The Mystery of Sudden Genius
psychologytoday.com
psychologytoday.com
I had been having months of focal (non-tonic clonic yet) seizures that I thought were panic attacks for about 5 months
I had a massive psychiatric event in Dec 2022 and started writing that paper
I was in the bath tub the same night and saw a hallucinated blue orb for lack of better term that “felt” like it was trying to communicate that the paper was good
So very interesting! The brain is crazy and I have spent a lot of time studying it and it never ceases to amaze.
Oh and I forgot, my art style got really honed in and I was more prolific in 6 months than I had been in years, leading to my first art show in 15ish years:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CzC8HoZOApQ/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng...
Maybe more boring, when trying to create I find I spend lots of time in a miserable morass where I feel like my "normal" brain is trying to solve creativity like it's a hard procedural problem, and progress is slow and the result is always uninspired. If I keep at it I eventually "punch through" and it's like an avalanche of sudden ideas and mental connections flow through and out of me and I get into a zone of unreal hyper productivity for a while.
Later on when reviewing what I did during those moments while in a normal brain state, I find I can't replicate, edit, or really do much to alter what I created until I can punch through again -- I have basically no ability to replicate what I just made. The level of detail, the inspiration, the raw creativity is just not my normal mode. It's just not on tap.
It also leaves me really hungry after a couple hours of doing it. I suspect there's some kind of interesting energy recruitment my body is doing in my brain, sensing it's working hard, and trying to support the emergency with sugars, or oxygen or something.
This was after two severe tonic colic seizures, which put me in the hospital with a half bitten tongue and dislocated shoulders.
The initial thinking was epilepsy, but after the ambulatory EEG, and absolutely no history of epilepsy or anything of approaching epilepsy, she’s basically said “everything looks healthy, I have no clue what’s going on, so call me if you feel like you’re dying again.”
It’s been 8 months since any issues and I’m healthier than I’ve ever been - considering thatI was a collegiate athlete 20 years ago that’s not nothing
1. Get a tough problem
2. Read all the surrounding information about it. If a solution doesn’t appear then it’s distraction time
3. Go do something completely unrelated for a while. I like to tinker with something mechanical but listening to music or doing exercise both work. Anything where you can get a decent flow going works for me.
Quite often just after I have finished with the distraction I get a good idea about the original problem. It used to be about 50/50 whether this would work for me but it’s now around 80/20.
Like anything it takes practice and you need to find the right distraction for you
And talking donkeys if you're Muhammad! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%CA%BDf%C5%ABr
Could be their affinity for strong weed.
The brain is more complex than a mere mental condition which we still don’t fully understand.
But on your larger point about fuzzy diagnoses I agree with you. In my experience, diseases like schizophrenia are better understood as a large number of unique diseases under a single heading. Saying "I have schizophrenia" is like saying "I own a dog". While an accurate statement, there are many different kinds of dogs, and their behavior varies widely. Schizophrenia is the same.
If you've spent time with groups of people with schizophrenia, you'll see that there's an extremely wide range of outcomes. I think the wide range of outcomes may be explained by there being a number of different diseases.
Not some exogenous event or mystical miracle or whatever it was just pure chemistry and electricity.
This awareness is technically called "insight", as in "insight into the weirdness of your beliefs". Generally, people suffering from psychosis don't have insight. They genuinely believe they're experiencing real things. So in this way at least it seems like you're healthy.
That being said, there's a wide range of psychotic episodes, and feelings of uniqueness, specialness, or being chosen aren't always present.
Without commenting on the merit of the thesis, people get flashes of insight all the time that seem totally genius to them. Regardless of what you wrote, I would wait until it's actually validated by further scientific consensus before calling that any kind of vindication of the phenomenon of sudden genius.
And your other example is that ... you produced art? As in, the famously capricious, easily duped community? That may not be the slam dunk you think it is.
With that said, you definitely were productive in some sense, and I don't mean to trivialize that in anyway -- it's certainly more than I accomplished over the same time! It's just ... "genius" is a stretch. By the same token, I could claim I unconvered something major with my "fish would be bad swimming instructors" idea:
http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2023/05/chatgpt4-refines-m...
My interpretation is it was a Culture drone trying to influence you to influence humanity into joining the fold by returning to traditional human social structures of community, cooperation & sharing.
What I have linked is draft 3
I expect that I’ll have a proper falsifiable theory on paper by the end of the year (Is my hope)
My best guess based on what I know of the brain is that there was likely some amplified activation of memories linked to a heavy period of intentional visualizing (I’m a very visual thinker) cascading around my visual cortex as I was in a resting state
Readers: "You're saying there's still a chance I'm a genius???"
> In Treffert’s response to de Avila’s outreach, he called her story “compelling, and your artwork amazing.”
> “He was like a father figure to us weird circus people. He was the ringleader of this beautiful circle of giftedness,”
Treffert sounds like grade A manipulator, though not sure who's using who here.
> He loved music and had played drums as a kid, but nothing more.
And from a Guardian article from 2012 about him:
> I'd played guitar in a couple of little rock bands when I was young but I'd never progressed beyond that on any instrument. Yet here I was, producing a fluid melody I'd never heard before.
Steephen Wiltshire, Autistic Savant and Artist [0,1]
Can't comment on these individuals, but the phenomenon is real.
Also note that she mentioned „no formal training“. And she is a digital artist and knew how to code.
So that painting I my mind just went from "impossibly good for someone who's painting for the first time" to "mediocre".
„She immediately began painting. She had no training in art. But her hands just knew what to do. “It was fulfilling to connect line and form. I let things be guided by intuition,” she says. Two hours later, the canvas was covered in splotches of teal, brown, and orange. She titled her first piece “Blobs and Boomerangs.”
Wouldn't most qualified psychiatrists working with autism (or adult autism) do? All it takes is diagnosis autism (what they do anyway) and being able to identify savant abilities (which is even easier).
From a young age, Logothetis took an interest in his father’s work, devouring the weekly shipping newsletter and analyzing the market. He soon took the helm, becoming CEO by age 19. He remembers every number, every quantity, every measurement, every price that passed through his ledger. “The East Cape, a ship we delivered in 1993, was 482,000 cubic feet, built in 1975, and leased for $416,000 a month,” Logothetis says. “It doesn’t require effort to retrieve this. It’s just there.”
This could instead be explained by having a IQ , not savant syndrome. People
I respectfully disagree. Reasoning and memory is not the same.
If you happen to actually become aquaintaned to more than one of this type of people during your lifetime you will (maybe) note that their abilities in memory do not need to be correlated to their abilities in reasoning. I have personally met more than a handful with extraordinary memory skills, and while some would probably be able to achieve a "high IQ" score others would certainly not. The latest I've met did not even pass public school reading tests [0].
As an aside, obtaining a high IQ score is done using a standardized procedure and as such it is only a measure of one very specific class of reasoning skills, not "general intelligence" per se
[0] First hand, he told me
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Edit to add this: Here I specifically relate to the memory-equilibrists due to the parent comment emhasizing one such specimen. Others in the savant spectrum (it is a spectrum) do have abilities that would correlate better with the measure known as "IQ".
Can he remember what is essentially thousands of numerical data points? I would think that kind of photographic memory would be pretty similar to savantism? Also what do you mean by "explained by having a IQ"? An IQ is just some test's measurement of our intelligence, so I don't know how that is relevant.
I am just as skeptical as you though.
Those types of experiences are not the type of behaviour that is on topic here. Also, depending on perspective what you wrote may well be perceived as derogatory.
People suffering[0] from some degree of savant syndrome generally can display "non-normal" behaviour which is
1) observable, and
2) repeatable
[0] Yes, suffering. To quote the article
Injury, disease, or disability essentially “unlocks” the brain, leading a particular region to explode in functioning and flourishing.