I was doing some late night reading last night and I had both eyes open for a change. When it gets very late and I am tired, I find I read with one eye closed in order to focus…I likely should take that as a sign to go to bed. Anyway back to creative people…well more like Creative Genius People…like Mozart and Andy Warhol, Beethoven, van Gogh, Yeats, George Orwell, Hans Christian Anderson and others. It seems that many of the extremely gifted people the world has known and called a little “different” or “eclectic” were more than likely Asperger’s. It is likely that the Asperger’s is the thing that gave them the ability to hyper focus on their areas of interest, to see things from a different perspective, and take it to a new level for the area of interest. This book is called “The Genesis of Artistic Creativity” and is about Asperger’s and the Arts. This was a great quote by Gregory (1987):
“…it is necessary to consider the idea that Genius and madness are closely allied. It is not true, of course, that great poets, painters, scientists, and mathematicians are mad; far from it. On the other hand, it may well be that they work as intensely and imaginatively as they do in order to remain sane; but they have access to aspects of the mind’s functioning from which those who live more staid and conventional lives are excluded, and that it is this access which gives their work both its flair and its sense of risk.”
It is interesting that what everyone has been calling “artistic” might actually be diagnosed as a syndrome. I hate putting people in boxes but there is something to this…
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