Jordan Peterson (UofT) and Shelly Carson (Harvard) and their colleagues have put a new spin on an old question in looking for a biological fine-line between creativity and mental illness. The key appears to lay in the phenomenon of latent inhibition, the ability of the brain to ignore 'irrelevent' events ...

"The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."

... and I'll add to that an observation on how autistic children, long thought to be somehow maladjustedly beyond genius, can't leave the object alone and become tangled in the infinity of plurabilities --- The Peterson/Carson conjecture may also have something to say about the popularity of recreational psychotropics and the concurrent rise in popularity of even the most bizarre cults:

"It appears likely that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought might predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishment under others."

For example, during the early stages of diseases such as schizophrenia, which are often accompanied by feelings of deep insight, mystical knowledge and religious experience, chemical changes take place in which latent inhibition disappears.

False Mystic Syndrome®

Interesting. Do you suppose the same mechanism may give rise the Californialand phenomenon? Perhaps the induced pseudo-rapture of a deep LI trough may become pavlovially paired to all sorts of cultural artifacts and oddities; -- the subjective perception of a drop in the LI might have something to say about a whole family of pseudo-mystical experiences ...

for which I hereby stake my copyright claim to the zero-PageRanked diagnostic designation: False Mystic Syndrome® ... aye, put that in your DSM-IV and light it!

There are some other possible practical applications too: their work may provide some validation to the ancient art of zazen where we observed no attenuation of the electrical brain reaction to a repeated regular click stimulus [Hirai 1966] [Hardt 1994] confirming what I've long believed about zazen and a large family of meditation experiences in general, namely that it can improve the person, but by itself is no guarantee of intellectual success (or of ethical development) because the effacy of the technique depends on other independent factors:

The authors hypothesize that latent inhibition may be positive when combined with high intelligence and good working memory - the capacity to think about many things at once - but negative otherwise.

And perhaps then, where the LI drop is induced (psychotropically or otherwise) outside of that narrow exceptional strata of humanity, far from truly improving the person's faculties, the therapist/guru/teacher is actually, biologically, inducing a Californialand FMS experience (which they can then leverage for their own profit).