The eccentricity of the creative mind

World Bodypainting Festival
A participant from France poses with her body paintings designed by French bodypainting artists Johanna Soegeng during the 15th World Bodypainting Festival in Poertschach on July 8, 2012.
ALEXANDER KLEIN/AFP/Getty Images

Have you noticed that a lot of the most creative people you know are also a bit eccentric? That's not a coincidence - there's neuroscience that backs it up. From Emily Dickinson to Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs, we look at the link between creativity and eccentricity.

Shelley Carson, research psychologist and lecturer at Harvard University, will join The Daily Circuit Wednesday to discuss the creative mind.

"The incidence of strange behavior by highly creative individuals seems too extensive to be the result of mere coincidence," Carson wrote for Scientific American. "As far back as ancient Greece, both Plato and Aristotle made comments about the peculiar behavior of poets and playwrights. More than a century ago Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso catalogued the bizarre behavior of creative luminaries in his book 'The Man of Genius' and attributed this behavior to the same hereditary 'degeneration' that marked violent criminals."

Rex Jung , assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, will also join the discussion.

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VIDEO: Rex Jung on creativity and the brain

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