The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [67]
So we might consider the ACC as the Where’s Waldo? Detection Device. But what has that got to do with creativity and madness? “If you think of noticing patterns, a person with schizophrenia picks up on ridiculous patterns and draws conclusions based on them,” Kuszewski continued. “For example, a stranger across the room looked at you, then made a phone call, and then looked at you again, therefore the false conclusion is that the person is stalking you, and was calling conspirators to come and hunt you down.”
Right, that’s what we call conspiratorial thinking, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, so how can we tell the difference?
“Schizophrenics who are delusional see patterns like this all the time and think they are relevant. Their PFC and their ACC are not functioning to weed out the unlikely patterns, but instead see all patterns and give them equal weight for relevance.”19 In a way, there’s a fine line between the creative genius of finding novel patterns that change the world and the madness or paranoia of seeing patterns everywhere and being unable to pick out the important ones. “A person who is successfully creative will see many patterns also (because creative people have an overinclusive thinking style) but will have a superior functioning PFC and ACC that tell him which patterns make no sense, and which ones are useful, relevant, yet original ideas,” Kuszewski concluded.
An instructive example would be a comparison between the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, who did top-secret government work on the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb (and whose quirkiness extended no further than playing bongo drums, sketching nudes, and cracking safes), and the Nobel Prize–winning mathematician John Nash, who was diagnosed schizophrenic and portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind as a man struggling with paranoid delusions about top-secret government work on a code-breaking project to detect enemy information patterns. Both Feynman and Nash were creative geniuses who made novel discoveries of unique patterns worthy of a Nobel Prize—Feynman in quantum physics and Nash in game theory—but Nash’s cognitive style was all inclusive. He saw patterns everywhere, including complex conspiracies with nonexistent government agents and no basis in reality.
Someone in between Feynman and Nash on the patternicity scale is the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist Kary Mullis, the scientist behind the development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the idea for which he says came to him late one night when he was driving through the mountains of northern California: “Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. I had to arrange a series of chemical reactions, the result of which would represent and display the sequence of a stretch of DNA. The odds were long. Like reading a particular license plate out on Interstate 5 at night from the moon.”20 Mullis’s insight was that he could use a pair of chemical primers to bracket a desired DNA sequence and copy it using DNA polymerase, which would make it possible for a small strand of DNA to be copied an almost infinite number of times. By most accounts Mullis is a creative genius who loves to surf. He has an eccentric zeal for California counterculture with its propensity for artificially altering one’s states of consciousness. His work has revolutionized biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, medicine, and even forensics—those cheek-swab tests for DNA that you see on various crime television shows, for example, use the