by L K. J

Created on: February 16, 2008

I love movies! One of my favorites is ' A Beautiful Mind' starring Russell Crowe as the tortured schizophrenic and Nobel- prize winning economist John Forbes Nash Jr

My favorite line by Nash in the movie is " Classes will dull your mind, ..destroy the potential for authentic creativity..".

Now that's pure genius speaking. Bearing in mind (no pun intended) that John Nash practically established Game theory, Differential geometry, and Partial Differential equations and also serves as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University, his downplaying of the importance of academics and scholastic enterprise is slightly jarring.

In an effort to understand the mysterious link between genius and psychosis, several scientific studies have been conducted in different parts of the world. I will highlight two such studies in the areas of Psychoanalysis and brain-wave technology.

A recent analytical study on the link between Asperger's syndrome and creative genius seeks to shed light on this topic. It examines the odd personality traits and behaviors elicited by 21 of the most outstanding creative minds of the modern world including writers, philosophers, musicians and painters like George Orwell, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , Beethoven and Andy Warhol, among others.

In the resulting book ' The Genesis of Artistic Creativity', Michael Fitzgerald, professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland presents that artistic creativity is in many instances throughout history profoundly linked with psychiatric malaise.

Using biographical information, he demonstrates how clues to Asperger's syndrome were present in the lives of these geniuses affecting their social relationships but not intellect. He also claims that people with Asperger's can have exceptional artistic creativity, as well as mathematical genius.

For example he lists American novelist Herman Melville's eccentric behavior where he berated his cooks everyday based on the strength of his coffee or the consistency of his oatmeal; French philosopher Simone Weil disliked being touched and refusing to ever eat with a spoon she became so thin that she had to be fed mushed food from bottles; Ludwig van Beethoven made inappropriate marriage proposals and Vincent van Gogh had an inability to form lasting relationships.

It is important to note that this kind of research is largely based on anecdotal and not verifiable statistical evidence. Encountering difficulties in establishing whether the genius

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>