The Molecule of More

Pet Sounds
(1966), a critically acclaimed collection of creative music that 

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sounded like nothing that had come before. If artists such 
as Bob Dylan elevated pop and rock lyrics from doggerel 
to poetry, Brian Wilson transformed the possibilities of the 
music itself from three chords and a verse-chorus structure 
to what Beach Boys publicist Derek Taylor is credited with 
calling the “pocket symphony.”
The range of unusual creative connections suggests he 
experienced low latent inhibition associated with high lev-
els of dopamine, but those high levels also may have con-
tributed to Wilson’s mental illness. “He hears voices,” his 
wife Melinda Ledbetter told 
People
magazine in 2012. “I can 
tell if it’s good voices or bad voices by the look that comes 
over his face. For us it’s hard to understand, but for him 
they’re very real.” He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, 
later changed to schizoaffective disorder, a combination of 
symptoms of schizophrenia and abnormal mood, including 
hallucinations and paranoia. In 2006, he told 
Ability
maga-
zine that he started hearing voices at the age of twenty-five, 
a week after he had taken psychedelic drugs. “For the past 
40 years I’ve had auditory hallucinations in my head, all day 
every day, and I can’t get them out. Every few minutes the 
voices say something derogatory to me . . . I believe they 
started picking on me because they are jealous. The voices 
in my head are jealous of me.”
Wilson says that treatment to reduce the symptoms did 
not significantly reduce his creativity. Contrary to popular 
perception, the untreated pain of mental illness is a hin-
drance, not a help. “I used to go for long periods without 
being able to do anything, but now I play every day.”

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THE MOLECULE OF MORE
FURTHER READING
Orendain, S. (2011, December 28). In Philippine slums, capturing light in 
a bottle. NPR All Things Considered. Retrieved from https://www.npr.
org/2011/12/28/144385288/in-philippine-slums-capturing-light-in-a 
-bottle
Nasar, S. (1998). A beautiful mind. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Dement, W. C. (1972). Some must watch while some just sleep. New York: Freeman.
Winerman, L. (2005). Researchers are searching for the seat of creativity and 
problem-solving ability in the brain. Monitor on Psychology, 36(10), 34.
Green, A. E., Spiegel, K. A., Giangrande, E. J., Weinberger, A. B., Gallagher, 
N. M., & Turkeltaub, P. E. (2016). Thinking cap plus thinking zap: tDCS 
of frontopolar cortex improves creative analogical reasoning and facilitates 
conscious augmentation of state creativity in verb generation. Cerebral Cortex, 
27(4), 2628–2639.
Schrag, A., & Trimble, M. (2001). Poetic talent unmasked by treatment of Parkin-
son’s disease. Movement Disorders, 16(6), 1175–1176.
Pinker, S. (2002). Art movements. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 166(2), 224.
Gottesmann, C. (2002). The neurochemistry of waking and sleeping mental activ-
ity: The disinhibition‐dopamine hypothesis. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 
56(4), 345–354.
Scarone, S., Manzone, M. L., Gambini, O., Kantzas, I., Limosani, I., D’Agostino, 
A., & Hobson, J. A. (2008). The dream as a model for psychosis: An experi-
mental approach using bizarreness as a cognitive marker. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 
34(3), 515–522.
Fiss, H., Klein, G. S., & Bokert, E. (1966). Waking fantasies following interruption 
of two types of sleep. Archives of General Psychiatry, 14(5), 543–551.
Rothenberg, A. (1995). Creative cognitive processes in Kekulé’s discovery of
the structure of the benzene molecule. American Journal of Psychology, 108(3), 
419–438.
Barrett, D. (1993). The “committee of sleep”: A study of dream incubation for 
problem solving. Dreaming, 3(2), 115–122.
Root-Bernstein, R., Allen, L., Beach, L., Bhadula, R., Fast, J., Hosey, C., & Pod-
ufaly, A. (2008). Arts foster scientific success: Avocations of Nobel, National 

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Academy, Royal Society, and Sigma Xi members. Journal of Psychology of Sci-