The Quirky Habits of Certified Science Geniuses (bbc.com) 190
dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Celebrated inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla swore by toe exercises -- every night, he'd repeatedly "squish" his toes, 100 times for each foot, according to the author Marc J Seifer. While it's not entirely clear exactly what that exercise involved, Tesla claimed it helped to stimulate his brain cells. The most prolific mathematician of the 20th Century, Paul Erdos, preferred a different kind of stimulant: amphetamine, which he used to fuel 20-hour number benders. When a friend bet him $500 that he couldn't stop for a month, he won but complained "You've set mathematics back a month." Newton, meanwhile, bragged about the benefits of celibacy. When he died in 1727, he had transformed our understanding of the natural world forever and left behind 10 million words of notes; he was also, by all accounts, still a virgin (Tesla was also celibate, though he later claimed he fell in love with a pigeon). It's common knowledge that sleep is good for your brain -- and Einstein took this advice more seriously than most. He reportedly slept for at least 10 hours per day -- nearly one and a half times as much as the average American today (6.8 hours). But can you really slumber your way to a sharper mind? Many of the world's most brilliant scientific minds were also fantastically weird. From Pythagoras' outright ban on beans to Benjamin Franklin's naked "air baths," the path to greatness is paved with some truly peculiar habits.
You don't have to crazy to be a genius (Score:3)
Re:You don't have to crazy to be a genius (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember taking a left brain / right brain test in high school and the teacher saying that the only people who scored equal on both sides tended to be either genius or mentally retarded. Whether it is autism, schizophrenia, creativity, or something else, if you want to "think outside the box" then being on the fringe is to your advantage. It doesn't surprise me that great thinkers were far outside the box. The trick is being far outside the box without being so far out that you're unstable. Many great thinkers, artists, etc.. were fairly unstable but still managed to hold it together well enough to give us some novel ideas.
On a somewhat related note, I have a personal theory that the spike in autism is being caused by smart people having children. If intelligence is "balancing on the brink of insanity", then two people on the brink who reproduce sometimes causes their offspring to be over the edge.
Re:You don't have to crazy to be a genius (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:You don't have to crazy to be a genius (Score:4, Informative)
I thought autism was caused by blond actresses who saw something on TV and then convinced like-minded dolts to stop vaccinating their sproggs.
Re:You don't have to crazy to be a genius (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's what causes pandemics.
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Your personal theory is a published study. Mostly aspergers, but a prof looked into it and his theory is that since most people are marrying later, they are also marrying people in their fields. So instead of marrying a random girl from town, you're marrying someone that could also be intelligent and have low level autism.
Do you have a link to that study? I've seen from personal experience that most people I know with autistic kids tend to be highly intelligence and it makes sense that it could be some kind of "inbreeding" type characteristic especially considering that it's spiking in places like Silicon Valley but I have yet to see anything but conjecture on the topic.
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Albert Einstein didn't speak till he was more than 5 years old either. There was nothing wrong with him.
Sure there was. He married his first-cousin. Hell, he left his wife for his first-cousin.
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And what is wrong with that?
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Albert Einstein didn't speak till he was more than 5 years old either. There was nothing wrong with him.
Sure there was. He married his first-cousin. Hell, he left his wife for his first-cousin.
So what? Even fucking a direct sibling and producing offspring isn't bad unless you've already got bad genes.
You're just slowing your genetic drift, which is often desired.
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Re:You don't have to crazy to be a genius (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember taking a left brain / right brain test in high school and the teacher saying that the only people who scored equal on both sides tended to be either genius or mentally retarded. Whether it is autism, schizophrenia, creativity, or something else, if you want to "think outside the box" then being on the fringe is to your advantage. It doesn't surprise me that great thinkers were far outside the box. The trick is being far outside the box without being so far out that you're unstable. Many great thinkers, artists, etc.. were fairly unstable but still managed to hold it together well enough to give us some novel ideas.
On a somewhat related note, I have a personal theory that the spike in autism is being caused by smart people having children. If intelligence is "balancing on the brink of insanity", then two people on the brink who reproduce sometimes causes their offspring to be over the edge.
I'd even take it a step further. It's their obsessiveness about that one thing. There are many people in this world that are dedicated to their work. They work hard, work all nighters, get stressed, study, etc... but there are very, very, very few people in this world so obsessed with a *SINGLE* topic that almost literally consumes them, all day, every day, for years and years. To the point they're not just neglecting themselves, they often consider their bodies a physical nuisance. They also shun everything else that doesn't seem important, like spending social time with others, what other people think, eating, cleaning, other mundane tasks. If you could free your mind of those things and spend every waking second on a single topic, then it should be no surprise one would argue that you already have clinical issues. Most of us are not wired to do that, we'd probably psychologically break down instead of thriving like these guys.
Re:You don't have to crazy to be a genius (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with this argument is that some of the geniuses under discussion were polymath generalists, not specialists in one thing. And even with the specialists, people like Tesla and Erdos covered an enormous range of topics within their specialization. The common factor with most of them is an enormous amount of energy bordering on mania, coupled with enough intelligence to make productive use of it instead of repeatedly rearranging the dishes in the kitchen at 3am.
I suspect that our knowing about their weird habits is just a side-effect of self-confidence in some (Newton, Franklin), and an utter disregard for social convention (Tesla, Erdos) in others. Lots of people have weird habits -- and I'm looking at YOU, fellow Slashdot users -- but prefer to be discreet about them.
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You're sort of saying they're monks but in a different way than most would consider?
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You do have to be an outlier to get noticed. If you go around doing what everybody else does, you'll blend in to the background, and you also won't be doing anything terribly novel or intriguing.
Makes sense that discovery comes from people who are different.
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You do have to be an outlier to get noticed. If you go around doing what everybody else does, you'll blend in to the background, and you also won't be doing anything terribly novel or intriguing.
Makes sense that discovery comes from people who are different.
Pretty much agree about the differentness getting people noticed. But it's the differentness, not the genius. The entire article sounds like some racist screed about how Dark Skinned People from Africa are stronger but dumb, or the sexist bullshit that wimminfolk can't do serious work because they go crazy every month.
Sorry everyone, but genius comes in all shapes and forms. And some of them live in McMansions in the suburbs, and enjoy football games. Just like "normal people".
And some remarkably obtus
I'm not odd, I'm a genius! (Score:5, Funny)
But remember kids, you cannot omit that genius part. Without, carrying a blanket around and calling it your waifu only makes you a weirdo.
Re:I'm not odd, I'm a genius! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm not odd, I'm a genius! (Score:4, Insightful)
We're all eccentric, only nobody cares about investigating our eccentricities.
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But remember kids, you cannot omit that genius part. Without, carrying a blanket around and calling it your waifu only makes you a weirdo.
Everybody is somebody's weirdo.
The Search for the Philosopher's Stone (Score:4, Insightful)
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Newton's fascination with mercury may have helped his insights - for a short time.
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Not "sunbathing", exactly: he seems to have done it indoors, sitting in front of an open window to get fresh air.
Going nekkid at home probably wasn't all that unusual, given that clothing was a significant expense...and Victorianism was still in the future.
Favism (Score:5, Interesting)
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Pythagoras ban's on fava beans can be traced back to his having favism [wikipedia.org].
Farting in rich primary colors, shocking your fellow French artists.
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Old hat (Score:5, Insightful)
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I am autistic and have ADHD. Before I started taking ADHD medication (when diagnosed at 33 for autism and ADHD, a few months ago), OCD was life. But I handled the OCD in a different way -- rather than looping about a single topic, I was able
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Re:Old hat (Score:4, Funny)
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In other words, a lot of geniuses were probably autistic or had other conditions we generally consider to be 'mental illness.'
I'm sure a few were somewhere on the spectrum but I don't see any reason to think they had what we'd consider mental illnesses.
Individuals with exceptionally high intelligence don't tend to integrate fully into society, and society's reaction is largely to consider them broken. As a great philosopher once said, "Only shooting stars break the mold."
I think that's close, but misses the mark. Most of us have oddities and quirks, but we tend to suppress them because we want friends and jobs. A crazy hat is fine up until you realize the girl you like doesn't dig it.
But when you're successful enough everybody already wants to be your friend so there's no need to normalize, in fact those weird little habits just become part of your
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Well, autism itself is considered a mental illness by the DSM, and the incidence of things like schizophrenia and dyslexia is significantly higher in certain fields.
An
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With no intellectual equals among the adult population, they are feral humans who grew up among children [mamensa.org].
There have been perhaps a few thousands of true humans, and everybody else is just a trainable animal.
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Re:Old hat (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a research psychiatrist (who I cannot remember now) who has been researching recovery. He is finding the best thing for a survivor for trauma is finding someone who is non-judgemental even tempered person and just hanging with them does wonders.
That's really interesting.
I wonder if that was gender based. I've read and listened to some work that while women are helped by talk, that men are best helped by something similar to what you note, hanging with some other guys, doing some stuff, maybe performing some sort of shared labor. It sounds odd, but I know that many men after some loss or trauma, will throw themselves into their work. The women in their lives often accuse them of not facing their grief, but it could possibly just be a mental difference between the two sexes.
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AC just proved parent's point. Great job, kid, that was one in a million!
The only difference... (Score:2, Insightful)
The only difference between brilliance and insanity is success.
Re:The only difference... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not at all. Most insanity is destructive. These people are/were not insane at all. They just did not give a damn what others think. The average human being, however, is so focused on what others think that they can regularly not even recognize clear nonsense. The critical characteristic needed for making mental breakthroughs is not high intelligence. That one, a lot of people have. It is the ability to use it independently and most people (even most highly intelligent ones) fail at that completely. Intelligence does not help if you do not use it.
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Seems easily explainable without the genius tag (Score:5, Interesting)
I see two distinct, yet likely, possibilities.
1. They were all autistic. Autists don't like change and tend to develop rituals and patterns, such as hammering your feet before bedtime or closing/opening the door 9 times before going through. Autists are sometimes also very sharp (though faaar from all of them) when they manage to focus their behavioral patterns on logical problems.
2. This is visibility bias. We are all quirky in some way, but not all of us invented relativity theory. I have a friend that sleeps 11+ hours a day, but she's not a genius, so no-one cares. I had a friend that only ate cereal, but she wasn't a genius so no-one cared. Looking back, most of my friends have had some quirk or other, and I'm guessing that if I spent some time digging I'd find that everyone has at least one. So, these geniuses aren't special on the quirk side, they are simply the ones we notice because they're 'famous'. I bet you all know of some unique quirk belonging to your favorite actor/actress, not because they're quirky, but because they're covered by the press 24/7 in detail.
Re:Seems easily explainable without the genius tag (Score:4, Funny)
You don't have to sleep 10+ hours to be a genius. Take a look at my cousin. He sleeps 16 hours a day and don't know shit!
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Autism has nothing to do with celibacy, using meth, running around naked outside, sleeping 10 hours a night and not eating beans because nobody understands what glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency is, so your first possibility is distinctly unlikely.
Your second possibility, on the other hand, is absolutely on point.
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Autism has nothing to do with celibacy, using meth, running around naked outside, sleeping 10 hours a night and not eating beans because nobody understands what glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency is
Maybe not directly, but Autism is strongly correlated with most of those things... except maybe the meth.
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Autism has nothing to do with celibacy, using meth, running around naked outside, sleeping 10 hours a night and not eating beans because nobody understands what glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency is
Maybe not directly, but Autism is strongly correlated with most of those things... except maybe the meth.
Have we reached the point where 100 percent of us are autistic yet?
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Maybe not directly, but Autism is strongly correlated with most of those things... except maybe the meth.
Citation needed. I challenge you to find a single study showing that any of those things correlates with autism. Especially the sleeping 10 hours one, because autism actually fucks up your ability to sleep.
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Not bothering to pull up a study, especially since those aren't things likely to be directly addressed, as they are very unacademic, but I will address them point by point:
Celibacy: Difficulty forming close knit bonds, hyper and hyposensitivity, and difficulty acting in socially appropriate manners are all impediments to having sex. Hyperfocus on special interests often lead to failures in self-care, which is generally unattractive, and means that more immediate needs than sex are ignored.
Meth: High rat
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Just because they are distinct does not mean they are not both true.
"Certified Genius" (Score:3)
So what earns a person certification in being a genius?
150+ on Stanford-Binet? 145+ on Wechsler? A life where one generates a great amount of new science/art/architecture/writing? A ton of Patents?
IQ is just a raw measure of the potential of a mind. The "mental velocity", as they call it. What one does with it. . . That is what really differentiates the geniuses.
Never declare anyone a genius until they are at least 35 years old. The truth is that you just can't tell which ones will bloom – so provide opportunities to all of the ones who exhibit high IQs or similar at a young age. Observe their progress and proclivities, and you might just be part of the formative years of a genius. (or you can quench it, as frequently happens)
"Tesla and Newton were celibate" (Score:2, Interesting)
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Or, conversely, before it was trendy to post-mortem "identify" people as being gay, without any real evidence..
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I get the feeling that Tesla and Leonardo Da Vinci were asexual. Leo once wrote something about how he thought the "means of reproduction" were so disgusting that he was amazed people hadn't gone extinct.
Now Newton was not merely disinterested in sex like Tesla and Da Vinci, but was religiously opposed to sexual activity, so yeah there's a good chance he was sucking dudes off in the bathroom at every opportunity.
Quirk (Score:5, Interesting)
Population statistics (Score:3)
There are more quirkly homeless people than quirky geniuses.
Just playing devil's advocate but is this actually true and what is the evidence for or against? Are you just assuming it to be true because it sounds right? We're talking about opposite ends of the spectrum in many cases but both tend to be some standard deviations outside the norm. It wouldn't actually surprise me if the number of crazy geniuses in total wasn't all that different from the number of crazy homeless people. I have no evidence for or against but it is an interesting question. (to me anyw
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Re:Population statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
How many of these people would you or sjbe actually admit are/were geniuses?
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Again, it depends on how you define genius, for which there is no hard rule. I personally don't conclude that 'genius' implies accomplishment, just ability that is a number of standard deviations away from the norm. A person can be a genius whose intellectual capacity far exceeds Einstein in intellectual capacity, yet spends their entire life as a janitor or sweatshop worker. In my view, not all genius have monumental accomplishments, but monumental accomplishments tend to be accomplished by geniuses.
I
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I personally don't conclude that 'genius' implies accomplishment, just ability that is a number of standard deviations away from the norm.
Everyone who has been historically considered a genius had notable achievements to their name. Achievements, and peer recogntion, are undeniable criteria for being considered a genius.
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Everyone who has been historically considered has had notable achievements because history doesn't record the unremarkable actions of unremarkable people.
Here are the dictionary definitions of genius: 1. exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability. 2. a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect.
Those don't include any kind of requirement of achievement. The etymology of 'genius' roughly translates to 'inborn' or 'innate,'
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Please find me a dictionary definition of genius that specifies a requirement for historically significant achievements.
You're insisting on your own personal definition, and making a circular argument based on it. "All historically notable geniuses have done historically notable things", well no shit Sherlock.
Try using actual data (Score:3)
There are more homeless people than there are geniuses
It depends on how you define genius. Approximately 2.2% of the population has an IQ above 140 which is the cutoff for MENSA membership. Approximately in the US is homeless. So if you are talking Newton or Tesla level geniuses you might be right but if you define genius as the smartest 1-2% of the population then there are at least as many geniuses as homeless people. [wikipedia.org]
Basically you are simply assuming there are more homeless people than geniuses when in fact the data seems to show that probably isn't act
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It depends on how you define genius. Approximately 2.2% of the population has an IQ above 140 which is the cutoff for MENSA membership.
UnluckiIy for you, IQ doesn't test for genius, and neither does MENSA membership. For one thing, you can practice for IQ tests. No different from all the high performing students who get amazingly high marks but fail to produce results in the real world. Like it or not, genius has a large "peer review" component and is one of those "we know it when we see it" type things.
It's simply easier to become homeless than be a genius.
That is an assumption not an evidence based fact.
Really? And you have examples of people who were of average intelligence and skill suddenly found themselves on the top tier in a matter
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I agree we ought to be more accommodating to neurological differences...but we'd have to jettison much of the Western religions to do it.
Academia tends to be more accommodating to neurological differences than the commercial world. The downside of that is when quirky individuals teach rather than confine themselves to research, they can sometimes be very disruptive. I've seen many graduate students ruined by professors who were quirky to the point of obnoxious.
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you're "special", that's for sure.
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Where do I collect my certificate? (Score:2)
Amphetamines (Score:3)
The use of amphetamines isn't a quirk, it's just common sense.
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I'm serious. Amphetamines can work wonders for people such as yourself, and even if not used as a treatment, it's the only drug that keeps you awake, alert and on top of things, when used responsibly of course.
LOGICAL REASONING (Score:2)
I have some truly peculiar habits, therefor I am a genius.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just in general, the regular pop. does not get statistics. When a street light pops as a person walks under it, frequently they attribute it to some dark force. The number of street lights popping intersected with the number of people walking under them will lead to a great number of dark forces at work.
This is an important limitation of high IQ. (Score:2)
People who are extremely intelligent are accustomed to being right when everyone around them are wrong and in fact aren't bright enough to realize they're wrong. This is not a good thing.
The smartest person I know (and I know a *lot* of smart people) had an affair with a married man that any idiot would have known was going to end badly. But there was no point in debating that with her because it would be like climbing into the ring and sparring with Ali in his prime. She never, ever loses an argument. I
Not limited to scientists (Score:2)
Stonewall Jackson held one arm aloft as much as he could, even riding into battle -- supposedly to equalize blood flow. He didn't quit even after he caught a bullet that way.
Bullshit article (Score:2)
"Peculiar" until we prove the benefit(s)... (Score:2)
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It's the other way around! (Score:2)
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