Creativity, the Hypomanic Edge, and the Genomic Blind Spot

Before I moved into population and evolutionary genetics, I spent a few years working on behavior genetics and individual differences. One of the questions that interested me most was one that sits awkwardly between psychology and folklore: why does creativity so often seem to cluster near unusual temperaments? The cliché of the “mad genius” is overused, but clichés usually survive because they distort something real. The interesting question was not whether madness produces genius. It was whether some of the traits that make minds unusual also make them more generative. That question led to a paper I published in 2014 on the personality and cognitive correlates of creative achievement.

The paper was small and I would not oversell it today. It involved 96 participants, most of them students, and used a battery that included the Big Five, temperament measures from the short TEMPS-A, schizotypy-related scales, divergent thinking tasks, a very short Remote Associates Test (RAT), and the Creative Achievement Questionnaire. Still, I think it asked the right question. I was not only interested in whether “creative people are high in openness,” which was already well known. I wanted to know whether artistic and scientific creativity might rest on somewhat different psychological foundations.

Openness to experience was the broadest and most consistent predictor. It was positively associated with ideational fluency, with artistic achievement, and with overall creative achievement. That part fit the existing literature nicely. However, when I extracted broader personality factors, the clearest extra predictive signal beyond the Big Five appeared for CAQ Science, not for CAQ Art. In the discussion, I interpreted one of those factors as closer to impulsivity or dominance, and it drew together low conscientiousness, hypomania, unconventionality, risk taking, aggression, and impulsivity. Scientific creative achievement also related more strongly to RAT performance than to simple fluency, whereas artistic achievement related more to ideational fluency. In other words, artistic and scientific creativity did not seem to live in exactly the same psychological neighborhood.

That, to me, was always the cool part of the paper. The point was not just that creative people are curious, imaginative, and open. The point was that scientific creativity seemed to sit a little closer to an activated, mildly hypomanic-spectrum temperament profile. Not full-blown pathology. Not romantic nonsense about suffering as the source of genius. Something more specific: energy, approach motivation, reduced inhibition, nonconformity, and the tendency to push into novelty rather than shrink from it.

What has happened since then is that the literature has become both more cautious and, in a way, more supportive. The most important paper for framing this is Baas, Nijstad, Boot, and De Dreu’s 2016 Psychological Bulletin review, Mad Genius Revisited. Their core argument was that the literature looks contradictory only because people lump together very different forms of psychopathology. They distinguish approach-based vulnerabilities, such as positive schizotypy and bipolar risk, from avoidance-based vulnerabilities, such as anxiety, depressive mood, and negative schizotypy. Their meta-analytic results fit that distinction: risk of bipolar disorder, including hypomanic and manic liability, was positively associated with creativity, whereas depressive mood showed a weak negative association.

Baas et al. suggest that some forms of creativity benefit from a temperamental style that increases exploration, broadens associative search, and lowers the threshold for trying unusual ideas. That is much closer to what I thought I was picking up in 2014 with the combination of hypomanic-spectrum temperament, impulsive nonconformity, risk taking, and scientific creative achievement.

Later work on bipolarity and creativity points in the same general direction, though in a more modest tone. A 2023 review and meta-analysis by Forthmann and colleagues focusing specifically on bipolar disorder and creative cognitive potential, usually measured by divergent thinking, reported a small overall positive relationship and found that results varied by bipolar status, with euthymic and subclinical presentations looking more creativity-compatible than depressive states. That is exactly the sort of nuance the old “mad genius” cliché usually misses: the link, when it exists, seems to involve activated or subclinical states much more than debilitating ones.

A 2024 review by Mathias Benedek adds another useful correction. It argues that creative potential, including divergent thinking, explains only limited variance in actual creative achievement and that the path from potential to achievement is mediated by behavior, expertise, environmental support, and domain specificity. That fits my own old results rather well. In the 2014 paper, ideational fluency mattered, but it did not simply turn into real-world achievement across all domains. Scientific achievement related more to RAT-like associative problem solving, artistic achievement more to fluency, and the personality profile mattered differently across domains. Creativity in the lab and creativity in the world are related, but they are not the same thing.

So far, so good. One can tell a reasonably coherent story. Openness is the broad base trait. Scientific and artistic creativity differ. Mildly hypomanic or approach-oriented temperamental traits may sometimes help, particularly in forms of creativity that reward drive, novelty seeking, and boundary pushing. The literature is not tidy, but it is no longer as confused as it once seemed.

And this is where things become frustrating from a genomics perspective.

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The GWAS Blind Spot

This is where the story becomes genuinely frustrating from a genomics perspective. It is no longer literally true that creativity has been ignored altogether by molecular genetics. There is at least one GWAS based on psychometric creativity measures, but it analyzed only about 4,664 Han Chinese participants after exclusions—far too small for a trait that is almost certainly highly polygenic.

There is also now a much larger 2024 study, but its solution to the phenotype problem is revealing. It does not measure creativity directly with divergent-thinking tasks, the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, or anything comparably rich. Instead, it uses occupational creativity: people are classified into artistic, scientific, or managerial “creative occupations” based on job codes, and a continuous “creative achievement” variable is built from three O*NET items about how much originality, idea fluency, and creative thinking the occupation requires. That is clever as a scaling strategy, but it is also a weak substitute for the thing psychologists usually mean by creativity. It is closer to the genetics of sorting into jobs that are labeled creative than to the genetics of creativity itself.

That is why I still think there is a real blind spot here. The small study is closer to the phenotype but badly underpowered. The large study has the power, but the phenotype is poor. Even that 2024 paper acknowledges both the domain-specificity problem and the statistical limits of the current literature, and notes that creativity phenotypes are highly polygenic.

What makes this harder to excuse is that the phenotype problem is real, but not insurmountable. We are not dealing with some trait so elusive that it cannot be measured outside a laboratory. The Creative Achievement Questionnaire was explicitly designed to be objective, empirically valid, and easy to administer and score. It is imperfect, of course, but it is a far more direct measure of real-world creative output than classifying someone as creative because of their occupation code.

So the real issue is not that no one has ever tried. It is that modern genomics has still not produced what one would actually want: a large, well-powered GWAS of direct creativity phenotypes—creative achievement, divergent thinking, scientific originality, artistic production—rather than occupational proxies. That absence is odd given the enormous cultural interest in genius and originality, and given how easy it would be to add at least a brief self-report creative-achievement instrument to large cohorts.

And the stakes are not trivial. If the genetics of creativity were understood even modestly well, the consequences would extend beyond psychology into education, talent identification, and eventually reproductive decision-making. That is precisely why this blind spot matters. Creativity is one of the traits most tightly bound up with human progress, yet at the molecular level we still understand it much more poorly than many adjacent traits.