A recent study in Nature Neuroscience suggests that genetic risks for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are associated with artistic activity. These findings appear to present data to support the long-held societal belief that creativity and mental illness are linked, but the strength of the association is extremely small.
Previously, studies that attempted to link psychiatric disorders and creativity have either assessed the presence of psychiatric illness among eminent creative professionals or assessed the levels of creativity among psychiatric patients and their relatives. The approach used in the new study is unique in that it uses a large dataset to probe whether individual genetic variants are associated with both psychiatric illness and creativity.
To complete this study, the researchers examined a dataset of more than eighty-five thousand Icelanders (insert your Björk jokes here), recruited by a research clinic. Participants were genotyped, and their genetic risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were assessed using the most recent genome-wide association study technique: polygenetic risk scores. In short, this technique looks at all the areas of the genome that have been associated with a greater risk of a disease and computes a single value for each individual's genotype.
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