Originality and Psychosis

Psychosis and originality are more similar than is apparent. The formation of an original idea involves blending knowledge or emotion from previous events into a new, albeit derived, idea. It is the synthesis of an idea that is both novel and comprehensible to others. A delusion, a common symptom of psychosis, is formed by blending knowledge and emotion into a new, but derived, feeling. The only two differences between delusions and imagination are that delusions are emotional, not logical, and that an imagined idea can be conveyed to another, who can understand it, while a delusion can never really be understood by anyone but the deluded individual. So perhaps genius and madness are not so far from each other as is commonly thought.

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