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In Brief
- Genius has been viewed two different ways: as achieved eminence and as exceptional intelligence. The former metric offers the more useful definition.
- Genetics and life experiences both contribute to genius. Creative contributions can occur only after a domain has been mastered, but genetics can help a person improve faster and accomplish more with a given amount of expertise.
- Genius can share certain potentially negative traits with the mentally ill, but when these traits are combined with specific positive attributes, the result is creativity rather than psychopathology.
- A scientific genius has different expertise than an artistic genius, but all creative geniuses may depend on the same general process: blind variation and selective retention.
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Identifying genius is a dicey venture. Consider, for example, this ranking of “The Top 10 Geniuses” I recently stumbled across on Listverse.com. From first to last place, here are the honorees: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Emanuel Swedenborg, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, John Stuart Mill, Blaise Pascal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bobby Fischer, Galileo Galilei and Madame De Staël.
What about Albert Einstein instead of Swedenborg? Some of the living might also deserve this appellation—Stephen Hawking comes to mind. A female genius or two might make the cut, perhaps Marie Curie or Toni Morrison. And if a chess champion, Fischer, is deemed worthy, other geniuses outside the arts and sciences ought to deserve consideration—Napoleon Bonaparte as a military genius, Nelson Mandela as a political genius or Bill Gates as an entrepreneurial genius, to name a few candidates.
This article was originally published with the title The Science of Genius.
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20 Comments
Add CommentDiscrimination seems haunt every aspect of everything, or is it that the compilers of the list are just plain biased or blinkered?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPS.
Isn't Albert Einstein already synonymous with genius?
Perhaps the question is not whether someone is a genius. Rather, whether something they do is genius. Was Einstein really a genius, or was his physics work genius?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTrying to identify people who 'are' genius, like Richieo says, is distorted by bias.
Intelligence can be increased by proper nutrition and staying away from doctors. intelligance = 1/pharma.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood point. I didn't notice any 'geniuses' listed from Amazonia or Papua New Guinea, but I am sure that over the years they too have had their share.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course there will be bias in making a list like this but the category is too broad. Previous commenter’s have alluded to this already. There are just too many geniuses in the history of math and science to limit a list to just 10 individuals. I noticed that my favorite musical geniuses were not on the list and I don’t think the list maker gave much thought to painting other than da Vinci. I mean a list of 10 geniuses and Newton does not appear? Well, that is my bias.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will have to withhold judgement until I read the entire article, but I have a feeling I'm not going to like this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo the article itself is not about a top ten list. To bad that's all this preview is about. What a garbage preview.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertainly there are many humans with exceptional intelligence who do not achieve eminence. Situations and limitations vary as much as does intelligence between individuals. Then of course there's the situation where super-geniuses might be hiding to avoid getting shot at like the chess wizard kid in the X-Files.
Is achievement a sign of genius? Yes, but appearances can be deceiving: Bobby Fischer, for example.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI remember BF was prone to put his skill at finger puzzles on display. Why was that, I wondered at the time. Well, it took less time to solve a finger puzzle than to play a winning game of chess, and most people couldn't distinguish the rules needed for finger puzzle expertise from chess expertis. Both skills involve pattern recognition and reasoning over search. Thus, BF could put on a quick finger puzzle skill display to impress an audience of one kind or another, often a talk show or an audience of news reporters.
Cheap trick, imo.
Genius in any form should be its own reward, but often it is not.
Dear friend[s],
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thismay be interesting and informative or relevant in this context
Please see my papers related to new/updated/refined theories on mind,consciousness and cogntive science,which may have an impact on human studies,leadership,psychology and philosophy,metaphysics and management besides multidisciplinary science-
1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2121214
2. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2008574
3. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2165139
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One of this paper,in a slightly modified form was accepted in a prestigous CELL conference ,sometime back,though I could not go to present it for health reasons
I've been analysing "autistic savants", a particular form of genious minds, for the past 15 years:there is little or no relation between exceptional talents of "autistic savants" and any measure of IQ. Darold Treffert has observed that the most stricking cognitive feat of"savants"consists of exceptional visual or auditory memory. in addition there is an incredible capability to transfer their brain memory content in a visible or audible way, via appropriate support and tools to transfer memory content: pencil and paper for visual memories, musical instrument keyboards for musical memories. For drawing they don't need to go through a "draft" they draw "as if the image was already on the support, their pencil seems to follow a line, without hesitation :see the video of Stephen Wiltshire drawing a huge panorama of Rome, after having had a one hour helicopter ride over the city, yet being capable of giving a "single point of view, integrating the million of visual perceptions provided by an helicopter ride circum-navigating over the city at various altitudes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn music they can remember a complex music piece and reproduce it without rehearsal, just few seconds after having listenned to it for the first time. This supposes a very quick and reliable connection between their brain memory content and the complex fine motor skills required to reproduce, musical or visual perceptions almost instantaneously. Most musical "savants" also improvise with talents that are near or superior to professional musicians, going hence beyond pure music memorisation.
For drawing talents, my son started with drawing large cities, but then invented his own imaginary city, this imaginary city was the subject of a book in 2004.
I'd be delighted to share more about this subject and provide direct website' URL for readers to see the evidence of the genius talents that are displayed by these autistic savants geniuses.
Talents are not limited to arts, but many show talents in maths and science, some also show talents in "foreign languages"
In my papers I have suggested that such talents may have been at the origin of a large share of human culture evolution.
Adopting Hans Asperger's view:
“It seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential.”
Hans Asperger
I also believe that autistic savants are capable of "hard creativity":when: “the world has turned out differently not just from the way we thought it would, but even from the way we thought it could”
M. Boden, "The Creative Mind, Myths and Mechanisms", Basic Book, 1992
Jeepers, I feel left-behind, I guess I could always become an athletic coach.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Genius has been viewed two different ways: as achieved eminence and as exceptional intelligence. The former metric offers the more useful definition."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do not find this a useful definition of genius at all. If this article was supposed to argue supporting that idea, either I entirely missed it or the argument was extremely weak.
The main problem, as I see it, with using achieved eminence as the definition of genius is that it involves that most random of random variables: other people. A person could have an almost superhuman level of skill, relentless commitment to their interest(s) and produce astonishingly accomplished works. However, if this person and their works are not discovered, recognized and broadly publicized, how is eminence supposed to follow?
Those geniuses who achieved fame (or notoriety) are probably the thin end of the wedge. There could be hundreds more people of equal or greater skill and accomplishment for every "genius" that makes these sorts of lists. There could be thousands of incredible works and discoveries from which the world has never benefited, simply because the publicity mill of the day never got hold of them and did the necessary.
Are these unknown people not geniuses? Are their creations or discoveries not works of genius? If not, then the expression "undiscovered genius" is an oxymoron.
I'm not going to get into the merits or otherwise of IQ testing as that's a whole other argument. However, given the choice of achieved eminence and exceptional intelligence, I'd have to pick exceptional intelligence as the more satisfactory definition of genius out of the two. People can defame a person, squash their creations, refuse to give them needed support, but a test report showing an exceptional score is harder to argue with.
Whatever definition we choose for genius, however, I feel very strongly that it should only encompass those factors which are inherent in the person (intelligence, creativity etc.) and the quality of his/her output. Please do not make fame, fortune and recognition by other people any part of it.
Comming back to what can be considered "genius in a person's activity results could well fit Margaret Boden's deffinition of Hard creativity" I quoted in my previous post :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"hard creativity" is when: “the world has turned out differently not just from the way we thought it would, but even from the way we thought it could”
When facing the feats of a real Genius mind this is often the feeling one has : total surprise about the outcome imprevisibility.
To anwer a couple of other questions: it is indeed a pity that no women were quoted in the original list. Marie Currie had as much genious as her husband Pierre Currie intheir associated research on particle physics which lead them to Nobel price,shared with Henry Beckerel for their discovery and analysis of radioactivity.
In my previous post about autistic savants I forgot to menion several cases of Savant skills in young girls and adult women.
Gender seems to have no impact on genius, except for the societal constraints often imposed on women.
Along the lines of the conversation, if you saw an adult that didn't know that turning a knob would allow him to push away a panel that would otherwise be a barrier (a closed door) you would consider him to be an idiot. Until of course, he opened the door without touching the knob. Suddenly he would be genius. So which is it? The inability to properly anticipate limitations (e.g. the accepted procedure to open a door) permits you to be completely creative; sometimes even discovering something new and apparently non-sequitor. But then, it also presents a great handicap in life. How do you get through the day without being totally confused and exhausted?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy not Spinoza instead of Lebiniiz who had stolen many ideas of Spinoza.Why not Nietzsche,mahatma Gandhi.After all every selector is unique so he select his choice of genius till those who were world known genius must be included in the list
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving only read the teaser I can only comment on it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyone listing Napoleon Bonaparte as a military genius hasn't actually studied his track record. He suffered several crushing defeats. Such as the first invasion of Sardinia [failed landing] and Caldiero [3 battle losses in a row] (from which he recovered primarily due to incompetence of the Austrians). Then there is the entire Egypt/Syria campaign that ended in failure.
There is also Aspern-Essling, and then the entire Russian invasion.
Most of his Imperial expansion was due to diplomacy and bribery. His battlefield success is primarily due to his bravery and later his choices of underlings.
As for the superior performance of his armies, most of that was due to logistics, weapon innovation and mass conscription. Very little of this was directly done by Napoleon himself. In fact, Lazare Carnot was responsible for much of this.
No one mentions anonymous geniuses. Or those who choose to work in da shadows.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"A female genius or two might make the cut, perhaps Marie Curie or Toni Morrison."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid he really just say that?
I notice the reference to BVSR, which is a controversial theory of creativity, not universally accepted among creativity researchers. If readers want to peruse alternative ideas about the process of creativity,try
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKronfeldner, Perkins, Schooler and Dougal, and Sternberg.
After buying this magazine 15 days ago in Heathrow. I was inspired to read this article today. And came here to find the email address to the author. Yet after reading all the comments. I felt obliged to create an account for one comment. I can attest 99.9% of this article through my ownself. Simply put we are all born Genius and then polluted with dogma. The Universe is my teacher that speaks through me and the only thing that I am certian, is that Imagination is the inventor of everything and is the only thing that allows us ignorant beings to believe Genius, when we prove Imaginations pure Genius. Having said that, what ever the almighty may be, I can assure created us humans powered by Imagination. You see the Universe is the keeper of time and all the knowledge of the Universe exsist in its hard drive of cosmic energy defined in such as a binary code or positive and negative. We humans are just quantum computer like processors designed to feed off of it. What we humans like to believe we imagine, we do not imagine, we absorb via the size of our faith and belief in our Super Human abilities to be God like. My abilities to comprehend my imagination logically as far as I have ever spent the time to look into anyone other than myself, which does not happen very much do to my beliefs that I hold the keys to all the knowledge of the Universe in my DNA and that I need only to imagine what I wish to understand, assist Newton, Einstein, Tesla, Spinoza, Archimedes, the bible, the quran and most recently I met a Harvard graduate of philosophy on a flight from Kuwait to London. Who recommend that I look into the Kabbalah. The fact of this matter is I was not taught any of which I know, yet I have been learning how to think. My ignorance + imagination has proven to be my greatest virtue. I can see clearly with my eyes and world traveled experiance what the past has brought to my day and age, so I spend my energy thinking for the future of all Earth Kind. My greatest ambitions are to develop Vortechnology that will allow us to travel faster than the speed of light. 5 years ago I had a Hypothesis, Today I have designs. 6 months ago I read about a Mexican physicist with an equation 2 months ago NASA mentioned theory of such technology and now I'm just waiting for the Universe to conspire the oppurtunity for me to prove it through my design. I only graduated from High School, my father offered me the oppurtunity to work as an Aero/Mechanical Engineer. He opened the door for me and I found the light switch. I am 27 years young.
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