People who are creative are suffering from schizophrenia or people suffering from schizophrenia are creative. As a matter of fact, either of the conditions given above is not true or may be true but a new research now shows that creative people and people diagnosed with schizophrenia, both share similar dopamine systems in the brain.

Dopamine, along with serotonin, is a key neurotransmitter - chemicals that are vital to transmitting messages via nerve cells in the brain.

"We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia," Fredrik Ullen, associate professor at Karolinska Institute's department of women's and children's health in Stockholm, said in a news release.

Working with schizophrenia patients and healthy individuals who were deemed creative after completing psychological testing that focused on problem-solving, Ullen and his team gleaned their finding, which was published online May 17 in PLoS One.

The study showed that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less-creative people. Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity.

Creative people, therefore, might gain from having fewer D2 receptors because an abridged amount of filtering would decipher into a higher flow of information, the study team speculated.

In turn, this might explain why creative individuals tend to come upon less obvious solutions to problems and, for similar reasons, why the mentally handicapped might also tend to reach "outside the box" in favor of relatively novel associations.