It enables us to discern emotionally the intentions and feelings of others and to interact with others. All of these factors form the second part of our nature, which originates from the evolutionary pressures of the social aspects of human experience.
The absence or deficiency of the social algorithms in brain function frees enormous power in the brains of these temperamentally lopsided individuals. This power then becomes available for creative processes in the right individual.
They bypass our evolutionary limits of comprehension and invent ways to access the mathematical arrangement of nature, thereby conceiving, for example, quantum mechanics. Although often exhibiting a learned civility, these individuals may nevertheless be deficient in understanding the algorithms that help us perceive and comprehend the emotional gestalt, state of mind, and intentions needed for social interaction. This lopsided variant, deficient in social algorithms, may be related to the autistic spectrum eg, savants who can recite the list of an entire telephone book or to traumatic brain injury eg, persons who develop sudden heightened or de novo creative skills after the injury.
Two years after graduating from the police academy, Officer Ryan suffered a gunshot wound to the head that resulted in left frontal lobe brain injury. Before the incident, he had no interest in art and had never taken any courses in art. Also endowed with high intelligence, tenacity, curiosity, persistence of effort, energy, and enthusiasm, Officer Ryan has now become a creative genius. Individuals with this type of so-called brain deficiency exhibit exuberant confidence as national leaders and religious figures.
Matched with guile and charm, such persons are often the rare individuals who are gifted with charisma. The charismatic individual is able to transform nations or create religious movements by playing to our social nature. He or she uses our innate yearning for certainty in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity to lure us into unreflecting submissiveness to his or her dictates.
Charles Darwin was aloof, obsessive-compulsive, and a hypochondriac. Nikola Tesla was often mentally compromised, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart suffered from mood swings. Albert Einstein was an aloof man who mistreated his second wife Elsa who was also his cousin.
He gave away his illegitimate daughter, sight unseen, although on the surface he displayed social affability and charm. More recently, Steve Jobs, a very intense, compulsive genius, exhibited signs of cyclothymia. Yet, under oath, he swore impotence and sterility to avoid the obligations to his illegitimate daughter. And the list goes on and on. Winston Churchill had periodic dark moods, Theodore Roosevelt had mood oscillations, and the often melancholy and otherworldly Abraham Lincoln and Alexander the Great were seized by demonic fits.
Creative individuals share a similar lopsided temperament with other individuals who are vulnerable to major mental disorders. Although deficient in social algorithms, this releases enormous brain power that enables these unencumbered individuals to excel in creative activities. Individuals also endowed with high intelligence, curiosity, persistence of effort, tenacity, energy, and enthusiasm are able to reach heightened levels of creativity in art, science, and politics.
The readily observable phenomena discussed here provide promising leads for future studies in molecular genetics and evolutionary biology, which will bring us closer to understanding the origin of temperament and its variability. Most important, further studies may identify temperamental clusters that increase the risk of a major mental disorder.
Acknowledgment- I am grateful to my daughter, Nicole, for helping me edit and organize the content for this article. Dr Pediaditakis practices psychiatry full-time, consults, and writes articles and poetry. He raises Black Angus cattle as a hobby. He reports no conflicts of interest concerning the subject matter of this article. However, intelligence has drawbacks too. For example, studies have found that higher IQ is associated with more drug use and earlier drug use.
Studies have also found that higher IQ is associated with more mental illness, including depression , anxiety , and bipolar disorder. One large study led by Ruth Karpinski of Pitzer College surveyed more than members of Mensa , a society whose members must have an IQ in the top two percent, which is typically about or higher.
The team asked about many factors, including mental health. They discovered that mood disorders and anxiety disorders were extremely common among Mensa members. Among the general population, about 10 percent of people have mood disorders and about 10 percent of people have some anxiety disorder, with some degree of overlap between the two.
Among Mensa members, those percentages were much higher. About 20 percent reported having been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and nearly 27 percent had been diagnosed with a mood disorder such as major depression or bipolar disorder. Learn More. This paper proposes to analyse the relationships between depression and high intellectual potential through a multidisciplinary and original approach. Based on their respective experience in psychology and child psychiatry, the authors will focus their analysis on creative potential.
Aristotle introduced a quantitative factor, asserting that levels of melancholy and black bile are positively correlated; however, under a given threshold of black bile, it can give rise to an exceptional being. Second, the case study of Blaise Pascal scientific and philosophical creativity associated with major depressive episodes from childhood will be presented and discussed.
This case study sheds light on the paradoxical role of depression in the overinvestment in intellectual and creative spheres as well as on the impact of traumatic events on high intellectual potential.
Third, observations will be reported based on a study conducted on children with high intellectual potential 6—12 years old. Finally, based on these different levels of analysis, it appears that heterogeneity of mental functioning in children with high intellectual potential is at the center of the creative process and it has related psychological vulnerability.
Childhood depression is still a relatively taboo subject in clinical practice, its existence long denied by parents and professionals alike. High intellectual potential is another, idealizing measure leading to both resistance and fascination.
Whereas childhood depression is now recognized as a distinct pathopsychological entity, its descriptions are many and various, changing with each new classification and epistemology.
As for high intellectual potential, although a consensus has been reached over its psychometric definition—an intelligence quotient IQ above , according to the criterion of the World Health Organization WHO —different conceptions continue to exist, depending on the intellectual, developmental, cognitive, factorial, or dimensional model to which one refers.
Paradoxically, studies of high potential often focus on young people attending special clinics and who are therefore subject to psychological problems, even though a large proportion of such children seemingly experience no particular difficulties.
This introduces a definite research bias and means that there is little empirical research conducted on the latter population [ 1 ]. For this reason, in our own research on high potential, we have been comparing a group of children referred to the National Center for children with high intellectual potential CNAHP; coordinated by S.
Each group currently comprises around 50 children i. It should be noted that just because a child has never been referred to a specialist does not mean that he or she has no psychological problems. This article is based on the general data we have collected from our samples so far and on what we know about Blaise Pascal. We explore the implicit link drawn between depression and high potential both longitudinally from antiquity to the present day and transversally looking at the various parallels and interactions that can be established between these two entities.
We cannot regard depression as a manifestation of high potential without immediately evoking the opposite hypothesis whereby high potential is a defensive?
According to Tordjman [ 2 ] high potential may be either the cause or the consequence of psychopathological disorders. In the case of children with high potential with problems, two questions spring to mind:. Or is it the other way round, with disturbed socio-affective development resulting in cognitive overinvestment? It may well be that early social interaction deficits lead children to become socially isolated which, in turn, triggers intellectual hypercathexis. This may lead to the feelings of persecution that are exhibited by many children with high potential in situations of exclusion or victimization.
It is difficult to disentangle the respective contributions of cognitive and affective factors to the development and expression of high intellectual potential, not least because these two aspects may start to feed into each other over time, creating a veritable vicious circle. We therefore highlight the reciprocal incidences of high potential and depression, describing the characteristics of the underlying defensive organization in accordance with the psychodynamic model of child development: impulse—reaction formation defense mechanisms —character formation sublimation.
Above and beyond the extreme or overdeveloped nature of certain aptitudes and certain components of these children's psychological organization, we underscore the heterogeneity of their mental functioning, in terms of excess and deficit, pressure and depression. A link between depressive disorders and literary, artistic, or scientific genius has been drawn since Antiquity. From the very outset, melancholy was assumed to draw its sustenance from the finitude and distress inherent to the human condition, and fuel thinking and philosophizing on the existential enigmas of humanity.
In more recent times, Freud and his successors showed that thinking and fantasizing stem from real and imagined losses. When we move from one developmental stage to the next, we have to relinquish the previous mode of satisfaction, in what is an entirely normal depressogenic process. This means that certain periods in normal child development, such as early childhood and adolescence, are characterized by particularly acute vulnerability.
As a result, psychopathological studies of depression have tended to focus on infants and adolescents, to the detriment of children. We believe that this heterogeneity, which we have also identified in children with high potential, lies at the heart of the creative process and its relased psychological vulnerability.
We reject the hypothesis that such children suffer from affective immaturity, pointing instead to tensions within their mental apparatus:. While it sometimes signals a cognitive dysfunction, more often than not, it masks a heterogeneity inherent to the development of high-level intelligence. Aristotle discusses two points which seem just as relevant as ever, namely, the particularly reactive constitution of exceptional individuals and the manner in which their basic receptivity is triggered by external and internal stimuli.
Providing it does not exceed a given concentration, however, this black bile will give rise to an exceptional being. Alongside this lability of identification, Aristotle appears to describe a sort of intellectual hyperactivity, insofar as genius and melancholy become exponential.
The extreme and often disharmonious conduct of children with high potential, and the way in which they seek refuge from depression in intellectualization or sublimation, is all too clearly foregrounded in this seminal text.
Current theories of trauma stemming from excess or deficitfactors which some authors, such as Jean Bergeret [ 9 ], have linked to depression in so-called borderline personality disorder can be traced back to the ideas developed by Aristotle and discussed at the start of this paper. The second stage consists of the sexualization of the first traumatic stage, and may take different forms in different patients […, this I have named the hot nucleus.
This excitability potentially opens up breaches that can become traumatic places, but which are necessary if individuals are to be even minimally receptive to relationships, to the world and indeed to their own selves. These two perspectives are not as diametrically opposed as one might think and apply not just to trauma, but to the whole of clinical psycho-pathopsychology, as well as to the various depressive disorders.
For affects, too, have a history, with anxiety anticipating a disquieting future and depression arising from the loss of a previous satisfaction. Still on the subject of history, Golse [ 11 ] argues that since the fifties, we have witnessed a shift from an orificial psychoanalysis, interested in orifices i.
This brings us to Blaise Pascal, as we know that he enjoyed a passionate and possibly even incestuous relationship with his sister, after losing his mother at an early age. Blaise's childhood prefigured a destiny of excess and lack. Pascal's biographers report that he was saved from the cold hand of death by a scalding poultice applied by a bonesetter.
Pascal's scientific and philosophical thinking was antitraumatic, in that he worked on the very subjects that caused him anxiety and uncertainty, namely, emptiness, probability, and the transformation of liquids, solids, and gases which, according to Anzieu [ 5 ], correspond to the urine, flatulence, and excrement that flow uncontrolled and uncontrollable from the body of a tiny child.
We can speculate that the young Blaise had a constitutional hyperreactivity that rendered him particularly receptive, with the result that normal situations, such as the loving relationship between his parents, became wounding ones to him. If that was the case, we can easily imagine the impact of his mother's death when he was just three years old. As Bailly [ 13 ] has written:. He babbles, but she does not come. He cries, but she does not come. He screams, but she does not come. She no longer comes.
She will never come again. According to Bailly this type of traumatic loss questions sometimes even damages infantile sexual theories. However, these theories can also be intensified by the omnipotence of thought. From a very early age, Pascal displayed true scientific and philosophical genius. A precocious mathematician, he developed the theory of probability, which he later applied to his metaphysical concerns about the existence of God, in his famous Wager.
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