that the most eminently creative achievers (a subset of students who had published a novel, patented an invention, and so on) had both lower latent inhibition and higher IQ scores compared to the other students.
Their finding supports the well-known association between genius and madness. Highly creative people have greater access to more of what the world presents; high intelligence helps one successfully navigate through this flood of perceptions. Low intelligence struggles in vain, and the result may lead to psychosis. And even with high intelligence there is always the risk of becoming overwhelmed by a persistent state of expanded perception.
From this perspective, it is easier to understand why creative people report more psychic experiences, and why the paranormal is often associated with psychopathology. People who believe in the transpersonal are not necessarily ignorant, mentally deficient, or deprived. They just see farther into the depths of the world than "normal" people do. Of course, for the sake of mental health, the trick for every creative person is learning how to peer comfortably into that abyss without becoming swallowed up by it.
DEAN RADIN, Ph.D. is IONS' Senior Scientist. Dr. Radin earned a Masters degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois, Champaign. He has held research appointments at Princeton University, Edinburgh University, University of Nevada, and several Silicon Valley industrial research labs, where he has conducted basic research on exceptional human capacities, including psychic phenomena. His books include The Conscious Universe and the upcoming Entangled Minds. Dean's website: www.deanradin.com 
