A joint research team of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital (SNUBH) and Sung Kyun Kwan University (SKKU)-Samsung Medical Center (SMC) has released the results of a genetic study on the relationship between creativity and mental disorders.

Professor Myung Woo-jae at the Department of Neuropsychiatry at SNUBH, and Professor Won Hong-hee of Samsung Advanced Institute for Health Sciences and Technology (SAIHST) at SKKU and SMC led the study. Three SAIHST researchers -- Kim Hye-jin, Ahn Ye-eun, and Yoon Ju-hyun – joined Professor Won,

According to researchers, creativity is the ability to discover new ideas or concepts or combine existing ideas or concepts to create something new. It's considered an essential skill in many professions that require original thinking, including art, architecture, and science.

On the other hand, creativity is also known to be strongly associated with mental disorders. Historically, many scientists and artists who are considered geniuses have suffered from mental illness. Several observational studies have reported that depression and bipolar disorder are common in families of artists.

To determine the genetic makeup associated with creativity and mental disorders, the researchers analyzed data from 351 occupations of over 240,000 Europeans in the U.K. Biobank using machine learning techniques to assess their level of engagement in creative roles.

Using various genomic studies, including a genome-wide association study, the researchers identified 25 genetic variants associated with occupation-based creativity scores. The variants may affect brain tissue expression, particularly in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex.

According to the researchers, this is a remarkable achievement because it reveals the complex link between creativity and psychiatric disorders at the genomic level. A significant proportion of the genetic variants associated with creativity were also associated with psychiatric disorders; for example, creativity and depression shared 96 percent of their genetic variation.

However, it's also worth noting that the genetic variants didn't always affect creativity and mental disorders in the same direction.

This finding is different from the myth that people with mental disorders are more creative or that creative people are more susceptible to mental disorders, the researchers said. Revealing the mechanisms by which the same genetic variants work differently in different individuals could provide important clues to understanding the genetics of creativity and mental disorders, they added.

However, the researchers noted that the genetic factors identified in the study can only explain about 7.5 percent of the total variation in creativity, and it is not possible to predict an individual's creativity based on their findings.

"Not only did we find a molecular biological cause for creativity, but our findings also expand our understanding of mental disorders that share many genetic variations with creativity," Professor Myung said.

Professor Won said, "Existing measures of creativity have been limited by the difficulty of applying them to large-scale cohort studies. This study is significant because we defined creativity based on occupational survey results and machine learning models of a large cohort of hundreds of thousands of participants, enabling large-scale genetic analysis."

The study was supported by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Research Foundation's Mid-Career Research Support Program for Basic Research, the Young and Mid-Career Linkage Project, the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Ministry of Science and ICT's Dementia Overcoming Research and Development Project, and the Seoul National University Department of Healthcare Convergence and SNUBH's Joint Research Project.

The study was published in the latest issue of the international psychiatry journal Psychiatry Research (Impact Factor=11.3).