单项选择题

Passage Six There may be a link between creativity and mental disorders, but it is probably not in the way that you think. There is a widespread highly romanticized belief that madness somehow heightens creative genius among artists, writers, and musicians. And that may be because we romanticize the idea of artistic inspiration. As with mental disorders, there is something mysterious and unexplainable about the creative process. But all significant creative leaps have two very important components: talent and technique. By far the most universal and necessary aspect of technique is dogged persistence, which is anything but romantic. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, best known psychologist for his work on flow, says despite the carefree air that many creative people effect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Even acknowledged creative geniuses find that endurance must follow intuition. Follow-through is critical to the realization of an idea. Robert Root-Bernstein, another observer of the creative process, points out: "If the writer doesn’t sit at the computer every day, the muse is not going to visit." Even having ideas can take a great deal of discipline. Discipline is not a hallmark of minds in the throes of emotional distress. Nevertheless, depression strikes artists ten times more often than it does the general population. The link, however, is not creativity. Artists are more likely to be self-reflective and to think things through. And that thinking style -- as opposed to creativity itself-- is a hallmark of depression and commonly leads to it. Evidence that madness does nothing to heighten creative genius comes from a study done by psychologist Robert Weisberg. He studied in detail Robert Schumann, the great composer, who was known to endure bouts of manic depression that drove him to attempt suicide. Indeed, Schumann wrote a great deal of music during his manic intervals. But quantity is one thing and quality is another. Weisberg found that Schumann’s compositional output indeed swelled during his manic years, but the average quality of his efforts did not change. Mania "jacks up the energy level," Weisberg points out, "but it doesn’t give the person access to ideas that he or she wouldn’t have had otherwise." It’s entirely possible, Weisberg notes, that the elevated rates of mental disorders among artistic geniuses result from their creative lifestyle, which hardly provides emotional stability. Many artists struggle against poverty and public indifference in their lifetime. And if they do indeed produce works that are acclaimed, they could succumb to the overwhelming pressure to live up to their earlier successes. Based on the first two paragraphs, the author is trying to focus our attention on________