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Having a few personal quirks or feeling at odds in social situations may not be such bad things after all, according to the findings of a new U.S. study.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University say those who exhibit odd behaviour may also be more likely to excel creatively.

The study looked at people with schizotypal personalities – people who exhibit odd behaviour or language but are not psychotic or schizophrenic – and found evidence that those individuals may be more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic people.

“The idea that schizotypes have enhanced creativity has been out there for a long time, but no one has investigated the behavioural manifestations and their neural correlates experimentally,” psychologist Brad Foley, who conducted the experiment alongside colleague Sohee Park, said in a report published on the university's Web site.

“Our paper is unique because we investigated the creative process experimentally and we also looked at the blood flow in the brain while research subjects were undergoing creative tasks.”

Psychologists now believe famously creative people like Emily Dickinson and Vincent Van Gogh may have had schizotypal personalities.

The research conducted by Mr. Foley and Ms. Park involved two separate tests designed to compare the creative thinking of schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal control subjects.

In the first, the subjects were shown a variety of common household objects and were asked to come up with new uses for them. The results showed schizotypes were best at suggesting new uses for the objects, while the other two groups performed at a level similar to one another.

During the second test, subjects were asked to perform a basic control task while again thinking up new uses for everyday objects. Researchers then monitored activity in their prefrontal lobes using brain scanning techniques.

The findings of that test showed that all groups used both hemispheres of the brain for creative tasks, but the activation of the right hemisphere was greater among schizotypal people.

“The researchers believe that the results offer support for the idea that schizotypes and other psychoses-prone populations draw on the left and right sides of their brains differently than the average population and that this bilateral use of the brain for a variety of tasks may be related to their enhanced creativity,” the Vanderbilt report said.

The study was published in the on-line journal Schizophrenia Research and was funded by grants from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.