Well done! The information you've amassed here has convinced me to completely reverse a position I've argued for in the past. It's good to see the field continuing to progress over the years.
I do wonder if you could help me out by clarifying a couple of things, though:
> So, all in all, being a creative is correlated with higher IQ, but
> being a psychiatric patient is correlated with having a higher IQ!
Don't you mean to say that being a psychiatric patient is correlated with *lower* IQ?
> An interesting observation in this study was that authors are not
> like other artists. They really do suffer from all kinds of mental illnesses!
Can you elaborate on this? (The study is behind a paywall.)
Thanks for the comments! You I right, "higher IQ" should be "lower IQ", I corrected this! I also changed the second link to a scihub link so now you can read the full study. Apparently I had access to it due to an institutional thing but it was not open access.
It's probably worth reading the whole thing if you are interested in the author issue. Basically what they find is that authors are very special creatives who, unlike the others, suffer more frequently from all kinds of psychiatric problems. They have a short section (3.2) summarizing this, but they also flesh it out in Table 2. The pattern you want to look at is that in the first column for scientific and artistic occupations the numbers are <1 (scientists and artists have these illnesses LESS frequently), even if they are >1 in the other columns (family members of scientists and artists have these problems MORE frequently). But for authors, the numbers are usually >1 even in the first column, and often higher in column 1 than in the others, showing that authors are not only crazier in a general sense than the general population, but also more so than their own family members!
Well done! The information you've amassed here has convinced me to completely reverse a position I've argued for in the past. It's good to see the field continuing to progress over the years.
I do wonder if you could help me out by clarifying a couple of things, though:
> So, all in all, being a creative is correlated with higher IQ, but
> being a psychiatric patient is correlated with having a higher IQ!
Don't you mean to say that being a psychiatric patient is correlated with *lower* IQ?
> An interesting observation in this study was that authors are not
> like other artists. They really do suffer from all kinds of mental illnesses!
Can you elaborate on this? (The study is behind a paywall.)
Thanks for the comments! You I right, "higher IQ" should be "lower IQ", I corrected this! I also changed the second link to a scihub link so now you can read the full study. Apparently I had access to it due to an institutional thing but it was not open access.
It's probably worth reading the whole thing if you are interested in the author issue. Basically what they find is that authors are very special creatives who, unlike the others, suffer more frequently from all kinds of psychiatric problems. They have a short section (3.2) summarizing this, but they also flesh it out in Table 2. The pattern you want to look at is that in the first column for scientific and artistic occupations the numbers are <1 (scientists and artists have these illnesses LESS frequently), even if they are >1 in the other columns (family members of scientists and artists have these problems MORE frequently). But for authors, the numbers are usually >1 even in the first column, and often higher in column 1 than in the others, showing that authors are not only crazier in a general sense than the general population, but also more so than their own family members!
I've decided to take your word for it, as you seem pretty trustworthy, and my antivirus software tells me there's malware in those links.