Are You Neurotic? This Emotional Roller Coaster Is Linked To Creativity

That fundamental, wacky, psychological, distinguishable trait that brings out moodiness, frustration, jealousy and the like. Of course, we're talking about neuroticism; this emotional roller-coaster that can create unstable and stressful conditions for affected individuals.

But there's a new study out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences suggesting that neurotic unhappiness and creativity may go hand-in-hand. The study authors argue that part of the brain responsible for self-generated thought is highly active in neuroticism, which yields both creative and stressful traits.

Study author, Jeffrey Gray, a British psychologist who proposed in the 1970s that such individuals have a heightened sensitivity to threat, had this eureka moment during a lecture that changed his whole world on the subject. University of York psychologist Jonathan Smallwood, a leading expert on the neural basis of dreaming, described a key study that showed how individuals at rest in an MRI scanner spontaneously have negative thoughts, displaying greater activity in regions of the medial prefrontal cortex associated with conscious perception of threat. Perkins then realized that individual differences in the activity of these brain circuits that govern self-generated thought could be a causal explanation for neuroticism, the study notes. 

From there, the two researchers collaborated with Dean Mobbs of the Columbia University Fear, Anxiety, and Biosocial Lab, who is an expert on the neural basis of defense in humans. Mobbs had previously shown that there is a switch from anxiety-related forebrain activity to panic-related midbrain activity as a threat stimulus moves closer. Mobbs had also showed that this switch from anxiety to panic is controlled by circuits in the basolateral nuclei of the amygdala--the brain's emotional center.

"It occurred to me that if you happen to have a preponderance of negatively hued self-generated thoughts due to high levels of spontaneous activity in the parts of the medial prefrontal cortex that govern conscious perception of threat and you also have a tendency to switch to panic sooner than average people, due to possessing especially high reactivity in the basolateral nuclei of the amygdale, then that means you can experience intense negative emotions even when there's no threat present," Perkins says, in a statement. "This could mean that for specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active imagination, which acts as a built-in threat generator."

However, more information is needed to essentially determine these and other thoughts surrounding the subject: "We're still a long way off from fully explaining neuroticism, and we're not offering all of the answers, but we hope that our new theory will help people make sense of their own experiences, and show that although being highly neurotic is by definition unpleasant, it also has creative benefits," Perkins says. "Hopefully our theory will also stimulate new research as it provides us with a straightforward unifying framework to tie together the creative aspects of neuroticism with its emotional aspects."

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