I really enjoyed Dr. Simonton’s lecture and the breakfast meeting Thursday morning. He has a great deal of information to share and relates conplex ideas in a very simple way. I am glad we had a chance to visit before the lecture and discuss some of his views, especially those relating to the topic of creativity.
There were two items in this lecture that caught my attention, “head scratchers” if you will. First, Dr. Simonton shared an expansive list of details as what qualifies as a hard or soft science, outlining both positive and negative indicators as well as specific characteristics, such as peer evaluation consensus, citation concentration, anticipation frequency, to name just a few. When he extrapolated this into the arts and humanities, he only mentioned two specific characteristics: obsolescence and lecture disfluency. Could this reduction/inequality in measurement criteria affect the outcome of this study?
The other issue that kept returning to my thoughts is on the topic of madness. Dr. Simonton suggests in his lecture that there is an increased occurrence of mental illness in the arts and humanities, especially among writers, and this is supported by statistical data. He he has also observed a higher level of “turbulence” (broken homes, parental death, instability, etc.) is typical in the backgrounds of those arts and humanities practitioners. The occurrence of madness seems more related to the background of the individual than to the creativity level, and I wonder if a broader study of a population (beyond the bounds of disciplinary placement) would demonstrate a similar statistical disposition for mental illness for those individuals from “turbulent” backgrounds as those from the arts and humanities shows in the focused study. Are these correlations proof enough? If we tested creators from stable homes, would they also have a higher level of mental illness than those scientists from stable homes?
As a writer, this makes me think. Of course, it’s too late for me in either case.