Creative Or Defective?

At the IONS international conference in September 2003, the Institute's research department conducted a pilot survey exploring relationships among:

• bodily sensitivities
• creative expression
• transformational practices 
• transpersonal experiences

From 500 returned questionnaires, we were able to determine predictors of transpersonal experience. By "transpersonal" I mean a broad brush of numinous experiences, everything from telepathy to encounters with angels or UFOs.

We found that people are likely to have experienced some aspect of the transpersonal if they're:

• (a) feeling types (as compared to thinking types)
• (b) practice one or more of the creative arts
• (c) engage in some form of mental discipline (like meditation)
• (d) are open to unconventional claims
• (e) are interested in possibilities more than facts

These factors resemble creative personalities in general, suggesting that the perceptions & experiences of the highly creative minority differ - sometimes dramatically - from the experiences & resulting worldviews & belief systems of the less creative majority.

Creative perceptions can be challenging to conventional minds. Indeed, from an orthodox perspective, creativity gone wild is synonymous with madness. For many academic psychologists, the public's persistent belief in the paranormal, i.e., is explained by one of 3 hypotheses:

• ignorance
• defect
• &/or deprivation

The "ignorance hypothesis" asserts that people believe in the paranormal because they're uneducated or stupid. The "deficiency hypothesis" asserts that such beliefs arise because people are mentally defective in some way, ranging from low intelligence or poor critical thinking ability to full-blown psychosis.

The "deprivation hypothesis" proposes that these beliefs exist to provide a way to cope in the face of psychological uncertainties & physical stressors.

Studies conducted to examine these hypotheses have produced mixed results. Some authors claim that their results show that paranormal beliefs do indeed provide a feeling of control over life's uncertainties, but that such control comes with a high price:

• the tendency toward dissociative experiences
• anxiety
• more serious psychopathologies

Other investigators report complex relationships between personality factors such as extraversion & beliefs about precognition.

Still others have examined traditional beliefs about the so-called "religious paranormal" (miracles as described in religious doctrine) vs. the "secular paranormal" (telepathy or UFOs) & found no support for any of the traditional explanations.

There have even been studies of belief & reported paranormal experiences among psychotic populations (both manic-depressives & schizophrenics) & healthy people. Again, no clear picture has emerged from these studies.

So perhaps there's another, simpler reason for the persistent belief in the paranormal: Maybe some of those experiences are real. And maybe the reason that creative people report higher levels of belief in the paranormal is that they see things that others don't.

A recent experiment supports this idea. In 2003, Harvard Univ. psychologists Shelley Carson & Daniel Higgins & Univ. of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson, published an interesting study in Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.

They examined a property known as latent inhibition, which refers to an unconscious process that degrades our future ability - & possibly our need - to pay attention to stimuli that have had no consequences in the past.

Imagine, i.e., that Pavlov's dogs were exposed to ringing bells without being fed. The dogs will quickly learn to ignore ringing bells, because the sounds have no meaningful consequence (no association with food).

Pavlov then decides to train his dogs to salivate whenever they hear a bell by ringing those same bells & then feeding them. Unfortunately, these dogs have already learned to ignore bells, so they're going to have a very hard time learning that there is now a meaningful association between bells & food.

Dogs that hadn't previously heard the irrelevant bells will quickly learn to salivate.

Latent inhibition serves an important perceptual function in our brains. It allows us to talk on a phone, sip coffee & drive a car on a busy highway, all at the same time & without a second thought. If we hadn't previously learned what is worth paying attention to while driving, we'd quickly become overwhelmed with information & paralyzed with uncertainty.

Latent inhibition is robust in healthy people, but when it goes wrong it can lead to serious problems. It's been studied extensively in schizophrenic patients because a key symptom of that disease is perceiving meaningful relationships everywhere, even when there aren't any.

Distorted associations are associated with low latent inhibition because it reveals that the mind is having trouble ignoring irrelevant information. The 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind, about the life of Nobel Laureate John Nash, suggested how this might appear from a first-person perspective. The tagline for the movie was "He saw the world in a way no one could have imagined."

That line is also a good description of creative people in general, so perhaps they, too, exhibit low latent inhibition. Previous experiments have indeed shown that low latent inhibition is associated with the personality trait "open to experience," which is in turn associated with divergent thinking & creativity.

But not all creative people are, or become, psychotic. Carson, Higgins & Peterson proposed that "some psychological phenomena might be pathogenic in the presence of decreased intelligence . . . but normative or even abnormally useful in the presence of increased intelligence."

They tested this idea on Harvard undergraduates who were given creativity measures, IQ tests, personality tests & a latent inhibition test.

They found that the high-creativity group had significantly lower latent inhibition scores than the low-creativity group & that the most eminently creative achievers (a subset of students who had published a novel, patented an invention & so on) had both lower latent inhibition & higher IQ scores compared to the other students.

Their finding supports the well-known association between genius & madness. Highly creative people have greater access no more of what the world presents; high intelligence helps one successfully navigate thru this flood of perceptions.

Low intelligence struggles in vain & the result may lead to psychosis. And even with high intelligence there is always the risk of becoming overwhelmed by a persistent state of expanded perception.

From this perspective, it's easier to understand why creative people report more psychic experiences & why the paranormal is often associated with psychopathology.

People who believe in the transpersonal aren't necessarily ignorant, mentally deficient, or deprived. They just see farther into the depths of the world than "normal" people do.

Of course, for the sake of mental health, the trick for every creative person is learning how to peer comfortably into that abyss without becoming swallowed up by it.

DEAN RADIN, Ph.D. is IONS' Senior Scientist. Dr. Radin earned a Masters degree in electrical engineering & a Ph.D. in psychology from the Univ. of Illinois, Champaign. He has held research appointments at Princeton Univ., Edinburgh Univ., Univ.of Nevada, and several Silicon Valley industrial research labs, where he has conducted basic research on exceptional human capacities, including psychic phenomena. His books include The Conscious Universe & the upcoming Entangled Minds. Dean's website: www.deanradin.com

3 Steps To True Happiness - by Norm Ephraim

Let’s face it.  We all want to be happy. And we all realize, sooner or later, that outer success doesn't  produce lasting happiness. So what does? 

Loving ourselves & loving others.   In fact, we can only love others authentically when we're loving ourselves. So why is it that some people seem to feel self love easily, while others spend their lives searching in relationships or career accomplishments to find it?

While it may seem a cliche,  the answer does seem to point to experiences in childhood. What we know as self esteem begins, originally, in the esteem parents have for their children. 

Thru the simplest acts of touch, attention to feelings & guidance toward accomplishment, a child comes to see their own worth reflected in their parents’eyes.  They see themselves as loveable, i.e. worthy & able to be loved.

When thru various forms of abuse & neglect a child fails to get this mirror of love, two things happen. 

First the child begins to take in the feeling of defectiveness or un-loveability. Since, to a child, a parent is God, parental abuse & neglect (including insensitivity to feelings) is experienced as totally justified. 

“If mommy or daddy treats me this way, it must be my fault?

A 2nd thing also happens. Children are masters at devising  strategies to get love or prevent abandonment. A common ”protective strategy" is perfectionism. 

“If I’m perfect, then mommy or daddy will love me? 

The search for perfection can become a lifetime one, whethere it be for the perfect partner, the perfect accomplishment, or the perfect amusement or “high?   But the result will always be disappointing.  Nothing can replace self love.

Is there hope for those who didn’t get enough love in childhood?  The answer is a resounding yes!!  But like anything worthwhile, it takes effort.  The key is in the way we experience our memories of parenting. 

Rather than being simply static memories from childhood, each of us carries within our mind an “inner parent" a voice which talks to us much as our parents did. 

If our parenting was primarily supportive, our self talk will be so also.  If our parenting was primarily negative, we'll tend to to be self critical much of the time. Some of this self criticism will be a simple replay of what we heard. 

More often, though, a child criticizes themselves to protect their relationship with parents. In this fact lies both the source of much of our distress & the seeds of our renewal.

Once we realize that people with high self esteem talk lovingly to themselves - especially when under stress & those with low self esteem are self critical, we create for ourselves a pathway to change. 

The goal becomes changing the way we talk to ourselves. There are 3 steps to changing our self talk.

It’s amazing how differently we can talk to ourselves at different times.  If we’re having a good day, our mind often reflects this in positive thoughts.

Often, at such times, our mind can be very quiet & peaceful. Contrast this with times we’re under stress or after experieincing some disappointment. At those times our mind can be quite negative & quite “busy."

In my experience, when our mind is full of anxiety & general static, we're often re-experiencing a “child state of mind."  In essence, a negative life event has sent us shuttling back in time to experience younger feelings. Once we can recognize how we’ve gone from feeling expansive & adult to insecure & childlike we have an amazing gift. 

We can feel compassion.

2. Compassion:

Whenever we shift into an insecure child state of mind (we all do at times), we each “go home" to specific inner experiences of support, abuse, or neglect.  Depending on our particular childhood, we will be able to generate self love & self care at such times, or not. 

But wherever happens, it’s not our fault.  This fact is crucial. Once we recognize that it’s only by the luck of the draw that we go home, in our minds, to inner parental support, we become more empathic. We can feel love for ourselves & our particular story. 

From that compassion we can truly take better care of ourselves. We can undertake authentic adult action.

3. Authentic Adult Action

In a child state of mind, we often feel passive & helpless. Our self talk includes either anxious statements like:

• "I’ll never be good enough" 
• "I can’t do it"
• “If only" 

or self critical ones:

• “snap out of it"
• "grow up"
• “stop making a mountain out of a molehill"

Once we recognize that we’re in a child state & have compassion to our unique childhood experience, we need to actively assert our adult energies. Authentic adult actions are those which help us shift us out of a child state  to a more expansive & adult sense of ourselves.

Simply put, authentic adult action involves greater self care.  Sometimes this involves just accepting our current feelings as a reflection of  earlier childhood experience. At other times, it includes actively taking better care of needs. Whether it be preparing a nice meal for ourselves or calling up a friend, authentic adult action is, in essence, being like a “positive self parent."

Often, too, authentic adult action involves challenging our stream of negative self talk. This is much easier to do when we realize that we’re in a child state of mind. For instance,whenever we’re having catastrophic “what if" thoughts about the future, we can become more relaxed if we recognize that our thinking may be more  that of a young child than a full adult. This can give us compassion & often,  a humorous perspective.

These 3 steps of awareness, compassion & authentic adult actions are, I believe,  the keys to greater self love & greater happiness.