Comment by robbedpeter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbedpeter | Hacker News Reader

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Nash is a counter to your assertion. Tesla as well. Einstein, too - he exhibited compulsive behaviors and may have had ocd. High levels of intelligence often accompany greater susceptibility to mental illnesses, resulting in lower quality of life and ability to care for themselves.

It's not a matter of romanticizing the crazy genius trope, but likely a consequence of genetics. Hundreds of genes are known to accompany higher intelligence, and many of them are correlated with mental illnesses as well.

It could very well be that mental illnesses can be the cause of varied changes in perspective and neural operation in ways that we view as increased intelligence.

Absent a rigorous theory of intelligence, it's like we're speculating about microbes when the best tools we have are magnifying glasses. I think within the next couple decades, we'll have the equivalent of SEM and germ theory of disease. We may be able to augment adult brains to operate at the levels of Einstein or Feynman without the accompanying neuroticism or illnesses.

Absolutely you can name incredibly talented people who suffered from a mental illness, but that does not counter my assertion. Instead it's an instance of Berkson's paradox [1] wherein you are unlikely to consider the group of people who failed high school, have a drug addiction, are homeless, or are otherwise suffering from their OCD. The only people with OCD who have a name worth mentioning will be among the most successful people in their field.

But that doesn't change the studies that show that unlike the myth first popularized by Pierre Janet and then popularized by Freud about the positive relationship between obsessiveness and intelligence, it turns out the correlation is negative [2]. Having OCD is overall detrimental to ones ability to perform intellectual tasks and statistically people with OCD are more likely to end up homeless or in poverty, the victim of abuse or otherwise taken advantage of.

Does this mean that a mental illness is a death sentence? No and I never claimed it was. My position is that historically if you did suffer from a mental illness, you were also more likely to be anti-social or introverted, and hence dissuaded from pursuing fields that involved working with other people. As such it's tempting to look back at many of the historical icons in said fields, see that many of them did suffer from a mental illness and conclude that said mental illness must have been a benefit to them. Absolutely not, it's just that people without a mental illness who were sociable likely did not study math or physics as they would have been encouraged both financially and socially to pursue other fields.

Going forward, as more fields that were traditionally studied by individuals become more team oriented, I hypothesize that we will no longer associate future leaders in math, physics, computer science, etc... with their mental illness. Of course we will still see some talented people who do suffer from mental illness, but the mystique that is often written about it, as if these people peered into a world only accessible to them because of their madness and saw things only they could possibly understand, will be considered farcical and instead we will appreciate that these people succeeded in spite of their mental illness rather than because of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28864868/

I wouldn't just chalk it up to Berkson's paradox. A lot has been written on the connection between genius and madness and it seems to me that folk psychology gets it right on this point, at least in essence. It's easy to feel like we've solved that mystery by just denying that there's such a thing as a genius, that they're just incredibly talented people who were in the right place at the right time to produce that deep seismic shift in perspective that creative genius is associated with. This demystification might appeal to our competitive, status-seeking side as well, it's uwarranted.

There are those people who discover/invent a whole new field and those many many more people who are engaged in the vital and equally important collective effort of working out the consequences and filling in the gaps of those initial discoveries/inventions. I would expect the latter cohort (of very talented people), but not the former one, to be more psychologically and physically robust than the average.

Yeah I'm reminded of Jason Padgett, who turned into a "math genius" after an accident involving head trauma[0]. Judging from that I rather think that us "normal" people have abilities that are hidden from us, filtered out by our normalcy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7H6doOmS-eM

i think there's some way in which the brain "crystallizes" as one grows up, and the modes of cognition which are the most used in daily life are deepened at the expense of others. i'd compare it to trails being worn into the dirt by foot traffic; the most trafficked paths will remain for years and years, while the unused paths slowly disappear, until eventually they show no sign of their existence at all.

the example i'd give is to think of a kid playing with hot wheels. the kid is not playing with the physical toy; the toy is an avatar from which the kid is building a vivid imaginative playground. the kid is playing within the world of their mind's eye. adults, for the most part, can't play with hot wheels and dive into that same mental landscape of imagination and association. an adult just sees a small die-cast car. rather than being an inherent part of growing up, i think this power of the "mind's eye" is simply a mode of cognition our society doesn't reinforce and select for; so, for most, it's lost as they grow.

however, there's really a lot of utility in the power of imagination, and so we also see people who either never lost the ability through repeated reinforcement, or went to great lengths to re-activate it - artists like Katsuya Terada or Kim Jung Gi. notable with these artists is the way they're able to draw photorealistic pieces of eye-watering detail, without construction or perspective layout; they simply start from any point and draw, somehow putting every line in its exact place. when asked about how they possess what is essentially an artistic superpower, they've both related that they are able to visualize the scene in a vivid, consistent, and complete way in their mind's eye, and they simply draw from the mental image. both have said that they drew for hours a day in this "rakugaki" (doodle) style as kids, and never stopped the habit. in doing so they were able to retain and reinforce the power of visualization, a mode of cognition that emerges naturally, but is not retained if not practiced.

I know what you mean! My brother is very talented at drawing and he's been doing it his whole life. It's fascinating to see him start drawing something where I don't see what it's supposed to be until he's finished maybe 30% of it. Just seemingly random lines at first. It's fascinating to me as I can hardly picture even simple shapes in my mind. But I can picture music, because I've been doing that for most of my life, so I can somehow relate to what it's like.

The sad thing about this, and things like music, is that despite all the positive encouragement that "it's never too late to learn to play", it actually is (hard to impossible) if your goal is to achieve mastery resembling that of those who forged their paths at a young age.

And from this perspective it becomes so important to encourage and support children in creative endeavours and not just have them sit on a school bench memorizing things.

SEM == scanning electron microscopy

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