O Efeito "Sylvia Plath"

O efeito "Sylvia Plath"

A ligação entre criatividade e insanidade mental vem desde Aristótoles quando ele escreveu que filósofos, políticos, poetas de grande escalão possuíam tendências à "melancolia".

Esse nome é dado devido à estudos que comprovam que poetas tem mais tendências a serem suícidas e depremidos do que outros artistas. Esses estudos apontam que pessoas criativas - na maioria das vezes poetas mulheres -, possuem tendências de doenças mentais se suas motivações são extrínsecas, tais como relações interpessoais. Valorizar esses fatores externos podem prejudicar a saúde mental dos poetas, especulam, porque altos níveis de criatividade exigem que as pessoas "desafiar a multidão" e ignorar o que os outros pensam. Isso significa que a escrita eminente poderia produzir mais estresse - levando a uma maior incidência de doença mental.

How creativity can become a habit?

Capture your new ideas. Keep an idea notebook or voice recorder with you, type in new thoughts on your laptop or write ideas down on a napkin.

Seek out challenging tasks. Take on projects that don't necessarily have a solution—such as trying to figure out how to make your dog fly or how to build a perfect model of the brain. This causes old ideas to compete, which helps generate new ones.

Broaden your knowledge. Take a class outside psychology or read journals in unrelated fields, suggests Epstein. This makes more diverse knowledge available for interconnection, he says, which is the basis for all creative thought. "Ask for permission to sit in on lectures for a class on 12th century architecture and take notes," he suggests. "You'll do better in psychology and life if you broaden your knowledge."

Surround yourself with interesting things and people. Regular dinners with diverse and interesting friends and a work space festooned with out-of-the-ordinary objects will help you develop more original ideas, Epstein says. You can also keep your thoughts lively by taking a trip to an art museum or attending an opera—anything that stimulates new thinking.

Sleep on it. In a 1993 study at Harvard Medical School, psychologist Deidre Barrett, PhD, asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep and found that they were able to come up with novel solutions in their dreams. In the study, published in Dreaming (Vol. 3, No. 2), half of the participants reported having dreams that addressed their chosen problems, and a quarter came up with solutions in their dreams.

"We're in a different biochemical state when we're dreaming, and that's why I think dreams can be so helpful anytime we're stuck in our usual mode of thinking," Barrett says.

A 2004 study in Nature (Vol. 427, No. 6,972) also shows just how powerful sleep may be in helping people solve problems. Researchers at the University of Lübeck in Germany trained participants to solve a long, tedious math problem. Eight hours later, when participants returned for retesting, those who had slept during the break were more than twice as likely to figure out a simpler way to solve the problem than those who had not slept.

Collaborate—in writing. Plucker notes that much psychological