One thing that might cause anxiety is the lack of skills to transfer the abstract idea or inspiration into a real product (music track, painting, writing etc.). When the result is not what you had in mind you get frustrated. The ideas keep appearing but you don't know how to process them.
I agree with you on this. In my experience, mental illness has actually held me back with creativity. Social anxiety and depression have made it almost impossible for me to get out there and achieve my goals.
Don't worry about getting it out there, just let yourself see your own creativity from time to time, it's helped me to accept my own little amature expressions as personal achievements, just done simply for my own satisfaction...i bet you're actually talented unlike me, maybe you could just take a moment to soak that in without fear or pressure from anything external.
i've been told plenty of times that my poems and paintings are depressing- in my case, it's often because when i'm happy i'm busy being happy, not writing about it! i don't know if that's the case for others, but it's certainly a factor for me. additionally, creativity is an outlet for negative feelings, so perhaps sad people are more prolific because their creativity helps them?
My advice for artists: 1. Create fearlessly, then tweak mercilessly 2. Critique is for when you've finished 3. Assume you are overthinking it until shown otherwise. 4. Make bad art on purpose sometimes. 5. Have fun!
Sometimes the image of the "tortured artist" makes me feel even worse because when I'm in the throws of depression I'm useless and can't create anything. It's only when I'm back to basically functional that I can actually be productive
I completely agree that the "tormented artist" narrative needs to go away and that romanticizing mental illness doesn't help anyone. But what counts as romanticizing isn't always clear. People who experience extreme mental states need room to talk about their creativity in the context of their own emotional worlds just as much as anyone else. But it's really difficult to do this without being accused of romanticizing your symptoms, especially if you're trying to avoid medicalizing your experience. The language and narrative structures available to us are limiting and self-reinforcing. I used to feel like my bipolar disorder meant I was doomed to dysfunction, so romantic narratives of mental illness felt like the only "positive" way to see my diagnosis. I understand now that that is a terrible way to frame the issue, but I can't really blame myself for feeling backed into a corner like that, since it took a lot of digging to discover other options.
The last few comments about how art doesn't exist in a vacuum were actually very enlightening. Most, if not all art, is reactionary in some degree, whether it's in reaction to an event or an emotion. In my experience, artists themselves (myself included, though I strain to call myself an artist) tend to be very emotionally aware, for want of a better term. But this isn't just the case for negative emotions, the positive can also be greatly appreciated and influential to the artist. Take Ode to Joy for instance, when it was first written, I doubt Beethoven was feeling sadness or anger. Although it's also possible that artists are no more susceptible to greater emotional diversity than anyone else. The difference could be less about the feelings themselves, but our ability to express them. Artists have an outlet for our emotional experience, whatever it may be, which can lead us to feeling more open to being expressive about how we feel, whereas mostly, the average person seems content to not fully express how they feel, but still have the same level of feeling as someone who lets their emotion rise to the surface.
Loved this video, Olly. Shared it on Facebook. As a poet (not published yet but yeah), I do get sad a lot and this video explains most of it. Imposter syndrome, perfectionism, disappointments & life experiences are some of the main reasons I get down.
From personal experience as an artist I can tell you that good creative work requires the artist to have a keen eye for the negative when it comes to their own work so that they can identify the things they want to improve in the future. Perhaps this constant attention to the negative reflects in the rest of an artists life.
This video hits too close to home. I often ask myself if I'm doomed to an existence of loneliness and depression because of the creative path I chose. I'm so sensitive, most of the time it's amazing because I have this strong imaginary world I can go to and all those ideas that just pop in my mind, but it also feels like a burden because I wish there was an off switch so I could rest?! Is it possible to live a happy life whilst diving into the depth of the soul? Or will I die in misery like all those artists I relate to? I know it's a pathetic cliché, but I can't get it out of my head.
TheChavert Use your creativity to find and devise coping strategies that allow you to create and live well as best as you can, one day at a time. Think of it like this: you have to be around so you can share your gifts with the rest of the world, so focus on taking care of yourself as best as you can. Get as much help and support as you can and keep going for today.
Being depressed or just in a melancholic state is what fuels my creative drive most of the time. To me, inspiration is a moment of sentimental disarray. My emotions have to reach extremes in their positive or negative spectrum to inspire wayward thoughts
There's a fun example I've encountered going to school for music. Every college of music teaches Arnold Schoenberg, the guy who pioneered atonal and eventually serialist music: music that is profoundly dissonant because it doesn't repeat any note until it's gone through every note first, creating a deliberately disorienting experience. Scholars will talk about it, and even to a large extend Schoenberg wrote about it, as the "liberation of dissonance", or some such metaphor for freedom, and college undergrads all hate learning about Schoenberg, because it's very inaccessible and it sure doesn't SOUND like liberation. Sure, from a historical perspective, it takes the "any notes are fair game" concept of composers like Wagner and takes that one step further on a theoretical level. But it still doesn't explain WHY this was the music Schoenberg wanted to write. I learned in an elective senior-year history seminar that in the immediate lead-up to Schoenberg's "break with tonality", what was going on in his life was that his wife was cheating on him with a famous artist, he caught them, and the famous artist tried to convince Schoenberg's wife to leave him. Schoenberg made a romantic appeal to win her back, and when she decided to stay with Schoenberg, the artist, Gerstl, committed suicide, which Schoenberg had difficulties not feeling indirectly responsible for. And THAT'S what the music that Schoenberg wrote at the time sounds like. It doesn't sound like a grand liberation. It sounds like taking back your cheating wife and having someone do a suicide about it. And, at least for me, the music that didn't do anything for me before is really good at making me empathise with exactly that.
Freaky coincidence. You creeped me out when you said "Liam, Sammy..." in that order, as Liam is my dead name and Sammy is my current name. Thought you became a transphobic tv ghost for a second! :O lol
Well, he did have a way of fueling creativity... Without Marxism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would never have had a chance to write The Gulag Archipelago! After the 20th century, we can safely say that creative achievements pour out of countries that accept Marxism, like blood from an open wound.
Marx literally said that creative labor is what makes us distinguished from all other species. Labor is central to life, in his view. But that is, labor that we command and have a say in. Capitalist labor is alienated from us. We don't get to command what happens to the product, we don't necessarily get to do it the way we'd like to (we must be efficient to succeed), and our species-essence becomes commodified and through commodity fetishization we stop being represented by our labor, instead our products are thought of as their own things unto themselves that are represented by a price. But there are some anti-work leftists out there. You just won't find them among Marx's disciples. If you want someone who actually critiques work, look up Bob Black. And btw, the last part of your shitty joke (other people should be forced to labor) is actually just what the bourgeoisie does.
Oh nooo! I’m doing research for my own RUclips video about Art & Depression .. but ahhhh!!! Philosophy Tube is the best. Oy ! covering a topic spoken about here is bit nerve wracking as I find this channel brilliant. But while I watch and enjoy the video, I do find comfort in knowing I was planning on a very different approach. Is just cool to see..one topic, two different aesthetics. Going to try to forget the subjective idea of “better or worse” here, partiality for my own good, as I plow ahead over the next few days. Thanks for all yr videos! Completely original personality.
I think there is a confounding factor in the link between creativity and emotional/mental 'torment'. Creative people tend to dive into themselves and reach into their psyche. Nietzsche was also keenly aware and described how diving into yourself can make you 'insane'. I don't think creativity has much to do with sadness or mental illness, in my experience as an artist in art school, I've only met one person with legitimate mental health issues. That's less than a 1/4 of a percent. I think that the fact people face themselves is what brings out the feelings of 'torment' and 'sadness' associated with creativity, because creativity often involves this introspection and self-confrontation. We can see this sort of introspection and self-confrontation in non-artistic fields as well, like celebrities and actors, or in people who experience clinical depression, and when people hit milestones in their lives such as the death of a loved one which makes them reevaluate themselves.
My ASD brain got a bit away from me towards the end, but I think I brought it around: Life is about narrative and it's about reality. Having a brain that is statistically a variation on the norm can help us pierce the veil of our shared narrative, the sociology of it all. The reality/expectation clash is called the Stroop Effect and it's a heightened unsettling feeling and when things are unsettled, they sometimes resettle in a different configuration. That could be interpreted as sadness, anxiety, existential dread. Piercing the veil of social BS can make us question how we created the narratives about ourselves and THAT creates the cognitive dissonance between how we see ourselves and how much the social shaped that introjected narrative. There is that Stroop effect again with its accompanying sadness, anxiety, existential dread. The personal narrative experience is not sociology, it is psychology, but the thing is the society is made from individuals also the divergent psychology can be dangerous to the people policing the sociology, so you end up with 'disability' which is often just being ill adapted to a constructed reality, a disabling society. Codified and commodified as a unit in a system of money. Reduced from subject to object and dismissed. .. and of course, psychology develops in the context of a sociological context. It's not a clean delineation, it is nebulous. I saw a video recently about, amongst other things, habituation, and space. We think in society, the sociological perspective, of a narrative of 'People whose legs don't work are disabled'. Is that true though, or is the problem about the current context? A lot of people use their arms a lot getting around in wheelchairs and they habituate, get stronger. In space, in the ISS the movement in the station is done in free fall and, like the vomit rocket, getting around is mainly done with the arms. The person with legs that operate unusually in 1G is suddenly more ambulatory in zero G because of those stronger arms. Earth's mass generates 1G of gravity. The earth is an oblong spheroid with a radius of 6,371 km . Impressive. Here's the thing zero G, going by sheer scale, is much more impressive. The distance between earth and the sun is 151.66 *million* km... of zero G. In essence the habituation of 1G adaptation for someone with legs that don't work as the norm in 1G, well that person has an advantage on a much greater scale. Are the astronauts whose legs work in 1G disabled in zero G? Different is different. As John green explained in his book the fault in our Stars, and this is mathematically accurate, infinities are not a monolith. Infinities can be of different lengths. It's a matter of perspective not fact. It's how evolution works as differences occur over generations as conditions change values change, as Darwin said, the most adaptable survive and those adaptations become part of the nature of the natural selection process crafting the genome to survive in the (historically) slowly evolving landscape. Adaption exercises creativity and creativity creates narrative, maybe that is why creative people struggle: "What is to give light must endure burning" -- Viktor Frankl
While not all creativity is due to a divergent brain. with respect to people with uncommon gray matter, the answer is simple, elementary simple. People with different brains think different. Creative is different. For good or ill. Walk up a different ramp you have a different view. and as far as sadness I do not think this causes all of the issue but different ways of thinking can make feeling a connection to other people and to your work also different. you can feel more a sense of completion in the act of creation than in the finish of a work, or feel that feelings of the moment are sharp but the recollection of feelings are dull or hollow. creating a drive to do more and MOre and MORE to make it feel more real. I have this problem, anything I look back on I want to change to add to even when i run out of ideas because something always feels missing, it only feels close to completion when it is being added to. So it takes a lot to make me let go and accept that for anything to have a place it must also have an end. this is not a hand wave at what this all means, only an example of a single potential perspective
fwiw ... for me, sadness and anguish are what produce my best art, not the other way around... Creativity doesn't lead to me feeling down, it's me feeling down that leads me to be creative... It's how I get all that sadness and anguish out of my system. It's part of the reason I'm reluctant to seek medication for sadness and anguish and depression - I'm willing to pay that price because for me I can (most of the time) handle the mood swings and I don't want to stop feeling those things that drive me to be creative; the writing and art that have basically become my most reliable coping mechanisms. ....
Exactly why do I have to go to school constantly 5 day's a week, I don't want to go spend 7 to sometimes 8 hours in a place in which I only hear other subjective interpretations on life.
Taco mayhem It's seed corn for you. You need to be exposed to mainstream ideas and, if you are lucky, you will have been taught to use critical thinking to better understand their strengths and weaknesses. Critiquing them will lay the foundations for more creative ideas to come from you. And if we are lucky, you might be able to influence others with your ideas. Who knows? The man we are looking for just might be you... That's why education is important. If I remember correctly, the word comes from the Latin verb 'educare' meaning to lead out, bring out, lead forth. Education is meant to give you the skills to bring out your own thoughts, ideas, and creativity. Think on this: Olly finished years of mainstream education, and he's given us this channel because of it. What could you do with it?
I think the reason that most artist (at least visual artists as a concept artist) I believe most most artists feel like imposters since we have people we look up to and compare ourselves to, which isn't helpful in the long term because, especially in visual arts: You Never stop learning and improving, so you're going to beat yourself up trying to get to the next level which is the worst way to go about it
Dear Olly as always I highly enjoy your channel and the great way you manage to explain complex topics. Regarding artists and the tortured genius idea I feel as an art historian I should mention that this is an idea that was constructed in the 19th century and lives on today as many other romantic ideas still do. I think it might be interesting to scan the deep incluence the 19th century still has on us. Regarding artists there are of course various types but Leonardo da Vince was well known for his openness and share ideas with everyone, Raffael was not only a womanizer but also sweet of temper (his father by the way wrote poems) and the architect Borromini was probably a choleric. Michelangelo though was a diva par excellence and very jealous of his art, not even the pope who commissioned the fresco of the sistine chapel was allowed to see it. He did once and Michelangelo flew into a temper tantrum. However Michelangelo as tortured genius is a construct of the 19th century. Regarding the famous Caravaggio who is said to have murdered someone recent research showed that this is untrue and in fact a bad rep given by the follower of Caravaggios artistic adversary. So he didn't kill anyone, as Sibylle Ebert-Schiffer explains in m,ore detail in her book about the painter. We tend to project our ways of thinking or what we are used to at times to earlier periods which may not have thought this way. This is by no means any critique on you or your lo9vely show as you are always very on point. I just wanted to offer a very specific history of art perspective as in the 19th century artist portraits were very en vogue, such as Eugène Delacroix' moody picture of a brooding Michelangelo in his studio.
Olly, I have an idea. I suggest an episode on the topic of mental illness as social construct. What is a mental illness and what is just a divergence from the norm and how this distinction is crafted by the powers that be.
***** i see the point that you are making but i believe this only reframes the question in a different way. What is a dysfunction? What is a malfunction? Where does one draw the line?
Dan Bondarenko Well its usually defined by if the organ/structure isn't performing it's job or negatively impacts the body. So for a mental disorder example, with OCD, a circuit in the brain that controls aggression and other behaviors doesn't turn off when it's meant to. All the biologcal factors are still unknown like many mental disorders. Just reluctant to say totally socially constructed. I'm sure you wouldn't say it's 100% either.
So feeling doomed an suicidal, having hallucinations or thinking that you're superior to the rest of humanity and that rules don't apply to you is not really bad. Depression, psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder are social constructs used to keep people under control. Thanks for the red pill bro!
If you look at trait openness from a Big Five and biological perspective, it is quite possible that anxious people (who also rate highly on trait neuroticism) will find more ways to worry themselves in novel ways. And perhaps they will then pursue creative outlets to alleviate said anxiety.
I think I am nothing, but listening to this video sent chills down my spine. 'Imposter Syndrome' resonates powerfully with me. I now wonder why I would write this in the comments. Am I talking to 'myself'?
I kind of go one step further than simply thinking I'm bad at the process of making art, nothing I've ever written is something I could comfortably call creative or good. It doesn't matter how positive anyone who reads it is, I can never look past the flaws (real or imagined) in something that I wrote or feel satisfied with the finished product. What happens more often than not is I start something, then I restart it over and over again until I've convinced myself whatever I was writing was a dumb idea in the first place or I f*cked it up in a way that would be near impossible to fix and I throw it all out, then I hate myself for doing that. It's not exactly a "fun" cycle to go through.
Phenomena termed "Bipolar disorder" and the "schizo spectrum" has been linked in studies to creativity. I have BP II I know that when i have hypomania i am creativity incarnate, i even get creative ideas in my dreams.
I've also read research that suggests those with depression have more complex brains with many shorter slower neural connections that lead to greater brain entropy. Less depressed people have less complex brains with fewer longer faster neural connects that lead to less brain entropy (as found in schizophrenia). Women and older people (with more information centent in their brains - so higher entropy) tend to suffer more from depression.
what about reverse causality? We like sad art. What about the idea that people are attracted to sadness in an art context? In the same way negative news are what people watch, art is spread quicker when we receive catharsis about current sad sociological events, in turn boosting the artists' fame, and contributing to the idea that Great Artists suffer greatly. Come to think of it, it might also have to do with religious valuing of suffering. Hmm, food for thought
We like real art because it teaches us something about reality we did not know before. For whatever reason, we as a society abstract out real truths like death, decay, and suffering from our day to day life ---- as a result, art that thrusts us into these realities feels "dark" (and sad, though I think dark is a more all encompassing adjective). It's a question of accurate calibration to the world around us. This contrasted with escapism (feel good movies and so forth), which, when present in art, most people separate out as something different or lesser than the real good stuff.
Hey Olly! I was wondering if maybe you would make a video about Cosmicism sometime, i'm a huge fan of H. P. Lovecraft and his philosophy sounds so interesting, so if you could make a video about it it would be awesome!!
Thunder. Old bone, wire. Knuckle beat. I know it. Great oily stone. The Cold. It's hard. Looming weight. Another wave - gentle feet - creatures, pebbles and shells. Washed under your heaving shape.... Will you ever know? - I don't join... I want to - but, still, will you ever? I breathe. I finally shiver. I must go. But I'll come back - as if I never.
I find that watching behind the scenes on films and tv series to be really good and inspiring. This is even for studying something like Engineering. You really get to see how much work goes into making something. You also see how much attention to detail is put into these works.
Not you saying creatives tend to be depressed and neurodivergent and me going to a physchatrist for the first time in my life and being diagnosed with inattentive adhd and depressive syndrome. I released a webcomic once in 2019 then started to loose all motivation. I plan on relaunching it though now that my art has improved a lot and I have a better ideas of its direction. And this time I'll take breaks when needed instead of forcing myself through it.
Hey. Love you, love what you do--such a tremendous public service. Hope you're well. And, with love, "Virginia Woolf had bipolar disorder" is an amazingly problematic line to just throw away (problematic not as in some TVOD stuff, but philosophically. The philosophy of diagnosis is a sticky, foot-sucking swamp.) Far too much to explain in the comments of someone else's video; I'm going to have to do some writing. But the key word here is "reification," and the puzzle is, are diagnostic categories illnesses? That is, does the label describe a thing that exists in nature, discovered and described by scientists in labs? Or is it just nomenclature? The best book on this, and not too psychiatiry/ology heavy, is Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters. Beautiful crossover from sociology and philosophy into psychology and psychiatry.
Thank you for introducing me to the work neurodivergent. It always annoyed me that if different mental states like schizophrenia, depression, and OCD should be labeled as illness when they are so statistically common.
observation of a graphic design class... 50% at least dyslexic, 15% autistic, 25% adhd, at least 50% dyscalculaic, about 10% bipolar... yes there was clearly overlap in there, but actually it left 15% at best who would be regarded as neurotypical.
I wonder if another problem might be that creative people are thinking more about life, and thinking more about life leads to dealing with unpleasant truths or obscure points of view. People who are less creative might have less in their minds to work with and create new ideas out of, because they're blocking out unpleasant things, and focusing on the comfortable. I've given this a lot of thought, particularly why suicide rates are so high among stand-up comedians. Speaking for myself, I think I've trained my brain to take the world around me apart and look for new material, but this leads me to overthinking everything (including this). Overthinking leads to mental stress and fatigue, which leads to all sorts of disorders.
Great video ! And I would like to ask something, could it be the case that there's not necessarily a link between creativity and sadness? Mental illnesses are not uncommon, but you don't get to know all the people suffering them, moreover, artists tend to be famous, widely-recognized, so maybe we get the impression that there's a link when actually we just know more about the mental illnesses of artists because they are well-known than we know about the every-day suffering of the "normal", "obscure" citizen. Disclaimer : I am NOT affirming that this is the case, just wondering if it has been considered or if it makes some sense
The late great Eric Hobsbawm said that our modern belief in sad artists comes from the seperation of art from patronage in the Romantic era. In the Renaissance artists were paid constantly and had constant work, but romantic poets and artists didn't have that stable economic support.
Well I think different mental illnesses can apply to that idea in different ways. For instance, if you see things that other people don't see it makes perfect sense for that to lead to wanting to draw and paint. As far as depression goes I think there's a case to be made that their point of view while not necessarily being more original or innovative than others often resonates more with audiences. For that argument I look to Percy Bysshe Shelly's To A Skylark: "We look before and after, / And pine for what is not: / Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught; / Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." Of course it's true that Percy was a romantic poet, but I think the truth of those lines goes a bit deeper than economics. Art is often something we turn to when we feel sad because we want something/someone to relate to. So it shouldn't be surprising if so many of the artists we turn to have a good reason for being able to portray those ideas in such universal ways. But that still only covers artistic creativity and even there it is still pretty apparent that mental illnesses are common but certainly not necessary. The argument that the economic and social factors played a big role in the idea of sad artists I think makes good sense, but I'd also argue that their resulting focus on emotion in aesthetics and the impact that's had on modern art/artists wouldn't really make it evidence that our belief in sad artists isn't accurate.
I also think (as I respond to this a year later) that tragic subject matter, especially if it is drawn from first hand lived experience of some event or aspect of life that we can learn from, drives the artists popularity. Unpopular artists, those without something interesting to say or some important perspective to impart, disappear into obscurity. And the ones who do have personal stories of tragedy stick in our mind, where artists without that fade from our thoughts.
RUclips has recently inspired to be more willing to try to be creative by viewing what I can create as content, instead of my unattainable view of what art is.
Surprised you didn't talk about creativity and anxiety being linked in that they both need imagination to function, so having the capacity for creativity gives you equal capacity to imagine horrible futures. I've experienced that in I cannot be both anxious and creative- I use up all my imaginative resources on worrying about how shit could go wrong.
i disagree with marxs theory, i am gratified when i make something that is worth something to other people and it pushes me to continue doing so. i find myself becoming depressed when i feel myself moving nowhere either not making new music or not doing anything to further my success in music and i wouldnt be able to feel the gratification of my music becoming successful if not for capoitalism
Attributed to Michelangelo: "I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible." Also, according to his assistant's notes, he would get angry, throw his tools, and hit & curse at the marble during work.
I wonder if "creativity intimately tied with sadness" is the same as "un-mysterious creativity that is only simply new action schema and nothing more"? I mean, all people create some new action schemas for everyday life some time or another, and yet it does not make usual non-sad people sad. Does it maybe mean that people who are creative "as a job" are milking their brains too much for new action schemas - too many new action schemas generation for brain to stay healthy while still generating them, like over-exploiting the brain? Or does it mean that sadness pushes people to create new and new action schemas as a desperate act of self-rescue?
It's difficult when doing research on the brain if your an amatuer (like myself) - there's a lot of quick fix articles out there. Sure you can go through the painstaking research yourself and end up being able to condense it all down to some simple principles, but that isn't always the case nor is it always desired. Quite a few avenues of research have come together that coincently relate directly to this video (great minds think alike?). I've always been well behind on philosophy and really didn't know if I wanted to get into it. I'm sorry to say that - at least from my own understanding - that dialectics and dialectic materialism isn't going down well with me. I've attempted to read Das Capital - really you can't argue with the first few chapters I suppose, and maybe only a masochist would read futher. But the whole idea of thesis and anti-thesis just goes against my nature. I'm am much more from a scientific and engineering background - I realize that I guess I am a positivist... I don't like to argue black versus white. I'm not going to write off Marx, but realizing that dialetic materialism essentially gives a green light to risk and stress as a way of living and so is really a philosophy of conflict, and turns me off. I don't see how dialectic materialism can chime with feminism for example. Women have different priotities to men and their risky ventures. To me positivism and the scientific method seem more feminist than Marxism. Marxists (one of my friends is a Neo-Marxist cock) have always seemed very masculine to me. But then I recognise that Positivism is just a step away from technocratic absolute rule without democracy... dictatorship (oh well...). I've been researching brain biology for a couple of years now (I'm not an expert, and even experts are wary of making conclusions from their findings). We have two reward circuits - one for dopamine and one for serotonin: dopamine being more concentrated in the prefrontal cortex and serotonin in the frontal lobes and pretty much cross the rest of the cortex across the top of the brain to the visual cortex at the back. Just literallly before watching this video I was watching another video on arousal centres (for sex) in males and females, and also reading an article in a web psychology magazine on dopamine and serotonin in males and females and the right sid eof the brain versus the left side of the brain. Maybe there really is lateralization - left brain and right brain - here?... I've read plenty of stuff on the internet saying there is (but I so far haven't read any scientific paper yet - there could be some... I just haven't got around to finding them). In a magazine article I was reading the left side of the brain is more influenced by dopamine. Apparently the left side of the brain has more androgen receptors as well according to another source I read. The right side of the brain is more influenced by serotonin and this side of the brain has more estrogen receptors. Supposedly, the right side is more creative (as you say) and the left side is more analytical. Dopamine brain disorders such as schizophrenia and ADHD are more common in men, whereas Serotonin disorders such as depression are more common in women. That suggests, women use the right side of their brains more the left (though I've read research that this is not the case - and so it could just be a feature of people with depression) and MRI scans of male and female brains shows more difference between men and women in the right hemisphere, with women having thicker cortexes on the right hemisphere than men. Men do apparently use the left hemisphere more than the right hemisphere though. Interestingly it seems parts of the brain targeted with dopamine are linked with female sexual arousal, and parts of the brain targeted with serotonin are linked with male sexual arousal (I just took a video from ASAPscience on male and female orgasm and matched it to target areas for serotonin and dopamine in the brain). Orgasm uses the same parts of the brain in both sexes though. But this suggests that if males tried think more with the right side of their brain that is supposedly more targeted with serotonin that they will become sexually aroused. And with women, if they tried using more the left side of their brain that is supposedly more targetted with dopamine then they well become sexually aroused that way. LOL - so if men and women tried to think like each other they'll get mentally unstuck with sexual heat. I am wary of such a conclusion, but maybe it is true?... I've seen males trying to join in with their wives/girlfriends in activities such as textiles, and delicate manipulation of cloth between their fingertips while in a female type social environment drives men to pure frustration. While females can have multiple oragsms from doing hard exercise such as sprinting or ab crunches etc that would be stereotypically attributed to male workouts. Also, to link back to dialetic materialism and stress - dopamine is released following acheiving goals from risky or stressful activities (which includes orgasm... which is followed by a release of prolactin). Men make more dopamine in their brains than women do - this is because women have higher levels of prolactin that supress dopamine levels. Also, in recent researc I've done, it seems women thrive better than males in lower stress environments than males do - learning much better than males... whereas males learn better than females in higher stress risky environments. So men are naturally more competitve than women - this seems down to a nuclei in the brain called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), which is sexually dimorphic (and also linked with transgenderism as transgender individuals have a BNST of the opposite sex among, other brain differences) which drives competitive learning behaviour. Remove the BNST in males and they adopt female learning patterns of behaviour (as well as mating behaviour - I am talking about studies on rodents of course... though case studies revealing the role of the BNST from disease or abnormalities in males and females of the BNST have corrobated research on rodents). So yeh, is the positivism and scientific approach naturally more feminine - that of curiosity (and creativity)? more calm. And Marxism and dialectoc materialsim more masculine and more political and antagonistic and heated? Well I can't say for sure - despite a couple of years of amatuer research. Maybe (and perhaps experts do this - Stockholm Syndrome is not a recognised psychological condition apparently.. and condition used often to portray stereotypes of male and female behaviour) their needs to be an overhauling of how we look at behaviour that isn't so male-centric perhaps? Research into painkillers shows that what works on males doesn't work in females - so applying male standards of behaviour onto women and then using that to justify Stokholm Syndrome type behaviours probably isn't the way to go if men and women use different stress circuits, reward networks and pretty much different parts of the brain for everything it seems (based on these net magazine articles I keep coming across) - I.E. we should stop thinking of women as "lesser-males" (or even of males as "Lesser Females"). We all have a masculine and feminine side that we use interchangeably given the situation at hand. Sure men and women are different - but they don't live in different worlds. (what a fucking ramble)
Is it possible that nurodiverse people can be more creative because they get practice while finding ways to fit into the NT world? And as to the we don't see the mistakes thing, I think of Lata Mangeshkar. She is a singer in Hindi cinema and does the dubbed in music for actresses who can't sing, and she's able to get most songs down in one or two takes. How? It's because she's recorded over 25,000. When I'm writing and it doesn't sound very good, I just tell myself it's one more step to greatness.
I wasn't there so I can't say for certain, but I'm not sure artists feeling guilty about compromising their integrity for money is entirely to do with Capitalism. I mean, the fact that they're referring to money as the source of their problem is 100% capitalism and I'm sure the money itself at least plays a role in it all, but I don't think if we got rid of the money that those feelings would go away, or that they would all stop doing things they felt was compromising. It doesn't apply across the board, but for the most part in our capitalist societies making more money off of art often equates to reaching either a larger number of people or a more exclusive set of people. One of the hardest parts I have with doing creative work is less about whether or not I'm getting paid and more about the work I'm most proud of all falls into areas with very small demographics. For instance, I don't personally know anybody who's remotely interested in reading essays on temporal mechanics or interpretations of They Might Be Giants lyrics. But since we're already talking about They Might Be Giants I'd also cite them as an example of artists who have no problem taking jobs doing stuff like commercial jingles or TV theme tunes (both in their own style and in completely different styles entirely dictated by their clients). It doesn't stop them from making their own stuff or affect their personal style at all because those are just jobs to them so they don't need to worry about losing any part of their identity by doing them. I think that's what most artists actually feel guilty and/or sad about when it comes to "selling out". When they make decisions that they feel sacrifices part of their identity in some way. They may do this in exchange for money, yes, but often it's also more importantly in exchange for reaching a wider audience. TMBG don't hide the freelance work they do, but they also don't use those jobs to promote themselves so only people who are already big enough fans to bother looking those projects up ever even know about most of them, which leads me to believe that being able to separate that work from their own probably has something to do with not having to feel guilty about it. I think there might also be problems involving artists who are well known enough to get certain offers that are based only on their celebrity rather than their actual work, and I can see that as leading somewhere more like the alienation you describe, except that it would be less about being overworked and more about the work itself not even being necessary. I can see that making some people feel just as insecure about the actual value of the work they're most proud of as I do from my tiny demographics. But is already a TL;DR post so I'll just leave that idea there.
Neymow - yeh I'd love to know this too. I do actually have a rambling comment in this comments section that includes a lot on the brain if you want to look for it - but I can't vouch for it's correctness as I am an amatuer in pretty much everything. I've been researching the brain for the past couple of years just in my own free time - looking at sex, gender identity and sexuality mainly but also their impact on cognitive behaviour and consciousness etc. I've mainly been looking at various diagrams of the brain, going through wikipedia, reading magazine articles on line and also delving into science papers and reading excerpts from books published on-line. It's been tough going. It seemed to me that there was a status quo of us all being born as blank slates that I was countering - an idea I think the feminist Germaine Greer upholds and maybe is a characteristic of Neo-liberalism I don't know (probably a bit of a stretch)? For my purposes probably reading "Whipping Girl" by the transsexual activist Julia Serano (who has a Phd in biochemistry) would probably be ideal, but I'd be worried it was dissapointing or naive. Ive found I've come across a lot of political controversy when researching the brain (especially looking at sex and gender identity and I suppse sexuality as well as they are all taboo in a lot of ways). And it feels as though information is protected from mis-use and those in the know keep their cards close to their chest. Hence why I am here I suppose...
Couldn't it be that sad people are just more likely to create in order to make sense of a world that has (in making them sad) let them down? And then they continue to create as they continue to feel sad and therefore get a lot of practice? Not to mention confirmation bias playing a part here.... I know anecdotes aren't everything, but in my personal experience, I started writing poetry (really bad poetry, at first) after deciding that I wanted to recover from mental illness. I had to make sense of the world because the understanding that had been given to me by society (that my mental health made me a freak) was rubbish! If I didn't look for a new perspective I don't want to know what would happen next. By writing down my emotions in a way that felt natural to me and then coming back to the draft when I was calmer, I could better understand myself and the world around me. I imagine art may have developed in order to help people think through things, so doesn't it make sense to view it as such? As just a way to cope with sadness?
& yes trying to keep up with making at least one RUclips video a week is splitting my brain in half. But I am afraid all of my subscribers will abandon me if I slack off.
Creative ppl have imposter syndrome BC art is coded as "not important" under capitalism... Getting accolades for things that society tells us don't matter is very hard to reckon with
i just uploaded a video today about me leaving my job because of my anxiety. everyone was dissapointed in me, mostly because I was making $800 biweekly but, I just couldn't do it with my anxiety.
I think there is a key component that isn't adressed in this video about why we associate creative people with sad, anxious, depressed or otherwise negatively neurodivergent people. However, you did cover it in the last videos. That would be percieved value. Humans have a strong bias toward information that is negative or threatening. For instance, a story about a character that has a lovely day without conflict where nothing goes wrong is unlikely to sell terribly well. We are interested by conflict and creators who have a unique understanding of conflict, from whatever source, are better able to convey that sense of danger, urgency, sadness or the like through their work, rendering it more valuable.
Jack Lankester Yes, good point. We see this in the news all the time. There are artists out there who aren't as sad. But we won't get as inspired and hold them as highly since they didn't have a hard or sad life to live. But of course, some artists we don't even know the background of and just like them because they're popular or really good. We can only see what is revealed. And if the artist doesn't reveal it much, except for in their biography - even on Wikipedia, for example - then we won't really know their backstory and only judge them for their work. This also plays into criticism. We may criticise a work we're not satisfied with more if we don't know what went into producing it.
Hey so I have a few questions, number one why is it that people don't just disagree with but are straight up hostile towards Marxist/communist ideologies, it's probably a lot more common here in America but I don't understand why. And as someone that doesn't lean either way it's a bit annoying, I don't really understand the material fully (when I was watching your Marx series I was just like, and this is important because? I'll figure out what the deal is eventually). Also I'm wondering when thinking about the world and stuff (vague I know) how do you come up with new stuff (you probably answered this in your how to be creative vid so I'll rewatch that again but hear me out). I feel like whenever I try to talk about something I have to pull from what someone else has said before me and use counter arguments against specifically arguments I've heard get counter argued and only with those exact counter arguments, but whenever someone address a topic from a different angle or rephrases something slightly differently, even if it makes no sense, is straight up wrong, or it is just a repackaged version of the same thing I can't seem to take the new thing, think about it and logically rebut it or explain why I disagree, hopefully that made sense. So how do I think about things that I haven't been spoon fed the answer, I can't seem to think about stuff when I do it in the real world, you know what I mean (probably just because I'm dumb tho).
One thing that might cause anxiety is the lack of skills to transfer the abstract idea or inspiration into a real product (music track, painting, writing etc.). When the result is not what you had in mind you get frustrated. The ideas keep appearing but you don't know how to process them.
uu523 This
yeah this
Exactly. Story of my life. It's the most maddening thing in the world.
I feel this
🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼 Yes. Exactly this! How to overcome?
Couldn't it also be the case that depressed (or divergent) people are more likely to pursue art as a creative outlet and for its therapeutic effect?
I agree with you on this. In my experience, mental illness has actually held me back with creativity. Social anxiety and depression have made it almost impossible for me to get out there and achieve my goals.
Don't worry about getting it out there, just let yourself see your own creativity from time to time, it's helped me to accept my own little amature expressions as personal achievements, just done simply for my own satisfaction...i bet you're actually talented unlike me, maybe you could just take a moment to soak that in without fear or pressure from anything external.
+
When I read up about imposter syndrome a year or so ago, my reaction was, "Wait, are you saying not everyone feels exactly like this all the time???"
NerdSync 4 years into a bachelor of music and I heard about it for the first time here. But 😳
sussy
i've been told plenty of times that my poems and paintings are depressing- in my case, it's often because when i'm happy i'm busy being happy, not writing about it! i don't know if that's the case for others, but it's certainly a factor for me. additionally, creativity is an outlet for negative feelings, so perhaps sad people are more prolific because their creativity helps them?
My advice for artists:
1. Create fearlessly, then tweak mercilessly
2. Critique is for when you've finished
3. Assume you are overthinking it until shown otherwise.
4. Make bad art on purpose sometimes.
5. Have fun!
I read "tweak" as "twerk" wow
@c a all has been said and done.
now, commence the twerking 🔫
Picturing Michelangelo hunched over a piece of broken marble and uttering "Che palle!" under his breath made me smile.
Chuck Vanderbildt Or bollocks. xD That was funny.
Sometimes the image of the "tortured artist" makes me feel even worse because when I'm in the throws of depression I'm useless and can't create anything. It's only when I'm back to basically functional that I can actually be productive
I completely agree that the "tormented artist" narrative needs to go away and that romanticizing mental illness doesn't help anyone. But what counts as romanticizing isn't always clear. People who experience extreme mental states need room to talk about their creativity in the context of their own emotional worlds just as much as anyone else. But it's really difficult to do this without being accused of romanticizing your symptoms, especially if you're trying to avoid medicalizing your experience. The language and narrative structures available to us are limiting and self-reinforcing. I used to feel like my bipolar disorder meant I was doomed to dysfunction, so romantic narratives of mental illness felt like the only "positive" way to see my diagnosis. I understand now that that is a terrible way to frame the issue, but I can't really blame myself for feeling backed into a corner like that, since it took a lot of digging to discover other options.
The last few comments about how art doesn't exist in a vacuum were actually very enlightening. Most, if not all art, is reactionary in some degree, whether it's in reaction to an event or an emotion. In my experience, artists themselves (myself included, though I strain to call myself an artist) tend to be very emotionally aware, for want of a better term. But this isn't just the case for negative emotions, the positive can also be greatly appreciated and influential to the artist. Take Ode to Joy for instance, when it was first written, I doubt Beethoven was feeling sadness or anger.
Although it's also possible that artists are no more susceptible to greater emotional diversity than anyone else. The difference could be less about the feelings themselves, but our ability to express them. Artists have an outlet for our emotional experience, whatever it may be, which can lead us to feeling more open to being expressive about how we feel, whereas mostly, the average person seems content to not fully express how they feel, but still have the same level of feeling as someone who lets their emotion rise to the surface.
Loved this video, Olly. Shared it on Facebook. As a poet (not published yet but yeah), I do get sad a lot and this video explains most of it. Imposter syndrome, perfectionism, disappointments & life experiences are some of the main reasons I get down.
From personal experience as an artist I can tell you that good creative work requires the artist to have a keen eye for the negative when it comes to their own work so that they can identify the things they want to improve in the future. Perhaps this constant attention to the negative reflects in the rest of an artists life.
I felt a lot of this resonated with me
Thanks man!
‘Neurodivergence’ to an autostic does as well.
This video hits too close to home. I often ask myself if I'm doomed to an existence of loneliness and depression because of the creative path I chose. I'm so sensitive, most of the time it's amazing because I have this strong imaginary world I can go to and all those ideas that just pop in my mind, but it also feels like a burden because I wish there was an off switch so I could rest?! Is it possible to live a happy life whilst diving into the depth of the soul? Or will I die in misery like all those artists I relate to?
I know it's a pathetic cliché, but I can't get it out of my head.
TheChavert Use your creativity to find and devise coping strategies that allow you to create and live well as best as you can, one day at a time. Think of it like this: you have to be around so you can share your gifts with the rest of the world, so focus on taking care of yourself as best as you can. Get as much help and support as you can and keep going for today.
thank you
TheChavert Not to come off as not caring but did you draw your profile pic?
nope! it's from @cogecha on tumblr
TheChavert
Coolness Thnkz
Being depressed or just in a melancholic state is what fuels my creative drive most of the time. To me, inspiration is a moment of sentimental disarray. My emotions have to reach extremes in their positive or negative spectrum to inspire wayward thoughts
Thank you for offering a broad and stimulating overview rather than just romanticising mental illness.
There's a fun example I've encountered going to school for music. Every college of music teaches Arnold Schoenberg, the guy who pioneered atonal and eventually serialist music: music that is profoundly dissonant because it doesn't repeat any note until it's gone through every note first, creating a deliberately disorienting experience. Scholars will talk about it, and even to a large extend Schoenberg wrote about it, as the "liberation of dissonance", or some such metaphor for freedom, and college undergrads all hate learning about Schoenberg, because it's very inaccessible and it sure doesn't SOUND like liberation. Sure, from a historical perspective, it takes the "any notes are fair game" concept of composers like Wagner and takes that one step further on a theoretical level. But it still doesn't explain WHY this was the music Schoenberg wanted to write.
I learned in an elective senior-year history seminar that in the immediate lead-up to Schoenberg's "break with tonality", what was going on in his life was that his wife was cheating on him with a famous artist, he caught them, and the famous artist tried to convince Schoenberg's wife to leave him. Schoenberg made a romantic appeal to win her back, and when she decided to stay with Schoenberg, the artist, Gerstl, committed suicide, which Schoenberg had difficulties not feeling indirectly responsible for.
And THAT'S what the music that Schoenberg wrote at the time sounds like. It doesn't sound like a grand liberation. It sounds like taking back your cheating wife and having someone do a suicide about it. And, at least for me, the music that didn't do anything for me before is really good at making me empathise with exactly that.
Freaky coincidence. You creeped me out when you said "Liam, Sammy..." in that order, as Liam is my dead name and Sammy is my current name. Thought you became a transphobic tv ghost for a second! :O lol
Haha, damn!
Marx tends to be cropping up a lot these days doesn't he?
Well, he did have a way of fueling creativity... Without Marxism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would never have had a chance to write The Gulag Archipelago! After the 20th century, we can safely say that creative achievements pour out of countries that accept Marxism, like blood from an open wound.
"Labour is bad, therefore other people should be forced to labour so that I don't have to" ~Marxist philosophy
Danny that's bad satire
"I don't understand Marxism" Danny Hendron
Marx literally said that creative labor is what makes us distinguished from all other species. Labor is central to life, in his view. But that is, labor that we command and have a say in. Capitalist labor is alienated from us. We don't get to command what happens to the product, we don't necessarily get to do it the way we'd like to (we must be efficient to succeed), and our species-essence becomes commodified and through commodity fetishization we stop being represented by our labor, instead our products are thought of as their own things unto themselves that are represented by a price. But there are some anti-work leftists out there. You just won't find them among Marx's disciples. If you want someone who actually critiques work, look up Bob Black. And btw, the last part of your shitty joke (other people should be forced to labor) is actually just what the bourgeoisie does.
Art and Fear is an absolutely fantastic book, I heartily recommend it to artist types and those otherwise interested.
Oh nooo! I’m doing research for my own RUclips video about Art & Depression ..
but ahhhh!!! Philosophy Tube is the best.
Oy ! covering a topic spoken about here is bit nerve wracking as I find this channel brilliant.
But while I watch and enjoy the video, I do find comfort in knowing I was planning on a very different approach.
Is just cool to see..one topic, two different aesthetics. Going to try to forget the subjective idea of “better or worse” here, partiality for my own good, as I plow ahead over the next few days.
Thanks for all yr videos! Completely original personality.
I think there is a confounding factor in the link between creativity and emotional/mental 'torment'.
Creative people tend to dive into themselves and reach into their psyche. Nietzsche was also keenly aware and described how diving into yourself can make you 'insane'. I don't think creativity has much to do with sadness or mental illness, in my experience as an artist in art school, I've only met one person with legitimate mental health issues. That's less than a 1/4 of a percent.
I think that the fact people face themselves is what brings out the feelings of 'torment' and 'sadness' associated with creativity, because creativity often involves this introspection and self-confrontation. We can see this sort of introspection and self-confrontation in non-artistic fields as well, like celebrities and actors, or in people who experience clinical depression, and when people hit milestones in their lives such as the death of a loved one which makes them reevaluate themselves.
My ASD brain got a bit away from me towards the end, but I think I brought it around:
Life is about narrative and it's about reality.
Having a brain that is statistically a variation on the norm can help us pierce the veil of our shared narrative, the sociology of it all. The reality/expectation clash is called the Stroop Effect and it's a heightened unsettling feeling and when things are unsettled, they sometimes resettle in a different configuration. That could be interpreted as sadness, anxiety, existential dread.
Piercing the veil of social BS can make us question how we created the narratives about ourselves and THAT creates the cognitive dissonance between how we see ourselves and how much the social shaped that introjected narrative.
There is that Stroop effect again with its accompanying sadness, anxiety, existential dread.
The personal narrative experience is not sociology, it is psychology, but the thing is the society is made from individuals also the divergent psychology can be dangerous to the people policing the sociology, so you end up with 'disability' which is often just being ill adapted to a constructed reality, a disabling society. Codified and commodified as a unit in a system of money. Reduced from subject to object and dismissed.
.. and of course, psychology develops in the context of a sociological context. It's not a clean delineation, it is nebulous.
I saw a video recently about, amongst other things, habituation, and space.
We think in society, the sociological perspective, of a narrative of 'People whose legs don't work are disabled'. Is that true though, or is the problem about the current context?
A lot of people use their arms a lot getting around in wheelchairs and they habituate, get stronger.
In space, in the ISS the movement in the station is done in free fall and, like the vomit rocket, getting around is mainly done with the arms. The person with legs that operate unusually in 1G is suddenly more ambulatory in zero G because of those stronger arms.
Earth's mass generates 1G of gravity. The earth is an oblong spheroid with a radius of 6,371 km . Impressive.
Here's the thing zero G, going by sheer scale, is much more impressive.
The distance between earth and the sun is 151.66 *million* km... of zero G. In essence the habituation of 1G adaptation for someone with legs that don't work as the norm in 1G, well that person has an advantage on a much greater scale.
Are the astronauts whose legs work in 1G disabled in zero G?
Different is different. As John green explained in his book the fault in our Stars, and this is mathematically accurate, infinities are not a monolith. Infinities can be of different lengths. It's a matter of perspective not fact. It's how evolution works as differences occur over generations as conditions change values change, as Darwin said, the most adaptable survive and those adaptations become part of the nature of the natural selection process crafting the genome to survive in the (historically) slowly evolving landscape.
Adaption exercises creativity and creativity creates narrative, maybe that is why creative people struggle:
"What is to give light must endure burning" -- Viktor Frankl
Your videos just make me feel good and happy, and also teach me a lot about things we usually don't over think during a normal day. Thanks for that!!!
While not all creativity is due to a divergent brain.
with respect to people with uncommon gray matter, the answer is simple, elementary simple.
People with different brains think different.
Creative is different. For good or ill.
Walk up a different ramp you have a different view.
and as far as sadness I do not think this causes all of the issue but different ways of thinking can make feeling a connection to other people and to your work also different.
you can feel more a sense of completion in the act of creation than in the finish of a work, or feel that feelings of the moment are sharp but the recollection of feelings are dull or hollow.
creating a drive to do more and MOre and MORE to make it feel more real.
I have this problem, anything I look back on I want to change to add to even when i run out of ideas because something always feels missing, it only feels close to completion when it is being added to. So it takes a lot to make me let go and accept that for anything to have a place it must also have an end.
this is not a hand wave at what this all means, only an example of a single potential perspective
It's always great when someone discusses neurodivergence appropriately. Thanks!
These old videos still have a heckuva punch even if they are a pale shadow of the new.
fwiw ... for me, sadness and anguish are what produce my best art, not the other way around... Creativity doesn't lead to me feeling down, it's me feeling down that leads me to be creative... It's how I get all that sadness and anguish out of my system. It's part of the reason I'm reluctant to seek medication for sadness and anguish and depression - I'm willing to pay that price because for me I can (most of the time) handle the mood swings and I don't want to stop feeling those things that drive me to be creative; the writing and art that have basically become my most reliable coping mechanisms. ....
and now i've added "things fall apart" to my wishlist/reading list
Exactly why do I have to go to school constantly 5 day's a week, I don't want to go spend 7 to sometimes 8 hours in a place in which I only hear other subjective interpretations on life.
Taco mayhem It's seed corn for you. You need to be exposed to mainstream ideas and, if you are lucky, you will have been taught to use critical thinking to better understand their strengths and weaknesses. Critiquing them will lay the foundations for more creative ideas to come from you. And if we are lucky, you might be able to influence others with your ideas. Who knows? The man we are looking for just might be you... That's why education is important. If I remember correctly, the word comes from the Latin verb 'educare' meaning to lead out, bring out, lead forth. Education is meant to give you the skills to bring out your own thoughts, ideas, and creativity. Think on this: Olly finished years of mainstream education, and he's given us this channel because of it. What could you do with it?
Funnily enough I have a video on just this subject! ruclips.net/video/VJdffFhbHkY/видео.html
Osman Oglu Lol! If this is nothing, then why are you here? Lol!
I think the reason that most artist (at least visual artists as a concept artist) I believe most most artists feel like imposters since we have people we look up to and compare ourselves to, which isn't helpful in the long term because, especially in visual arts: You Never stop learning and improving, so you're going to beat yourself up trying to get to the next level which is the worst way to go about it
Brilliant work. I really enjoyed the presentation and the value it delivers. Thank you!
Dear Olly as always I highly enjoy your channel and the great way you manage to explain complex topics. Regarding artists and the tortured genius idea I feel as an art historian I should mention that this is an idea that was constructed in the 19th century and lives on today as many other romantic ideas still do. I think it might be interesting to scan the deep incluence the 19th century still has on us. Regarding artists there are of course various types but Leonardo da Vince was well known for his openness and share ideas with everyone, Raffael was not only a womanizer but also sweet of temper (his father by the way wrote poems) and the architect Borromini was probably a choleric. Michelangelo though was a diva par excellence and very jealous of his art, not even the pope who commissioned the fresco of the sistine chapel was allowed to see it. He did once and Michelangelo flew into a temper tantrum. However Michelangelo as tortured genius is a construct of the 19th century. Regarding the famous Caravaggio who is said to have murdered someone recent research showed that this is untrue and in fact a bad rep given by the follower of Caravaggios artistic adversary. So he didn't kill anyone, as Sibylle Ebert-Schiffer explains in m,ore detail in her book about the painter. We tend to project our ways of thinking or what we are used to at times to earlier periods which may not have thought this way. This is by no means any critique on you or your lo9vely show as you are always very on point. I just wanted to offer a very specific history of art perspective as in the 19th century artist portraits were very en vogue, such as Eugène Delacroix' moody picture of a brooding Michelangelo in his studio.
second video of yours I watch, and again a reference to Marx. Subscribed!
now, onto that Marx playlist....
Currently going through a looottt of depression.. and I'm creative by nature... And it kills me looking at the things that are imperfect.
Thank you for this, I have a friend who is very sad for this exact reason
so iconic of olly to sneak marxist theory into everything when nobody's looking
Yep.
Olly, I have an idea. I suggest an episode on the topic of mental illness as social construct. What is a mental illness and what is just a divergence from the norm and how this distinction is crafted by the powers that be.
Dan Bondarenko commenting to move this up
Dan Bondarenko Some result from chemical dysfunction in the brain or malformations. Probably is some social aspect, but there are biological markers.
***** i see the point that you are making but i believe this only reframes the question in a different way. What is a dysfunction? What is a malfunction? Where does one draw the line?
Dan Bondarenko Well its usually defined by if the organ/structure isn't performing it's job or negatively impacts the body. So for a mental disorder example, with OCD, a circuit in the brain that controls aggression and other behaviors doesn't turn off when it's meant to.
All the biologcal factors are still unknown like many mental disorders. Just reluctant to say totally socially constructed. I'm sure you wouldn't say it's 100% either.
So feeling doomed an suicidal, having hallucinations or thinking that you're superior to the rest of humanity and that rules don't apply to you is not really bad. Depression, psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder are social constructs used to keep people under control. Thanks for the red pill bro!
If you look at trait openness from a Big Five and biological perspective, it is quite possible that anxious people (who also rate highly on trait neuroticism) will find more ways to worry themselves in novel ways. And perhaps they will then pursue creative outlets to alleviate said anxiety.
The key component to my own imposter syndrome is commitment. A true artist is working in all her spare time.
I think I am nothing, but listening to this video sent chills down my spine. 'Imposter Syndrome' resonates powerfully with me. I now wonder why I would write this in the comments. Am I talking to 'myself'?
I kind of go one step further than simply thinking I'm bad at the process of making art, nothing I've ever written is something I could comfortably call creative or good. It doesn't matter how positive anyone who reads it is, I can never look past the flaws (real or imagined) in something that I wrote or feel satisfied with the finished product. What happens more often than not is I start something, then I restart it over and over again until I've convinced myself whatever I was writing was a dumb idea in the first place or I f*cked it up in a way that would be near impossible to fix and I throw it all out, then I hate myself for doing that. It's not exactly a "fun" cycle to go through.
Phenomena termed "Bipolar disorder" and the "schizo spectrum" has been linked in studies to creativity.
I have BP II I know that when i have hypomania i am creativity incarnate, i even get creative ideas in my dreams.
The best of your videos in my opinion.
I've also read research that suggests those with depression have more complex brains with many shorter slower neural connections that lead to greater brain entropy. Less depressed people have less complex brains with fewer longer faster neural connects that lead to less brain entropy (as found in schizophrenia). Women and older people (with more information centent in their brains - so higher entropy) tend to suffer more from depression.
what about reverse causality? We like sad art. What about the idea that people are attracted to sadness in an art context? In the same way negative news are what people watch, art is spread quicker when we receive catharsis about current sad sociological events, in turn boosting the artists' fame, and contributing to the idea that Great Artists suffer greatly. Come to think of it, it might also have to do with religious valuing of suffering. Hmm, food for thought
We like real art because it teaches us something about reality we did not know before. For whatever reason, we as a society abstract out real truths like death, decay, and suffering from our day to day life ---- as a result, art that thrusts us into these realities feels "dark" (and sad, though I think dark is a more all encompassing adjective). It's a question of accurate calibration to the world around us.
This contrasted with escapism (feel good movies and so forth), which, when present in art, most people separate out as something different or lesser than the real good stuff.
Hey Olly! I was wondering if maybe you would make a video about Cosmicism sometime, i'm a huge fan of H. P. Lovecraft and his philosophy sounds so interesting, so if you could make a video about it it would be awesome!!
well that explains why im so sad all the time. theres this fear of never amounting to anything.
Thunder. Old bone, wire. Knuckle beat. I know it. Great oily stone. The Cold. It's hard. Looming weight. Another wave - gentle feet - creatures, pebbles and shells. Washed under your heaving shape.... Will you ever know? - I don't join... I want to - but, still, will you ever? I breathe. I finally shiver. I must go. But I'll come back - as if I never.
I find that watching behind the scenes on films and tv series to be really good and inspiring. This is even for studying something like Engineering. You really get to see how much work goes into making something. You also see how much attention to detail is put into these works.
Not you saying creatives tend to be depressed and neurodivergent and me going to a physchatrist for the first time in my life and being diagnosed with inattentive adhd and depressive syndrome.
I released a webcomic once in 2019 then started to loose all motivation. I plan on relaunching it though now that my art has improved a lot and I have a better ideas of its direction. And this time I'll take breaks when needed instead of forcing myself through it.
Hey. Love you, love what you do--such a tremendous public service. Hope you're well. And, with love, "Virginia Woolf had bipolar disorder" is an amazingly problematic line to just throw away (problematic not as in some TVOD stuff, but philosophically. The philosophy of diagnosis is a sticky, foot-sucking swamp.) Far too much to explain in the comments of someone else's video; I'm going to have to do some writing. But the key word here is "reification," and the puzzle is, are diagnostic categories illnesses? That is, does the label describe a thing that exists in nature, discovered and described by scientists in labs? Or is it just nomenclature? The best book on this, and not too psychiatiry/ology heavy, is Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters. Beautiful crossover from sociology and philosophy into psychology and psychiatry.
Thanks i needed your input before i pull all my Rasta out of my head thinking am alone in this anxiety.
Olly talking and I'm staring at Being and Nothingness like o.o ....
Keep up the good work!
Thank you for introducing me to the work neurodivergent. It always annoyed me that if different mental states like schizophrenia, depression, and OCD should be labeled as illness when they are so statistically common.
My mother was diagnosed bipolar. I discovered I have a form of dyslexia while studying fashion design. Now I'm into photography.
observation of a graphic design class... 50% at least dyslexic, 15% autistic, 25% adhd, at least 50% dyscalculaic, about 10% bipolar... yes there was clearly overlap in there, but actually it left 15% at best who would be regarded as neurotypical.
Arrogance of intellect is a necessity to prevent one from going insane .
I really identify with the topics in your videos. Thank you for doing what you do. I just subscribed.
Have you already touched on addiction?
Thank you so much for this
I wonder if another problem might be that creative people are thinking more about life, and thinking more about life leads to dealing with unpleasant truths or obscure points of view. People who are less creative might have less in their minds to work with and create new ideas out of, because they're blocking out unpleasant things, and focusing on the comfortable.
I've given this a lot of thought, particularly why suicide rates are so high among stand-up comedians. Speaking for myself, I think I've trained my brain to take the world around me apart and look for new material, but this leads me to overthinking everything (including this). Overthinking leads to mental stress and fatigue, which leads to all sorts of disorders.
Lots of us make art when we feel sad to make ourselves feel better, so that might be a link too.
Good to know! I feel happier now. :)
Great video ! And I would like to ask something, could it be the case that there's not necessarily a link between creativity and sadness? Mental illnesses are not uncommon, but you don't get to know all the people suffering them, moreover, artists tend to be famous, widely-recognized, so maybe we get the impression that there's a link when actually we just know more about the mental illnesses of artists because they are well-known than we know about the every-day suffering of the "normal", "obscure" citizen.
Disclaimer : I am NOT affirming that this is the case, just wondering if it has been considered or if it makes some sense
The late great Eric Hobsbawm said that our modern belief in sad artists comes from the seperation of art from patronage in the Romantic era. In the Renaissance artists were paid constantly and had constant work, but romantic poets and artists didn't have that stable economic support.
Celestina Nice explanation. That could be it. Would be nice to go back to those times. :) Now it's capitalistic.
Well I think different mental illnesses can apply to that idea in different ways. For instance, if you see things that other people don't see it makes perfect sense for that to lead to wanting to draw and paint. As far as depression goes I think there's a case to be made that their point of view while not necessarily being more original or innovative than others often resonates more with audiences. For that argument I look to Percy Bysshe Shelly's To A Skylark: "We look before and after, / And pine for what is not: / Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught; / Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."
Of course it's true that Percy was a romantic poet, but I think the truth of those lines goes a bit deeper than economics. Art is often something we turn to when we feel sad because we want something/someone to relate to. So it shouldn't be surprising if so many of the artists we turn to have a good reason for being able to portray those ideas in such universal ways.
But that still only covers artistic creativity and even there it is still pretty apparent that mental illnesses are common but certainly not necessary. The argument that the economic and social factors played a big role in the idea of sad artists I think makes good sense, but I'd also argue that their resulting focus on emotion in aesthetics and the impact that's had on modern art/artists wouldn't really make it evidence that our belief in sad artists isn't accurate.
I also think (as I respond to this a year later) that tragic subject matter, especially if it is drawn from first hand lived experience of some event or aspect of life that we can learn from, drives the artists popularity. Unpopular artists, those without something interesting to say or some important perspective to impart, disappear into obscurity. And the ones who do have personal stories of tragedy stick in our mind, where artists without that fade from our thoughts.
I see the Necronomicon in that bookshelf, we got a fellow Lovecraftian here..
"In the dooblidoo", Hank, see you on Wednesday!
RUclips has recently inspired to be more willing to try to be creative by viewing what I can create as content, instead of my unattainable view of what art is.
Surprised you didn't talk about creativity and anxiety being linked in that they both need imagination to function, so having the capacity for creativity gives you equal capacity to imagine horrible futures. I've experienced that in I cannot be both anxious and creative- I use up all my imaginative resources on worrying about how shit could go wrong.
Very interesting video!
Thank you for this
i disagree with marxs theory, i am gratified when i make something that is worth something to other people and it pushes me to continue doing so. i find myself becoming depressed when i feel myself moving nowhere either not making new music or not doing anything to further my success in music and i wouldnt be able to feel the gratification of my music becoming successful if not for capoitalism
Attributed to Michelangelo: "I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible." Also, according to his assistant's notes, he would get angry, throw his tools, and hit & curse at the marble during work.
I wonder if "creativity intimately tied with sadness" is the same as "un-mysterious creativity that is only simply new action schema and nothing more"? I mean, all people create some new action schemas for everyday life some time or another, and yet it does not make usual non-sad people sad.
Does it maybe mean that people who are creative "as a job" are milking their brains too much for new action schemas - too many new action schemas generation for brain to stay healthy while still generating them, like over-exploiting the brain?
Or does it mean that sadness pushes people to create new and new action schemas as a desperate act of self-rescue?
The way you said "what you [guys] were talking about was marxist alienation from labor" made me laugh harder than anything in a long time. Thank you.
dude, thank you
It's difficult when doing research on the brain if your an amatuer (like myself) - there's a lot of quick fix articles out there. Sure you can go through the painstaking research yourself and end up being able to condense it all down to some simple principles, but that isn't always the case nor is it always desired.
Quite a few avenues of research have come together that coincently relate directly to this video (great minds think alike?).
I've always been well behind on philosophy and really didn't know if I wanted to get into it. I'm sorry to say that - at least from my own understanding - that dialectics and dialectic materialism isn't going down well with me. I've attempted to read Das Capital - really you can't argue with the first few chapters I suppose, and maybe only a masochist would read futher. But the whole idea of thesis and anti-thesis just goes against my nature. I'm am much more from a scientific and engineering background - I realize that I guess I am a positivist... I don't like to argue black versus white. I'm not going to write off Marx, but realizing that dialetic materialism essentially gives a green light to risk and stress as a way of living and so is really a philosophy of conflict, and turns me off. I don't see how dialectic materialism can chime with feminism for example. Women have different priotities to men and their risky ventures. To me positivism and the scientific method seem more feminist than Marxism. Marxists (one of my friends is a Neo-Marxist cock) have always seemed very masculine to me. But then I recognise that Positivism is just a step away from technocratic absolute rule without democracy... dictatorship (oh well...).
I've been researching brain biology for a couple of years now (I'm not an expert, and even experts are wary of making conclusions from their findings). We have two reward circuits - one for dopamine and one for serotonin: dopamine being more concentrated in the prefrontal cortex and serotonin in the frontal lobes and pretty much cross the rest of the cortex across the top of the brain to the visual cortex at the back. Just literallly before watching this video I was watching another video on arousal centres (for sex) in males and females, and also reading an article in a web psychology magazine on dopamine and serotonin in males and females and the right sid eof the brain versus the left side of the brain.
Maybe there really is lateralization - left brain and right brain - here?... I've read plenty of stuff on the internet saying there is (but I so far haven't read any scientific paper yet - there could be some... I just haven't got around to finding them). In a magazine article I was reading the left side of the brain is more influenced by dopamine. Apparently the left side of the brain has more androgen receptors as well according to another source I read. The right side of the brain is more influenced by serotonin and this side of the brain has more estrogen receptors. Supposedly, the right side is more creative (as you say) and the left side is more analytical. Dopamine brain disorders such as schizophrenia and ADHD are more common in men, whereas Serotonin disorders such as depression are more common in women. That suggests, women use the right side of their brains more the left (though I've read research that this is not the case - and so it could just be a feature of people with depression) and MRI scans of male and female brains shows more difference between men and women in the right hemisphere, with women having thicker cortexes on the right hemisphere than men. Men do apparently use the left hemisphere more than the right hemisphere though.
Interestingly it seems parts of the brain targeted with dopamine are linked with female sexual arousal, and parts of the brain targeted with serotonin are linked with male sexual arousal (I just took a video from ASAPscience on male and female orgasm and matched it to target areas for serotonin and dopamine in the brain). Orgasm uses the same parts of the brain in both sexes though. But this suggests that if males tried think more with the right side of their brain that is supposedly more targeted with serotonin that they will become sexually aroused. And with women, if they tried using more the left side of their brain that is supposedly more targetted with dopamine then they well become sexually aroused that way. LOL - so if men and women tried to think like each other they'll get mentally unstuck with sexual heat. I am wary of such a conclusion, but maybe it is true?... I've seen males trying to join in with their wives/girlfriends in activities such as textiles, and delicate manipulation of cloth between their fingertips while in a female type social environment drives men to pure frustration. While females can have multiple oragsms from doing hard exercise such as sprinting or ab crunches etc that would be stereotypically attributed to male workouts.
Also, to link back to dialetic materialism and stress - dopamine is released following acheiving goals from risky or stressful activities (which includes orgasm... which is followed by a release of prolactin). Men make more dopamine in their brains than women do - this is because women have higher levels of prolactin that supress dopamine levels. Also, in recent researc I've done, it seems women thrive better than males in lower stress environments than males do - learning much better than males... whereas males learn better than females in higher stress risky environments. So men are naturally more competitve than women - this seems down to a nuclei in the brain called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), which is sexually dimorphic (and also linked with transgenderism as transgender individuals have a BNST of the opposite sex among, other brain differences) which drives competitive learning behaviour. Remove the BNST in males and they adopt female learning patterns of behaviour (as well as mating behaviour - I am talking about studies on rodents of course... though case studies revealing the role of the BNST from disease or abnormalities in males and females of the BNST have corrobated research on rodents).
So yeh, is the positivism and scientific approach naturally more feminine - that of curiosity (and creativity)? more calm. And Marxism and dialectoc materialsim more masculine and more political and antagonistic and heated? Well I can't say for sure - despite a couple of years of amatuer research.
Maybe (and perhaps experts do this - Stockholm Syndrome is not a recognised psychological condition apparently.. and condition used often to portray stereotypes of male and female behaviour) their needs to be an overhauling of how we look at behaviour that isn't so male-centric perhaps? Research into painkillers shows that what works on males doesn't work in females - so applying male standards of behaviour onto women and then using that to justify Stokholm Syndrome type behaviours probably isn't the way to go if men and women use different stress circuits, reward networks and pretty much different parts of the brain for everything it seems (based on these net magazine articles I keep coming across) - I.E. we should stop thinking of women as "lesser-males" (or even of males as "Lesser Females"). We all have a masculine and feminine side that we use interchangeably given the situation at hand. Sure men and women are different - but they don't live in different worlds.
(what a fucking ramble)
Is it possible that nurodiverse people can be more creative because they get practice while finding ways to fit into the NT world?
And as to the we don't see the mistakes thing, I think of Lata Mangeshkar. She is a singer in Hindi cinema and does the dubbed in music for actresses who can't sing, and she's able to get most songs down in one or two takes. How? It's because she's recorded over 25,000. When I'm writing and it doesn't sound very good, I just tell myself it's one more step to greatness.
Yes it is personal. Im so sad
I wasn't there so I can't say for certain, but I'm not sure artists feeling guilty about compromising their integrity for money is entirely to do with Capitalism. I mean, the fact that they're referring to money as the source of their problem is 100% capitalism and I'm sure the money itself at least plays a role in it all, but I don't think if we got rid of the money that those feelings would go away, or that they would all stop doing things they felt was compromising.
It doesn't apply across the board, but for the most part in our capitalist societies making more money off of art often equates to reaching either a larger number of people or a more exclusive set of people. One of the hardest parts I have with doing creative work is less about whether or not I'm getting paid and more about the work I'm most proud of all falls into areas with very small demographics. For instance, I don't personally know anybody who's remotely interested in reading essays on temporal mechanics or interpretations of They Might Be Giants lyrics.
But since we're already talking about They Might Be Giants I'd also cite them as an example of artists who have no problem taking jobs doing stuff like commercial jingles or TV theme tunes (both in their own style and in completely different styles entirely dictated by their clients). It doesn't stop them from making their own stuff or affect their personal style at all because those are just jobs to them so they don't need to worry about losing any part of their identity by doing them. I think that's what most artists actually feel guilty and/or sad about when it comes to "selling out". When they make decisions that they feel sacrifices part of their identity in some way. They may do this in exchange for money, yes, but often it's also more importantly in exchange for reaching a wider audience. TMBG don't hide the freelance work they do, but they also don't use those jobs to promote themselves so only people who are already big enough fans to bother looking those projects up ever even know about most of them, which leads me to believe that being able to separate that work from their own probably has something to do with not having to feel guilty about it.
I think there might also be problems involving artists who are well known enough to get certain offers that are based only on their celebrity rather than their actual work, and I can see that as leading somewhere more like the alienation you describe, except that it would be less about being overworked and more about the work itself not even being necessary. I can see that making some people feel just as insecure about the actual value of the work they're most proud of as I do from my tiny demographics. But is already a TL;DR post so I'll just leave that idea there.
I agree. Creativity is not necessarily a ''right'' brain function, nor logic a left brain.
What's, in your opinion, is the best book about neuroscience? I'd love to read about that, but I don't know where to start.
I'm not really sure! I never studied neuroscience! If you find it, do let me know!
Neymow - yeh I'd love to know this too. I do actually have a rambling comment in this comments section that includes a lot on the brain if you want to look for it - but I can't vouch for it's correctness as I am an amatuer in pretty much everything. I've been researching the brain for the past couple of years just in my own free time - looking at sex, gender identity and sexuality mainly but also their impact on cognitive behaviour and consciousness etc. I've mainly been looking at various diagrams of the brain, going through wikipedia, reading magazine articles on line and also delving into science papers and reading excerpts from books published on-line. It's been tough going. It seemed to me that there was a status quo of us all being born as blank slates that I was countering - an idea I think the feminist Germaine Greer upholds and maybe is a characteristic of Neo-liberalism I don't know (probably a bit of a stretch)? For my purposes probably reading "Whipping Girl" by the transsexual activist Julia Serano (who has a Phd in biochemistry) would probably be ideal, but I'd be worried it was dissapointing or naive. Ive found I've come across a lot of political controversy when researching the brain (especially looking at sex and gender identity and I suppse sexuality as well as they are all taboo in a lot of ways). And it feels as though information is protected from mis-use and those in the know keep their cards close to their chest. Hence why I am here I suppose...
Been creative doesn't make you sad .been sad doesn't make you creative. Yes artist get sad for others . And the way thy see the world for what it is .
My fav of the series :D
Couldn't it be that sad people are just more likely to create in order to make sense of a world that has (in making them sad) let them down? And then they continue to create as they continue to feel sad and therefore get a lot of practice? Not to mention confirmation bias playing a part here....
I know anecdotes aren't everything, but in my personal experience, I started writing poetry (really bad poetry, at first) after deciding that I wanted to recover from mental illness. I had to make sense of the world because the understanding that had been given to me by society (that my mental health made me a freak) was rubbish! If I didn't look for a new perspective I don't want to know what would happen next. By writing down my emotions in a way that felt natural to me and then coming back to the draft when I was calmer, I could better understand myself and the world around me.
I imagine art may have developed in order to help people think through things, so doesn't it make sense to view it as such? As just a way to cope with sadness?
To me it works the other way: when I'm sad I need a creative release
well said
& yes trying to keep up with making at least one RUclips video a week is splitting my brain in half.
But I am afraid all of my subscribers will abandon me if I slack off.
Creative ppl have imposter syndrome BC art is coded as "not important" under capitalism... Getting accolades for things that society tells us don't matter is very hard to reckon with
i just uploaded a video today about me leaving my job because of my anxiety. everyone was dissapointed in me, mostly because I was making $800 biweekly but, I just couldn't do it with my anxiety.
Does anyone know where I can get his version of being and nothingness that shows in the background? Can't find it.
I think there is a key component that isn't adressed in this video about why we associate creative people with sad, anxious, depressed or otherwise negatively neurodivergent people. However, you did cover it in the last videos. That would be percieved value. Humans have a strong bias toward information that is negative or threatening. For instance, a story about a character that has a lovely day without conflict where nothing goes wrong is unlikely to sell terribly well. We are interested by conflict and creators who have a unique understanding of conflict, from whatever source, are better able to convey that sense of danger, urgency, sadness or the like through their work, rendering it more valuable.
Jack Lankester Yes, good point. We see this in the news all the time. There are artists out there who aren't as sad. But we won't get as inspired and hold them as highly since they didn't have a hard or sad life to live. But of course, some artists we don't even know the background of and just like them because they're popular or really good. We can only see what is revealed. And if the artist doesn't reveal it much, except for in their biography - even on Wikipedia, for example - then we won't really know their backstory and only judge them for their work.
This also plays into criticism. We may criticise a work we're not satisfied with more if we don't know what went into producing it.
Michelangelo wasn't allowed to make mistakes - with fresco you've only got one chance
Ha lol when he said u may have not realized it liam I jumped
dude thanks so much
My pleasure!
I love your tie🩵
So artistic
A clinical creation and inane measure of madness
Hey so I have a few questions, number one why is it that people don't just disagree with but are straight up hostile towards Marxist/communist ideologies, it's probably a lot more common here in America but I don't understand why. And as someone that doesn't lean either way it's a bit annoying, I don't really understand the material fully (when I was watching your Marx series I was just like, and this is important because? I'll figure out what the deal is eventually). Also I'm wondering when thinking about the world and stuff (vague I know) how do you come up with new stuff (you probably answered this in your how to be creative vid so I'll rewatch that again but hear me out). I feel like whenever I try to talk about something I have to pull from what someone else has said before me and use counter arguments against specifically arguments I've heard get counter argued and only with those exact counter arguments, but whenever someone address a topic from a different angle or rephrases something slightly differently, even if it makes no sense, is straight up wrong, or it is just a repackaged version of the same thing I can't seem to take the new thing, think about it and logically rebut it or explain why I disagree, hopefully that made sense. So how do I think about things that I haven't been spoon fed the answer, I can't seem to think about stuff when I do it in the real world, you know what I mean (probably just because I'm dumb tho).
The romanticisation of drug use and creativity is also dangerous.
I'm here for the dooblidoo
very clever guy💖