tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post640524583944328049..comments2023-06-05T11:51:38.383-04:00Comments on Evolutionary Psychiatry: The Creative AdvantageAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04429177284200775781noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post-56830217512847494462011-06-27T12:20:16.474-04:002011-06-27T12:20:16.474-04:00Fascinating and we had a similar discussion along ...Fascinating and we had a similar discussion along these lines over at Art De Vany's forum.<br /><br />In my search to understand my recovery from bipolar (after becoming Paleo) I learned a lot about dopamine and the fact that it is thought humans became so dominant (and large brained) due to their ability to handle large(r) amounts of meat and fish which necessitated a bigger ability to process/tolerate dopamine.<br /><br />So, whizz forward several hundred thousand years and those with high function (high dopamine) creative etc individuals had a genetic advantage it has only been during the last few hundred years that these genotypes have been subjected to a diet that is far more insulinogenic and the knock on affect is the disruption to the dopamine pathways (via insulin/IGF1) causing many more occurrences of pathological presentation of what had been a group of individuals whose higher dopamine levels had until then conveyed an advantage.<br /><br />n=1 I've inherited my paternal Grandmother's bipolar aspects - she was an incredibly talented musician, my brother likewise, I probably could have been had the bipolar disruption not diverted my attention and my own daughter is probably the most talented musician of all of us!<br /><br />Now I'm 'recovered' as far as I can tell - no episodes for over a year even under duress - I'm enjoying learning to play the piano again with a much calmer persona and 'normal' focus.Cavegirlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02319318255360473712noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post-63015022008612192932011-06-25T20:34:16.275-04:002011-06-25T20:34:16.275-04:00"Psychotic thought is disjointed and disorgan..."Psychotic thought is disjointed and disorganized - creative thought is taking seemingly unrelated or unexpected ideas and bringing them together in a novel way." I might have to steal this line for a chapter I'm currently writing to contribute to an edited volume on the Neuroscience of Creativity!<br /><br />I think the point about genes needed the proper environmental conditions to express or fail to express themselves is one of the biggest overlooked ideas in modern medicine. I make the analogy in my classes to the following thought experiment. Imagine a group of individuals made up of children and adults who's weights vary from very light (a 35 lb 4-year-old) to very heavy (a 275 lb, 6'2 man). As the group walks together over a cement pavement, not one of them has any risk of falling through the pavement. As soon as they step onto a frozen lake, it is the heaviest individuals who have the greatest risk of falling through the ice. This analogy applies directly to the situation of the genetic variation present in a population and individual risk (due to gene variants) to disease susceptibility. In our ancestral environment (plenty of sunshine, activity and natural movement patterns, typically proper nutrition, occasional periods of fasting, good sleep, & etc.), even those individuals with the "riskiest" gene variants (e.g., cancer, dementia, psychopathology, autoimmune disease, CVD, etc.) are highly unlikely (though not impossible) to manifest these diseases. As soon as we adopted agriculture, and especially when we adopted an industrialized diet, we stepped off the pavement and onto thinning ice. The more industrially processed our diet becomes, the thinner the ice, and the higher the rates of expression of the risky variants in the population. I think this analogy carries a lot of weight in explaining why diseases can change in their rates of expression so rapidly and dramatically in only a few generations. More importantly, it holds the key on how to turn back the expression away from modern rates and to ancestral rates. That's what the paleo movement is in general, and is the major goal of the Ancestral Health Society!Aaron Blaisdellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17204484453346358921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post-20773456088829423952011-06-23T15:12:21.251-04:002011-06-23T15:12:21.251-04:00Yes, I've seen reports that urban kids are up ...Yes, I've seen reports that urban kids are up to 4 times as likely to develop schizophrenia - environment is definitely a big, big factor.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04429177284200775781noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post-53019122891562235222011-06-23T15:10:57.376-04:002011-06-23T15:10:57.376-04:00http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110622/full/474429...http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110622/full/474429a.html in the latest Nature. Says mental disorders get worse in big cities. Check that graph from a study from 2002. The risk of schizophrenia is twice as high in big cities.<br /> That might be the reason why the underlying genes for these traits have not been selected against historically -- the negative phenotype is only brought forward because the environment has changed!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post-54359432693806473852011-06-23T04:02:51.515-04:002011-06-23T04:02:51.515-04:00An interesting post. There is a lot of speculation...An interesting post. There is a lot of speculation (and it is just that) at the moment about autism and its 'association' with parental systemiser cognitive styles over empathising. That is, the more technical career patterns like those of engineering and IT and maths and statistics potentially being allied to the 'spirit' of some of the traits seen in autism (attention to detail, obsessions with systems, etc). I don't know how systemising or empathising might tie into creativity (is creativity art or science) but it strikes me that there might be some interesting parallels (or divergences) between various conditions.Paul Whiteleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14288851488012254897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post-68361114444664621432011-06-22T21:48:04.128-04:002011-06-22T21:48:04.128-04:00I like that hypothesis very much, I hope it is tru...I like that hypothesis very much, I hope it is true (I would make a terrible researcher, I think). Talk about taking one for the genes, yikes.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post-56272444403192738942011-06-22T21:40:57.106-04:002011-06-22T21:40:57.106-04:00Very interesting! My ex (and father of my kids) is...Very interesting! My ex (and father of my kids) is the child of a schizophrenic father. I suspect his birth mother also has some kind of mental illness or instability. He was adopted and only in his 20s was he acquainted with his birth parents. <br /><br />The interesting thing, to me, is that although he was raised by adoptive parents who don't have a single creative bone between the two of them, he was passionate about music and became an avid musician in his early teens. It turns out both his biological parents were musicians. <br /><br />I also suspect that my ex did not go unaffected by his genetics and seems to me to be prone to depression or some kind of mental issues. <br /><br />Anyway, both our kids also seem creative and are natural musical talents. I'm hoping they inherited the creative part, and not the illness, anyway. Time will tell...Buttongirlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08068246236049960445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3045634714760830992.post-66040094653820615462011-06-22T21:16:10.687-04:002011-06-22T21:16:10.687-04:00What if Emily your premise was formulated with a d...What if Emily your premise was formulated with a different thought? Maybe it has nothing to do with genetics and has everything to do with acquiring it after most of your brain is formed? But then something slowly diminishes the circuits and the plasticity of the system. It continues to happen until it overwhelms the system. Most with severe schizophrenia often can not find a mate. So using what we know about epigenetics and Darwinian natural selection it stands to reason that evolution should eliminate this trait. Is it really biologically plausible when you think about it in this light? Yet as you point out the incidence and prevalence are rising the last 125 years. Maybe just maybe it has nothing to do with genetics and has a lot to do with epigenetics of our environment? Dr. Kjohnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11126132841611727249noreply@blogger.com