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This is not to say that the dominance (however slight) of one hemisphere over the other is good or bad. It depends on the task. Creativity in all fields (art, music, literature, and even science), for example, appears to be related to right-brain dominance, and this makes sense given that the ability to find new and interesting patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise is what creativity is all about. Were we only logic machines churning out products that were the result of strictly defined cognitive algorithms, nothing new would ever be created or discovered. At some point we must think outside the box and connect the dots into new patterns. Of course, the rub is in striking the right balance between finding a few new and interesting patterns within the background noise and finding nothing but patterns and leaving no noise. Perhaps this is the difference between creativity and madness.

Patternicity, Creativity, and Madness

In a sense, creativity involves a process of patternicity, of finding novel patterns and generating original products or ideas from them. Of course, the products or ideas must be useful or appropriate for a given context or environment for us to label them as creative, or else every amateur scientist and American Idol contestant would be indistinguishable from Einstein or Mozart. The connection between patternicity, creativity, and madness comes from a thinking style that is too all inclusive and that indiscriminately sees patterns everywhere. “When I was investigating the neuroscience of creativity,” the clinical psychologist Andrea Marie Kuszewski explained, “one of the things I came across was the trait of ‘lack of latent inhibition,’ or as Hans Eysenck described it, an ‘all-inclusive thinking style.’ People on the schizophrenic spectrum tend to have an all-inclusive thinking style, which means they see patterns where no meaningful patterns exist, and cannot tell the difference between a meaningful or a non-meaningful pattern.”16

This is, in fact, what was found by Max Planck Institute cognitive neuroscientist Anna Abraham and her colleagues, in a 2005 study designed to explore the link between creativity and a personality trait called psychoticism, one of three traits that the psychologist Hans Eysenck included in his P-E-N model of personality (the other two being extraversion and neuroticism). Eysenck was the first to suggest a possible correlation of psychoticism with creativity, and that too much of it can lead to psychoses and schizophrenia because of its characteristic “overinclusive cognitive style,” which can lead to seeing patterns where none exist. We might think of this as patternicity on steroids. Abraham explored two dimensions of personality in eighty healthy subjects: the originality/novelty dimension and the practicality/usefulness dimension. She and her colleagues predicted that “higher levels of psychoticism would accompany a greater degree of conceptual expansion and elevated levels of originality in creative imagery, but would be unrelated to the practicality/usefulness of an idea.” This is indeed what they found. Subjects with higher levels of psychoticism were more creative but in less practical ways, and Abraham and her colleagues concluded that this was due to their capacity for “associative thinking” (finding associations between random things) instead of “goal-related thinking.”17 That is, finding new and useful patterns is good, finding new patterns everywhere and being unable to discriminate between them is bad.

The next step in the causal chain to understanding patternicity and false pattern detection is to determine where in the brain this would happen. “People like this tend to have a prefrontal cortex (PFC) that does not process dopamine properly (the PFC is the area of cognitive control),” Kuszewski hypothesized, “and also have a less than optimally functioning anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This area is activated when given options between multiple