The idea of the 'tortured artist' is a cliché, but one that may have some backing in science, according to a new theory of how the brain generates unnecessarily negative thoughts.
A UK-based psychologist say he has found evidence linking neuroticism and the ability to think outside the square – something that links minds as disparate as Kurt Cobain, Vincent van Gogh, Isaac Newton and Woody Allen.
In a paper published today in journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Adam Perkins, a personality researcher at King's College London, argues the widely accepted explanation of why creative types often struggle with anxiety and neuroticism doesn't make sense.
"The most popular explanation for why people are neurotic comes from British psychologist Jeffrey Gray, who proposed in the 1970s that such individuals have a heightened sensitivity to threat," says Dr Perkins.
"Why should having a magnified view of threat objects make you good at coming up with new ideas?"
Dr Parkins had a "eureka moment" after coming across a study which showed patients in MRI machines who experienced spontaneous negative thoughts also showed greater activity in a part of the brain known to deal with perception of threats.
"It occurred to me that if you happen to have a preponderance of negatively hued self-generated thoughts due to high levels of spontaneous activity in the parts of the medial prefrontal cortex that govern conscious perception of threat, and you also have a tendency to switch to panic sooner than average people… then that means you can experience intense negative emotions even when there's no threat present," he says.
"This could mean that for specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active imagination, which acts as a built-in threat generator."
Essentially, people who are better at coming up with ways everything could go wrong are more creative in general.
Neurotics' tendency to dwell on problems could also explain how they're able to achieve things others can't, says Dr Perkins.
"The creativity of Isaac Newton and other neurotics may simply be the result of their tendency to dwell on problems far longer than average people. 'I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light,' Newton once said of his problem-solving method."
Dr Perkins hopes his hypothesis helps neurotic people understand what they might think of as a bane, has its benefits too.
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