Patients with Bipolar Disorder More Creative; Creativity Associated with Worse Functional Connectivity of Brain Regions
While bipolar disorder can be a devastating illness, multiple studies indicate it is also associated with high levels of creativity. Researchers T. Su and Y. Kuan compared highly creative and normally creative patients with bipolar disorder to healthy controls with either normal or high creativity in the hopes of clarifying some characteristics of creativity in bipolar disorder. At the 2014 meeting of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, the researchers reported finding greater creativity in patients with bipolar disorder compared to normal controls, and that high creativity was associated with altered functional connectivity of two regions of the brain: the medial prefrontal cortex and the striatum.
The researchers hope to contribute to treatment solutions that can help patients with bipolar disorder reduce their emotional disturbance without losing their more positive cognitive functions like creativity.
Editor’s Note: Benson et al. found that compared to normal controls, bipolar patients had more positive hyperconnectivity of many brain regions using positron emission tomography (PET) scans with fludeoxyglucose to measure brain activity. Su and Kuan used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found less connectivity of these two regions. How these differences relate to bipolar disorder and its links to creativity remain to be further studied.
