Recently the Benchmark Reporter covered a new Scandinavian study, published in Nature Neuroscience, which shows a genetic link between creativity and psychiatric disorders.

The results of the study revealed that people belonging from these artistic societies had 17% more chances of variants connected with mental health conditions compared to general people.

Study author Kari Stefansson, the founder and CEO of deCODE, a genomic analysis company, stated, “The results of this study should not have come as a surprise, because to be creative, you have to think differently from the crowd. And we had previously shown that carriers of genetic factors that predispose to schizophrenia do so.”

Of course this study was not the first to explore the subject, as there have been many others. One notable contributor would be Nancy C. Andreasen, a leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity and the origin of genius and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

For more on the subject, check out “Secrets of the Creative Brain” by Nancy C. Andreasen or learn more about the Scandinavian study here. For a correlation between creativity and boredom watch this video.

Image via Benchmark Reporter | Video is a preview of a PBS News Hour segment about Nancy Andreasen via The Atlantic