Is being a genius genetic, a talent or an illness

[ImaLooser]

Yes, ofcourse practice would eventually get you to cross certain thresholds but you can't learn every single equation off by heart. I mean one guy I watched was given things like 98 to the power 13 and he just closes his eyes for like 3 seconds, then reads out the number and goes behond the decimal place of even the computer. Also doing outrageous calculations like 7.14256 factoral and other crazy stuff.

Which is impressive but the most impressive thing I ever saw which occurs in some savants, they sit them infront of a TV and for 1 second on the screen a random number of dots will appear, typically anywhere from 100 - 300 and after 1 second the image dissapears and they can instantly say how many dots there were...

You know those puzzles where you have to look at one image with one eye and another image with the other. Both images look like random dots, put them together and get an image. A few people can do it seeing the images a day apart.

 

[FreeMitya]

I posted something similar in another thread, but perhaps this might be of interest to you (OP):

Professor Sandra F. Witelson, department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, from the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University, and her co-workers, compared anatomical measurements of Einstein's brain with those of brains of 35 men and 50 women who had normal intelligence. In general, Einstein's brain was similar to the other brains except for one area called the inferior parietal region. Because of extensive development of this region on both sides of his brain, his brain was 15% wider than other brains studied. "Visuospatial cognition, mathematical thought, and imagery of movement are strongly dependent on this region," the researchers note. This unusual brain anatomy may explain why Einstein tackled scientific problems the way he did, the researchers write, "Einstein's own description of his scientific thinking was that 'words do not seem to play any role', but there is 'associative play' of 'more or less clear images' of a 'visual and muscular type'.

http://fhs.mcmaster.ca/main/news/news_archives/einstein.htm

Now, this is just one person (Einstein) and there is obviously no currently conceivable way we're going to be able to study the brains of every brilliant person (can we even define 'brilliant'?), but it is fascinating research and is certainly going to give us more insight into the labyrinth of human consciousness.

 

[Bill_K]

Years later an admiring Freeman Dyson was to meet with Einstein at Princeton in 1948. However, before the meeting, he obtained a copy of Einstein's new "Unified Field Theory". He called it 'junk', and skipped the meeting.

This says more about Dyson than about Einstein. I shared a cab ride with Freeman Dyson once. Now there is "Sheldon" in the flesh.

 

[SW VandeCarr]

This says more about Dyson than about Einstein. I shared a cab ride with Freeman Dyson once. Now there is "Sheldon" in the flesh.

The fact is that Einstein's "Unified Field Theory", to be kind, was irrelevant to physics by 1948. Einstein did not accept the foundations of Quantum Mechanics (QM), and held that hidden variables would explain the apparent probabilistic nature of QM. He seems to have ignored much of the practical work that was being done in QM. He really did not participate much in the advance of physics after the publication of General Relativity (GR) and not at all after about 1935. Even GR was not particularly relevant to mainstream physics until the 1960's when the Standard Model was being developed. A new appreciation of Einstein's work followed, but he died in 1955.