Andreasen ends her essay on creativity with a quotation from A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Nash, a mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in Economics and who had schizophrenia: Nasar describes a visit Nash received from a fellow mathematician while institutionalized at McLean Hospital. “How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical truth,” the colleague asked, “believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?” To which Nash replied: “Because the
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