Whoa! I was gearing up to write some kind of wisdom about disruptive innovation, when this morning Hylton sent me a link to a FuturePundit post that dropped a bomb in my brain: Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto and colleagues at Harvard University have found that decreased latent inhibition of environmental stimuli appears to correlate with greater creativity among people with high IQ.

In a nutshell, this research says that people whose brains are more open to stimuli from the outside environment will either be:

1. Creative, because their openness to new possibilities and stimuli gives them more, and more various, information with which to make connections and have new ideas, or
   
2. Psychotic, because their openness to new possibilities and stimuli leads to overload and mental illness.

This press release quotes Dr. Peterson: "It appears that we have not only identified one of the biological bases of creativity but have moved towards cracking an age-old mystery: the relationship between genius, madness and the doors of perception."

There’s also a role played by stress, though it only comes out in the paper (and in the FuturePundit post), not in the press release. Release of the stress hormone corticosterone lowers latent inhibition. So stress sends the brain into a state where it will examine factors in the environment that it normally ignores, thus allowing for the discovery of solutions to the stress-causing problem - solutions that would be ignored in normal and less-stressed circumstances.

Is this why we sometimes feel as though we're more creative under deadline stress (although studies have shown we’re not really more creative under those circumstances)?

Then, of course, stress overload causes information overload and then presumably psychosis starts. Or perhaps this is where depression comes from? A natural response to an overload of problem-solving stimuli, causing pattern-recognition and discernment responses to short-circuit?

So what is the effect of Prozac and the other SSRI drugs on this tendency for decreased latent inhibition? Would these medications decrease creativity by increasing latent inhibition, or would they increase creativity by increasing ability (or at least restoring your natural ability) to handle external stimuli?

I realize I have more questions than answers here, and I promise I’ll share answers with you if I find any. Meanwhile, you can see a .PDF of original paper here. The study was also published in the September 2003 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.