Hacker News Reader

I heard that Tesla could effectively "run" experiments in his mind, not just visualize them. Another pointer is that some "schools of thought" divide the art of thought into ability to visualize and ability to analyze where the latter has to be built upon the former and only when the former is perfected. My personal belief is that being a genius is about the ability to keep in mind many things at a time without losing details.

View on HN

I read this about Edison.

Also he read very fast, the librarians though he did not like the books that's why he was returning all of them every next week.

Also what usually geniuses can do is process information a lot. Read and write many papers. Eg Terrence Tao. His blog is always going strong, the polymath projects, plus regular teaching, plus his own (other) research.

Alexander Grothendieck, wrote books full of brand new ideas about very abstract math. Amazing insights. Ability to work with unfamiliar cutting-edge things while keeping focus, while communicating them to others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com