If you tend to brood and your family and friends claim you're neurotic, you may also be a creative genius, says a new paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

While many geniuses, such as Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, and Virginia Wolfe have left legacies that make them household names, they led miserable, tortured lives.

Why do creativity and genius seem to go hand-in-hand? Psychologists at King's College London may know the answer.

They believe that the part of the brain responsible for original thought (creativity) is also highly active in neuroticism, a fundamental personality trait that is characterized by a negative emotional state that includes fear, anxiety, moodiness, frustration, and loneliness.

People who score high on neuroticism in personality tests tend to have negative thoughts and feelings of all types, and they are more likely to experience psychiatric disorders.

In the 1970s, British psychologist Jeffrey Gray proposed that such individuals have a heightened sensitivity to threat after observing how anti-anxiety drugs reduced the sensitivity of rodents to cues of punishment, and also helped to relax and liven up psychiatric patients.

"Gray had a useful and logical theory, but the problem is that it doesn't account for the full spectrum of neuroticism — it's pretty difficult to explain neuroticism in terms of magnified threat perception because high scorers often feel unhappy in situations where there is no threat at all," says paper lead author Adam Perkins, a personality researcher at King's College London.

"The second problem is, there's literature showing neuroticism scores are positively correlated with creativity; and so why should having a magnified view of threat objects make you good at coming up with new ideas?"

Perkins' new theory came after seeing MRI brain scans of people who had spontaneous negative thoughts, a key characteristic of neuroticism.

The scans showed greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area that is associated with conscious perception of threat and also with creativity.

Perkins realized that differences in some people of the activity of these brain circuits that govern self-generated thought (creativity) could be an explanation for neuroticism.

The increased activity causes the tendency to switch to "panic" mode sooner than average people, which means "a person can experience intense negative emotions even when there's no threat present," says Perkins.

"This could mean that for specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active imagination, which acts as a built-in threat generator."

It's two sides of the same coin: The same area of the brain that's responsible for the negative aspects of neuroticism is also responsible for the spark of creative genius that can occur in people who are neurotic.