The Null Device blog: Marriage kills creativity, criminality

Scientists prove that marriage kills creativity; working from a database of bigraphies of scientists, they discovered that creative genius gets turned off like a tap as soon as one marries and settles down; much the same thing applies to geniuses in music, painting and writing. The good news is that criminality suffers much the same fate (which suggests something like what Greg Egan termed the Clockwork Orange Hypothesis; that genius and criminality or violence are interrelated). The decline in testosterone levels after a man settles down is believed to be related; it is unclear, though, whether the study was performed exclusively on men or on both men and women.

Though that may be why all the well-known writers and artists out of their 20s have rocky relationship histories; perhaps they're just the ones who escaped domestication?

There are 4 comments on "Marriage kills creativity, criminality":

Posted by: mitch http:// Sun Jul 13 05:05:08 2003

Maybe it's the other way around (lack of imagination causes marriage).

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Sun Jul 13 14:32:09 2003

Heh; that too.

Though does that mean that artists and scientists who marry are simply reacting in the most natural way to having burned out?

Posted by: Lisa Williams http://www.cadence90.com Tue Jul 22 03:56:32 2003

Is this just for men? I only wrote my first book *after* I got married.

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com/ Tue Jul 22 15:23:27 2003

I'd say it's more lack of time; when you're in your twenties and single, you've got a lot more time to mess around with your projects.