The narrative is interspersed with police and psychological reports, creative writing exercises, letters to Humble in prison from cranks and obsessives, and an extended piece of pulp fiction.
For their arguments, the authors, Tobias J. Moskowitz, a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago, and L. Jon Wertheim, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, have whipped up a recipe that includes statistical analysis, psychological theory, creative sociology and a brash confidence in circumstantial evidence.
Psychological studies of creative individuals' behavioral dispositions suggest that creative scientists share certain personality traits, including confidence, openness, dominance, independence, introversion, as well as arrogance and hostility.
She explored a theory of the psychological similarities between creative artists and mentally disturbed people.
Yet "When God Talks Back" is remarkable for combining creative psychological analysis with a commitment to understanding evangelicals not merely as a scholar's specimens, but on their own terms.
They proposed that bipolarity is the result of exaggerated biological energy that augments homeostatic oscillatory and creative psychological processes.
Ms. Gomez's real adulthood gambit might not be musical, or creative, but psychological.
In fact, he spends the entire volume, which ends when he's roughly 23, at a creative and psychological impasse.
From edible water bottles to yoghurt encased in fruit-flavoured skins, the packaging industry is getting creative, but psychological barriers persist.
But, in cases where talent is accompanied by real psychological disturbance, do the creative benefits really outweigh the costs to the individual?
