Two Minds Blog

  Wheat Field with Crows, V. Van Gogh (Auvers-sur-Oise, July 1890). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam I have written several posts about creativity ( here , here , and here ), all of which touched briefly on the common belief that great creative works are often products of a disturbed mind. In this post I will explore the idea in greater detail. Vincent Van Gogh is often cited as the exemplar of this linkage -- the painting above is one of his last. It conveys a certain eerie or threatening quality despite its beauty, and it was painted in the same month that he died by suicide at the age of 37. That was about a year and a half after the well-known incident where Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear and sent it to a cleaning girl at a brothel that he often visited, which resulted in his temporary institutionalization at a French asylum. Clearly Van Gogh was not mentally well. The supposed linkage of genius and madness, however, suggests that his mental illness was directly related to the...

In previous posts I have described Roy Baumeister's glucose theory of self-control , and how glucose depletion might explain the " Mardi Gras effect " in which a little bit of self-indulgence now might make it easier to resist temptation later on. But Baumeister also offer some advice on how to develop willpower so that we become less vulnerable to self-regulatory failures. Essentially, Baumeister views willpower as just one more skill that people can develop through intentional practice . People who have worked to build the skill may become less glucose-depleted in a situation that would challenge their peers, and therefore may be able to resist temptation longer and with reduced consequences for their mental state. Baumeister talks about the example of David Blaine, a British performance artist who specializes in feats of endurance. For example, Blaine once stood on an 80-foot pillar in New York's Central Park for 35 hours without sleep. On another occasion, Blaine...

Image: Young Mozart Giving a Recital, H. Pihnnero (19th century)   When I was young, everyone considered me to be "good at math." What do we mean when we use that phrase? It implies a certain innate ability, one that most people can't achieve. I had classmates who were told that they succeeded only by "working hard" at math, while for me the ability was supposedly inborn. My daughter Ruth is also good at math. At this point she has taken more of it than I ever did, she helps others with their math and physics homework at a tutoring center, and she is studying to be an engineer. She never had the stellar test scores that I did in high school, though, in part because it takes her a little longer to work through the problems on a timed test. Does this mean she isn't really "good" at the subject? I think not: On a recent construction project, I deferred to her better-informed calculations. As a culture we subscribe to the myth of genius : the idea of a...