Isaac Newton’s neurotic creativity may be based on negative thinking

Neuroticism is characterized by anxiety, fear, moodiness, worry, envy, frustration, jealousy and loneliness. The psychologists suggest that the same area of the brain responsible for self-generated thought is also highly active in neuroticism.

It has been found by researchers that people, who have high neuroticism in personality tests, usually have negative feelings and thoughts and they find it hard to tackle unsafe jobs, and have more chances of experiencing psychiatric disorders in their lifetime.

“The second problem is, there’s literature showing neuroticism scores are positively correlated with creativity; and so why should having a magnified view of threat objects make you good at coming up with new ideas?”

In a new study researchers claim that neurotic people tend to be creative as both phenomena could be linked through day-dreaming.

Perkins explained to Time that neurotics being “threat sensitive” are one of the classifications proposed by British psychologist Jeffrey Gray in the 70s.

This study could help people know that besides the anxiety and depression that comes with neuroticism creativity is a great benefit.

“The creativity of Isaac Newton and other neurotics may simply be the result of their tendency to dwell on problems far longer than average people”. Ranging from Isaac Newton, to Vincent Van Gogh and to the more contemporary Woody Allen, all of them have been known to be severe worrywarts who took their crippling anxiety and used it to fuel their creativity.

Inspiration for the new theory came from research demonstrating that when people spontaneously have negative thoughts, they exhibit greater activity in the regions of the brain associated with threat perception – the medial prefrontal cortex.

Neurotics watch and interpret a problem differently by seeing possible negative effects of everything or perceiving non-existent threats, creating scenarios in their minds that might not even occur to others.

Together, and with a little help from Dean Mobbs of Columbia University, the psychologists ran a series of MRIs on volunteers, who had not been told about the experiment beforehand.

Perkins theorized that if people happen to have a lot of negative self-generated thoughts because of increased spontaneous activity in the parts of the brain that govern conscious perception of threat, and if these people also panic sooner than average people, then that means they can experience intense negative emotions even when there’s no threat present. His theory states neurotics have overactive imaginations that blow threats out of proportion.

Adam Perkins, from King’s College London, who co-authored the new study with Smallwood, thought that some of the differences on the activity of brain circuits governing thought could explain neuroticism.