Sylvia Nasar, the biographer of the late John Nash, has often said the Nobel-winning economist did not “will” himself out of schizophrenia, but instead “aged out” of the devastating mental illness. Research confirms that a small percentage of people diagnosed with schizophrenia can experience remissions, or at least diminishment in what are called the “positive” or active symptoms of schizophrenia – hallucinations, paranoia, delusions. (Negative symptoms include social withdrawal, flat affect and problems with motivation.)
But while Nash, who was killed in a car accident Saturday along with his wife, Alicia, may have experienced relief from the more debilitating aspects of schizophrenia in later life, his greatest mathematical achievements occurred at an age when he was also the most mentally ill. Few people, including Nash, can function at a high level in the throes of psychosis, but was there a connection between Nash’s breakthrough mathematical insights and his schizophrenia?
I believe John Nash was able to conquer his mathematics with his breakthrough by being ill when he figured it out…profound thinking while ill seems logical.
Why do you rarely hear about schizophrenics who have achieved success in the arts? After all there’s millions of us. If we are so creative why do you never have world-famous artists, musical or otherwise, who suffer from schizophrenia? A schizophrenic who makes it big is the exception rather than the rule. There’s not many schizophrenics who make it to Nash’s or Saks level. And even Van Gogh was not even famous or successful in his own time.
It’s impossible to say. I sometimes wonder about the link between some types of drug use and creativity. Ken Kesey did a lot of acid, and he wrote two dynamite novels. However, he might have written twenty great novels if he hadn’t done acid. Poe and Coleridge both did opium, and a person can really see its influence in their work. However, the way they describe opium withdrawal, no amount of literary prowess could be worth that. They wrote about living a hundred years in a single night, and long, wet kisses from crocodiles. Nothing could be worth that.
A symptom that has been observed in schizophrenia is the inability to grasp and/or conform to the tacit rules of social interaction. Some high functioning schizophrenics will be able to formulate such tacit rules of interaction explicitly from observation of others. I think it is similar to high-functioning autists who have an explicit Theory of Mind. I suppose that if you had a formal training you could formalize such explicit rules and think through the game-theoretical model.
Schizophrenia need not compromise your ability to think logically about abstract matters. I noticed this myself as I was doing courses in formal logic when I first became psychotic, and my grades did not seem to drop. Also, there has been research that shows schizophrenics may even outperform neurotypicals on specific syllogistic reasoning tasks. It makes me wonder to what extent reasoning deficits can be held responsible for e.g. delusions.