Fine Line Revealed Between Creativity and Insanity - Yahoo! News: "The link between creativity and psychosis has largely been based on anecdotal evidence and correlation studies. The Vanderbilt study is the first to investigate the creative process experimentally using brain-imaging techniques.
The researchers defined creativity as the ability to generate something new and useful from existing products or ideas.
'Creativity at its base is associative,' Folley told LiveScience. 'It's taking things that you might see and pass by everyday and using them in a novel way to solve a new problem.'
The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal control subjects."

The scans showed that both sides of the brain in all three groups were active when making novel associations. However, in the brains of schizotypes, the activation of the right hemisphere was much higher compared to brains of the control subjects.


Folley speculates that what may be happening is that schizotypes may either have more access to the right hemisphere than the average population or there may be more efficient communication between the two hemispheres