I recently went to an exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s paintings at Tate Britain. Sargent was a portraitist famous not only for his ability to capture the essence of his sitters but also of the lavish Edwardian silks and velvets they wore. When you look at a Sargent close up you see a simple abstract pattern created by bold brush strokes and thick oil paint, sometimes even impasto. But, when you step back, these marks translate into the light and shade of folds in diaphanous voile and shining taffeta, so realistic you want to touch them.

Sargent chose the garments his subjects wore and posed them to show off the play of light to best effect. Some of them are still in existence and they are displayed in the exhibition alongside the relevant works. What immediately struck me is how much less interesting these dresses are than the painted ones. The painted ones seem somehow more real, and looking at them gives you an intense feeling of pleasure and reward you simply don’t get from the actual costumes.

Sargent is painting what he sees, not what he knows to be there – not the filtered and condensed version his – and your and my - brain has created for the practical purpose of navigating the physical world. And in doing this, he has enabled us to to see the subject afresh, to notice the different shades of cream and brown, the shadows produced by the intricate pleats in the fine fabric of a white dress. He has changed the way we see things – given us a new perceptual model.

Vision

‘To see a world in a grain of sand                                                                              ‘I like to have a martini
And heaven in a wild flower                                                                                       Two at the very most.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand                                                                   After three I’m under the table,
And Eternity in an hour’                                                                                            After four I’m under my host’

          William Blake                                                                                                                Dorothy Parker

This ability to step outside the orthodox way of seeing and thinking about things is the key characteristic of creative people. They trust their unconscious minds to take them outside the tramlines of conscious thought. Not only are they the masters of intuitive pattern recognition, they see links and correspondences the rest of us do not.

The ability to make such ‘creative leaps’ correlates with the characteristic that the personality psychometric, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, designates Intuition and the psychometric known as ‘the Big 5’, Openness to Experience. (I will explain more about the similarities, differences and uses of these models in a later article.)

The personality psychologist, Daniel Nettle, calls people high in Openness ‘poets’. He is thinking of poets’ fondness for metaphor, for illuminating one object by describing it as another, the abstract in terms of the concrete: a colleague as warm or cold, a life in terms of a journey with crossroads and wrong turns. Indeed, a study which asked participants to make a list of the associations that came to mind when they heard a certain word and mapped them by conceptual domain (the area of thought to which they normally applied} found that the associations made by the creative people in the sample ranged far wider. Nettle says:

‘It is as if the filters or membranes surrounding different areas of cognition are a little more permeable than normal, and the associations made consequently broader’.

Creative people notice things which the rest of us dismiss because they seem irrelevant to our usual ways of thinking. EEG observations of the brains of creatives show that when they are in a resting state the perceptual parts of their brains are much more active that those of their colleagues. This prompts their unconscious minds to construct new, more accurate and illuminating models of the world which accommodate these new factors, links and correspondences. (The downside of this is that they are easily distracted, and find it more difficult than other people to filter out the hubbub of a noisy office.)

It is this model-building process which produces the paradigm changes of science and the advances of technology: for example, the nineteenth century physician Dr John Snow’s realisation that cholera could not be caused by miasma because it is a digestive disease and his hypothesis that it was the result of ingesting contaminated water; or Sir Tim Berners Lee’s insight that the internal system of hyperlinks he had designed to allow CERN scientists to access each other’s electronic data was a model that could be scaled up to global level, and form a World Wide Web.

As we’ve seen, it’s also at work in the arts. New juxtapositions of ideas enable writers and playwrights to engage our attention and emotions, and enlarge our understanding and empathy. Like the visual arts, literature and drama can provide us with new perspectives often in a metaphorical way – by using a story to tell us something deeper. At a superficial level Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a romcom with elements of fantasy and farce about human interactions with fairies. But the story is a vehicle for insights into the unconscious mind and in particular the arbitrariness of erotic attraction. We laugh at the Dorothy Parker verse I quoted at the beginning of this article because it makes unexpected links which expose, in this case uncomfortable, truths – the essence of much wit.

I’m talking here of creative genius, but the creative people we work with every day share this ability to think afresh. They exhibit clear characteristics in the workplace – apart from the many ideas they produce. They relish complexity and seek it out. They trust their unconscious processes and find it easy to tolerate ambiguity – they see things not in black and white but in shades of grey. They are happy to play with ideas, but when they have identified what they believe is a good one, become highly invested in it, disciplined, single minded, tenacious in pursuing it, and unwilling to compromise it. And they take care to steep themselves in their raw materials, the vocabulary of their trade (one film producer I worked with had identified and watched every single romcom ever made before she embarked on her own.)

This particular cognitive style marks them out, but they also frequently have other characteristics in common. They are often Introverts and, in the arts though not the sciences, they frequently display some degree of Emotional Instability. You may remember the brain’s Default Mode – ‘Imagination’ network (DMN) – that we met in Article 6 on the creative process, and which flip flops with the Executive Network and comes on when the brain is resting and not concentrating on a task. This network is likely to be where new ideas are formed and studies have found that it is more efficient and better connected with the conscious mind in creative people.

This is also the case in people suffering from depressive disorders. Creativity is about imagining alternatives to the current way of seeing things – what one commentator calls ‘the adjacent possible’. The rumination which is associated with depression involves imagining the worst – about oneself and the future. If you are creative but also emotionally vulnerable then you are likely to be very good at imagining bad scenarios. And of course introverts live inside their heads anyway so are in close touch with the products of their unconscious minds.

Introversion

‘Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me – they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the best of them are artists. And artists work best alone…'
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder with Steve Jobs of Apple

Susan Cain’s book, Quiet, (perhaps top of my list of books I wish I had written) has revolutionised our collective view of Introverts. She points out that we live in a world designed for Extraverts. Though the numbers of Introverts and Extraverts in the population are roughly equal (certainly in the UK) our working conventions – meetings, presentations, brainstorms, lots of team interaction, open plan offices – are much more congenial to Extraverts.

Introverts, particularly Visionaries, are easily swamped by too much external stimulation. They need time to process things – to relate them to their rich internal landscapes - and don’t like being asked to react instantly in meetings. There may be quite a long pause before an Introvert answers your question (indeed, it’s probably best to email it and wait 24 hours for a response.)

They are also bad at sharing their thoughts. The MBTI literature contains a telling metaphor. When you talk to an Extravert, it suggests, you’re dealing directly with the CEO. But when you talk to an Introvert, you’re only communicating with the CEO’s PA: you don’t have access to all the important stuff going on in the inner office. The Introvert may believe that they have communicated the full richness of their inner vision when they’ve only given the bare bones, or they may feel reluctant to share it, and expose it to others who may not fully understand it or criticise it.

This is a real issue for creative people and those who work for them, and I’ve come across it a lot in my coaching practice. Sadiq, a screenwriter, said that if he was pitching an idea to an executive and they didn’t ‘get’ it, he just wanted to give up and leave and indeed had, on occasion, done so. Why should he expose something so precious to somebody who was obviously incapable of appreciating it? India graphically expressed how hostile she found the commercial environment when she said that pitching an idea she’d been working on to an executive felt like exposing something organic and soft and living (her pet kitten, perhaps) to something hard and sharp and angular, like a cheese grater. Something wonderful which she really cared about was being shredded and reduced to furry shards. These problems are exacerbated by the final characteristic which many creative people share.

A Degree of Emotional instability

'…He said: ‘Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’
Percy Bysshe Shelley

A number of contemporary writers, actors, comedians and musicians have been frank about their struggles with mental illness: the author and actor Stephen Fry, the actor and comedian Billy Connolly, the actor and writer, John Cleese, the actor and comedian, the late Robin Williams; musicians, the late George Michael and Robbie Williams; and there are many others.

In her book, Touched with Fire, the psychiatrist, Kay Redfield Jamison, herself a sufferer from bipolar disorder, examines the links between artistic creativity and all forms of mental illness from mild mood disorders to bipolar disorder, clinical depression and suicide. She analyses the diaries and life stories of writers and artists throughout history – Blake, Tennyson, Plath, Dickens, Woolf, Berlioz, Mahler, Van Gogh, Rothko are just a few - identifying the psychiatric disorders from which many of them suffered and the findings of current research on living writers and artists. Her conclusion is that, compared with the general population, artists are more than 10 times more likely than the general population to suffer from mild to serious depressive disorders.

Jamison’s work antedated recent research on the Default Mode Network, but she also suggests that psychiatric problems and creativity may be linked both through cognitive style and emotional makeup. It may be that the ‘manic’ phase of bipolar disorder facilitates the wide, flexible, rapid processing across boundaries which gives rise to novel ideas. Many artists have periods when they are full of creative energy and produce a stream of new work at great speed. The trance-like state of transient hypofrontality may also produce states of altered consciousness and transcendent experiences; the visions of William Blake are only one example of many.

Jamison suggests that depression gives creatives a rich perspective on life, and some creatives, like Shelley, have said explicitly that the mental pain they have experienced drives their need to create. Artists who have been to very dark places psychologically have something to say which resonates with us: they are equipped to take us to those places by proxy, enlarge our experience of life, help us to become more compassionate, or, if we too have been suffering, show us how to find some comfort. When they write about suffering, they’re also engaging in self -therapy. It’s cathartic: it gets the emotions ‘out’, and breathes in a bit of distance and objectivity. And work can be very soothing. The focus and discipline required still the rumination and weaken the grip of negative emotions. Creating something is redemptive; it satisfies the unconscious need for meaning: something good has come out of the suffering.

Research on the personality of comedians provides a fascinating insight into a specific instance of the soothing and redemptive power of work. A study of the personalities of actors and comedians found that comedians scored highly on two apparently contradictory dimensions, ‘introverted anhedonia’’ (unsociable depressive traits), and ‘impulsive non conformity’ (extraverted manic traits). The researchers suggest that this profile represents the personality equivalent of bipolar disorder, with the opposite traits being exhibited simultaneously rather than serially. They suggest that comedians may use their performances as a way to cope with their depressive thoughts.
The reasons why some of us have this emotional makeup – and many of us do to some extent – are a complex mix of nature and nurture, and I will examine them in more detail in my next article. But if you do have it, the challenges of working life are all the more difficult to deal with, both for you and your colleagues. You have a vulnerable ego which you must protect. Issues at work arouse anxiety and fear which trigger your fight or flight reaction, or, in the modern world, sensitivity to criticism, anger, defensiveness, inability to work, and at worst, depression, the ultimate protective withdrawal.

How to get the best from talented people who exhibit this trait, and how to survive if you are one, have been major themes of my coaching practice, and again I will return to these issues next time.

So, what lessons can we draw from this analysis?

If you work with creatives:

- Be aware that they may find it very difficult to share the full richness of their vision, and give them time and encouragement to do so: one of my producer clients saw herself as a midwife to a very talented scriptwriter, who would frequently produce a host of half-formed ideas, quite close to the start of filming.

- Because they are so invested in their work and emotionally vulnerable, creatives need affirmation and are acutely sensitivity to criticism – show how much you value them, and be careful how you frame your notes.

- As one of my producer clients said ‘as far as you can you need to protect your creative from everything else. You need to make a little bubble of encouragement and support and keep your creative in it’.

If you are a creative:

- Remember that your work has to be out there to be appreciated. Try to communicate your vision fully, be ready for some compromise, and try not to see feedback as a personal attack but an opportunity to learn and improve the work.

Sources

John Singer Sargent Lady Agnew of Lochnaw 1892

Daniel Nettle, Personality – what makes you the way you are, OUP, 2007

Roger E Beaty and Yoed N Kennett, Associative Thinking at the Core of Creativity, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, July 2023, Vol 27, No 7

Roger E Beaty, Matthias Benedek et al, Creativity and the Default Mode Network: a functional connectivity analysis of the creative brain at rest, Neuropsychologia, 2014.09.019

Roger E Beaty, Scott Barry Kaufman, Matias Benedek et al, Personality and Complex Brain Networks: the role of Openness to Experience in Default Network Efficiency

John Kounios and Mark Beeman, The Eureka Factor: Creative Insights and the Brain, Windmill Books, 2016

Adam M Perkins, Danilo Arnone et al, Thinking too much: self-generated thought as the engine of neuroticism, Trends in Cognitive Sciences xx (2015) 1-7

J Paul Hamilton, Madison Farmer et al, Depressive Rumination, The Default Mode Network, and the Dark Matter of Clinical Neuroscience, Biol Psychiatry 2015 Aug 15: 78(4): 224-230

Tina Chou et al, The Default Mode Network and rumination in individuals at risk for depression, Social and Cognitive Neuroscience, 2023, June 12

Steve Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, Allen Lane 2010

Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire – Manic depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Simon and Schuster, 1993

Victoria Ando, Gordon Claridge, and Ken Clark, Psychotic Traits in Comedians British Journal of Psychiatry, published online 16 January 2014