Creative Thinking in Tourette's Syndrome: An Uncharted Topic

This opinion article discusses the literature about creativity in patients with Tourette Syndrome (TS) and provides some suggestions about how this topic might be further exploited. TS is a neurodevelopmental disorder, with an onset occurring before the age of 18 (Robertson, 2011). The main symptom is the presence of tics, of which one or multiple sound tics and multiple motor tics (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). TS is associated with other potential impairments, such as cognitive anomalies, physical pain, impairment in daily activities, emotional and behavioral problems (Cavanna et al., 2013; Morand-Beaulieu et al., 2017). Despite these problems, high levels of creativity have been reported in TS patients. Examples of eminent individuals, e.g., W. A. Mozart (Ashoori and Jankovic, 2007), allegedly affected by TS, have been described (Szejko et al., 2019). On these premises, researchers studied more recent cases of TS patients showing creative aptitudes and measured the average levels of creative skills in samples of TS patients, to speculate about the reasons why these patients excel in creativity.