Guest Post by Scott Adams
The other day I was wondering about the relationship between OCD and creativity. People with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) have thoughts that they can’t get out of their heads. But creativity is the opposite of obsessing over a single idea, at least the way I experience it.
For me, creativity is a process by which I rapidly FORGET the thought that is currently in my head so a new one will fill the space. Your brain isn’t good at thinking of nothing, so when you eject your current thought, another rushes in to take its place. If you flush-and-replace enough thoughts in a row, you have experienced creativity. And if any of those new thoughts made your body respond with a laugh, a sigh, or chills, or anything else physical – you might have created art. I think of creativity as a system of cycling through ideas until one of them “moves” me, literally. If an idea doesn’t create some sort of physical change in my body, I rapidly reject it and move to the next thought.
The reason I am curious about OCD and it’s relationship to creativity is that I wonder if OCD sufferers could sometimes hack their brains by using creativity to crowd out the OCD. Your brain isn’t good at having more than one thought at the same time. And it also isn’t good at flushing your current thoughts when you have OCD. So instead of trying to actively lose an obsessive thought – which is nearly impossible for someone with OCD – perhaps it would be more helpful to try to solve a creative problem that automatically activates the imagination circuitry of your brain. If I’m right, trying to solve a creative problem would be more effective as a distraction for OCD sufferers than any other kind of mental distraction.
I Googled “OCD and creativity” to see what the science says. One study suggests that OCD sufferers are far more likely to “rely heavily on their imagination” compared to non-OCD people. The researchers concluded that this correlation might mean that having an extra-strong imagination is a necessary condition for OCD. And they might be right.
But consider another explanation for the correlation between imagination and OCD. Could it be that OCD sufferers use their imaginations more often than others because doing so is an escape from the OCD? And could it be that continued use of the imagination makes you better at it?
Humans can change the physical composition of their brains by choosing what they spend their time doing. Musicians strengthen one part of the brain and athletes strengthen another. I have to assume that continuous use of your visual imagination also changes the brain over time. And the more you practice something, the better you get. So if OCD sufferers have been self-hacking their brains by using their imaginations to avoid compulsive thoughts, you would expect them to have more vivid imaginations than the public because of all the practice.
For the first 30 years or so of my life I had obsessive thoughts about childhood traumas. Whenever my brain was under-occupied, it drifted to those horrors. When the bad thoughts came, my only defense was to crowd them out with stronger and better thoughts. So I used my imagination to create little movies in my head that were so engaging that my mind had no choice but to focus on them.
Is it a coincidence that my imagination is so strong now that I make my living using it? I don’t know. It feels as if I was born with a good imagination, but it also feels as if I exercised it more than other people. Lots and lots and lots more. And it also feels to me that my powers of imagination have gotten stronger every day of my life because of practice.
You should never take health advice from cartoonists. This is no exception. But I would be interested to hear from any OCD sufferers as to whether they use imagination to escape obsessive thoughts. And if not, why not?
ADD has now been rolled into ADHD – different topic but not wholly unrelated….gotta be a cousin to OCD? Real, genuine sufferers of OCD – they get little done in life. I know one or two and they don’t live, they exist. I’d argue the marginal sufferers/benefactors are the spectrum worthy of discussion. Some occupations such as emergency room doctors/trauma care, chefs, high stress – no time answer it correctly right now – type of occupations benefit from ADD/ADHD since they see options, possibilities, and ‘shades of gray’ vs. those who marry the first decision that pops into their head.
Growing up, I didn’t know EVEN ONE person who had ADD/ADHD. Not. One.
I wonder why that is?
Because it’s a MADE UP BULLSHIT psychobabble “disorder”? Hmmmmm?
I kinda feel the same about OCD … although I do know some people who are “compulsive”. Like my mom. When it comes to dirt. She sees dirt everywhere, all the time. “I must cleeen zee haus!”, she still says to this day, even though she’s older than a dinosaur, and you can perform open heart surgery on our kitchen floor.
There weren’t any ADD/ADHD kids in my school either, but that was a long time ago before they found a treatment for it so no one tried to find or create them.
There were no ADD/ADHD students in my kids school either, of course it was a private school with no profit incentive to create them.
The primary reason you old fucks never had to deal with it was (1) to a lesser degree, the effects of the shit in the food/air/water/etc., have now reached a point where the results are visible. They present more problems for boys since the blood/brain barrier in pregnancy is much less with males so you see 5:1 or so boys:girls. (2) Mostly what you’re seeing is the ‘teach to the test’ common core bullshit that puts zero emphasis on creativity and instead lasers in on ‘test and forget’….for a kid with those conditions you couldn’t pick a more difficult learning environment. Everything they’re good at has been ruled unnecessary and what they suck at is sacrosanct. But, it makes sense….creativity is to be crushed and adherence to the state mandate is to be goal….label the creative ones, the ones who see more than black/white…right/wrong. I was told and have read that the hunter/gatherer mind is evident in these kids. Long periods of nothing then brief, intense moments focused on a result or failure and the consequences of each. Aww, it’s prolly just bullshit and what they need is a good slap and a boot up their ass. That’ll learn’em real good.
Could also be that we used to let boys grow up acting like boys instead of trying to force them to act and grow up like girls.
That has got to have serious behavioral effects breaking out somewhere and ADHD drugs are used to treat those outbreaks.
I’ve read that ADHD is a symptom of poor gut health and can be passed from mother to child but effectively treated with probiotics and fermented foods. Processed food only makes it worse….or so I’ve read.
So it’s a disease that men catch from women and the cure is beer?
ADHD and ADD are fabrications. People with active minds and high IQ’s are constantly thinking complex thoughts that lead them in numerous directions. The whole BS story was created to neuter high functioning young males and lower their cognitive processes so the “no child left behind” policy could work.
Stupid people are still people, but they can never be made into intelligent people any more than short people can be made into tall people. You can, however, make smart people ignorant wastrels if you feed them enough drugs designed to impair their cognitive ability.
You have to wonder, if the schools (and parents) of today, with all this ADD, ADHD, OCD, ODD, and other “symptoms” of being a kid, that must be treated forthwith, were around a hundred years ago, would we have had Einstein, Tesla, Edison, and so many others that thought way outside the norm? Think about just Einstein for a minute. He was shunned by the university set for years (guess libtards were shortsighted even back then), so he ended up being employed as a patent clerk. In his SPARE TIME, he wrote the general theory of relativity ie: E=MC2 . He was asked some years later how he came up with these concepts, and his answer was that he imagined himself traveling on a light beam, and what as an observer he would see. Think also of Nikola Tesla, he was considered “weird” by many, and probably would be deemed a “threat” by some shortsighted modern libtard teacher, however his ideas of radio communications and electrical current basically give us the modern environment we live in today.
I have no doubt that there are kids, growing up right now that have the brilliance of Einstein or Tesla, however our current school system, in combination with ignorant-self centered parents and HR managers that won’t hire someone without a “degree” in conformity are all but completely smothering any shot at brilliance this generation can muster.
Like much else in “today’s world”, if the bureaucracy and stupid entrenched interests were all torn down, I honestly believe in 20 or 30 years, we would see the brilliance of the early US again.
Since at least the 1960s, American schools have valued social competence over cognitive competence. The idea, I suspect, was that socially competent people take part in coherent, cooperative societies, such that even if you couldn’t contribute anything worthwhile you could at least get along with each other. Emphasis was put on social development; even in elementary school “plays well with others” was a category the teacher evaluated the children on, even in first grade!
But the definition of social competence was left to the teachers, who were overwhelmingly female in grade school; I had my first male teacher in fifth grade! What female teacher would ever evaluate “stand your ground when threatened” as a social competence? What male would survive for long who didn’t?
Bright kids rarely get along well with dull kids: even kids can tell when they are outclassed in a thinking match, and hate it. As a result, in order to be at least acceptably popular, bright kids have to learn to “act dumb”; care about TV stars, fashionable clothes (female version of acting dumb), TV shows, crude behavior (male versions of acting dumb). The younger you learn to act like the foolish, the less friction you have with all the foolish ones around you. And actually accomplishing something while young (say, winning the National Spelling Bee, or a National Merit Scholarship) will turn your “friends” into green-eyed monsters who will talk about you behind your back ….
And now there are national efforts to identify “problem children” while they can still be salvaged and turned to the right path before they become hardened nonconformists …. the Crunch cannot come too soon, and the DOEducation should be dismantled before it does any more harm.