“There is no great genius without some touch of madness.” - Aristotle

Our minds are a potential gateway to a plethora of creativity, innovation, and invention. Creative thought has always been purveyed as the ability to see something in a way that may not appear to be obvious: “thinking outside the box”. The mind is connecting concepts that are not perceived by most to be connected. Creativity at its highest level is sometimes labelled genius.  However, unlike the certainty of Aristotle, many scholars would argue that genius and madness are not necessarily related.  

Genius

What is genius? Genius has been described as brilliant, exceptional, highly intellectual, a mastermind, or Einsteinian. Historically, we have observed creative genius in the arts, science, mathematics, philosophy, and more. Throughout time we have witnessed the influence of the creative genius. The genius brain will see, hear, believe, and perceive what is beyond the capacity of the rest of us.

Some people do believe that genius and psychosis are somehow closely related. That maybe the genius and all their talents are just a knife’s edge from the psychotic.  Are there any salient differences that need to be taken into account when generalizing genius and madness to be connected?

“Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.” – Thomas Szasz

Psychosis

So, what is Psychosis? Psychosis is a condition that affects the way your brain processes information. It causes you to lose touch with reality. You might see, hear, or believe things that aren't real. Notice the similarities of perception between the genius and the psychotic. They may be similar without being the same. How can we understand this relationship between genius and psychosis more fully? Perhaps there is a touch of apophenia in both.

Apophenia

What is apophenia? Apophenia occurs when individuals find significance and hidden patterns in nearly everything. These individuals make connections between unrelated concepts. Klaus Conrad (1905-1961) recognized that apophenia can be normal or abnormal.

In the abnormal example of apophenia Conrad diagnosed the beginning phases of delusion that might lead someone to be paranoid schizophrenic or psychotic.  An example of this delusion is pareidolia, which is a visual apophenia.  

Here one might be seeing the face of Jesus on a sandwich, or the Virgin Mary on the subway wall, or the Man in the Moon, or figures in the clouds.  There is an error in perception based on a recognized pattern.

In the normal range Conrad connected apophenia to a night of merely dreaming during sleep. The similarities between normal and abnormal states of consciousness where apophenia is concerned appear to be apparent. Does this mean that genius and psychosis go together? Not really.

The high degree of similarity between genius and psychosis is contraindicated by the idea that highly creative individuals do not usually function with high levels of psychopathology. Usually, but not always, mental illness will negate extremely high levels of functionality.  There are extreme examples like Ted Bundy who was obviously mentally gifted in some ways, defending himself in court for example, but still severely psychotic.

The highly functioning creative genius requires synchronistic processing to reach their penultimate achievements. They differentiate themselves from the dysfunctional through their high levels of achievement. Their works are dissimilar from normal because they demonstrate the act of being outliers in achievement through the mastery of their actions.

So, genius may look to be related to psychosis on the surface. However, apophenia helps us understand how this is only a surface resemblance.  There is a similarity in a heightened ability to see a pattern recognition that most of us do not have. 

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” – William James

However, it is how this awareness of the pattern recognition is implemented that determines genius or psychosis.  Apophenia helps us understand that we have to presume genius and psychosis are not the same but do have a similar origin.  That is, both genius and psychotic individuals possess an advanced, almost unworldly, ability to see connections between unrelated concepts that most of us fail to recognize. 

In the case of the genius, this high-level ability has the potential to advance society at large.  In the case of the psychotic, this ability has the potential to harm that same society.