EN
The stereotype of “mad genius” appears in our culture from time to time, having an influence on public thinking, biographies, arts, and sciences. The image of famous persons who simultaneously display eminent talent and achievement, suffering, oddness, and sometimes destructivity elicits fear, attraction, and admiration in common people. In the past decade, we witnessed a paradigm shift in the research of creativity and psychopathology; instead of the assessment of rare examples of eminent per-sons with labels of psychiatric diagnoses, schizotypal, affective, and autistic spectrum traits were evaluated in the general population in order to elucidate the relationship between common “psychopathology” and everyday creativity. Beyond the more and more sophisticated statistical characterization of the predictors of creative achievement, this new approach opens a door to the functional brain imaging and molecular genetic analysis of the complex phenotype of creativity.