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03/17/2008
Insanity and Genius
Sorry... I've been watching films I shouldn't have again. This time it is the "Aviator" and "A Beautiful Mind". They always do silly things to my thinking. In fact I think last time I saw the former I swore I would never watch it again... so much for that. I held out easily when we didn't have the film, then someone received it for Christmas I believe and now here I am again. Silly really.
There is such a close tie between insanity and genius. Autism, schitzphrenia, bipolar, OCD, paranoia, ADHD... Think of all the renown thinkers, artists, mathematicians, scientists, musicians that you know of and tell me just how many of them were diagnosed with what is generally considered to be a brain defect - a mental incapacity of some form or another.
Ok, so the brain has a limitted number of nerurones and it is very rare (quite possible impossible) to develop new neurones once the bran has matured - although this is not certain as far as I am aware. It thereby follows that genius is merely a rewiring of those neurones to observe and respons to the world differently. To be able to see a pattern in a list of numbers that no one else can identify. To be able to theorise and interpret data that everyone else will write off. To listen to a melody and immediately see before you 8 different ways to harmonise the same cadence and to know instinctively which is the best for what you want to achieve. To be able to capture raw emotion on canvas and recreate history with words. To be able to see the flaws in structural design without even caluclating the trig. To be able to imagine the unattainable, the to reach out and grasp it.
It is like seeing the world through prismatic lenses... each image is offset, just a little - no more than 4 or 5 degrees from the normal - but offset. Their vision of the world is not clouded or distorted in anyway, no rose-tinted glasses, just refracted one slight fraction around so they see what compeltely escapes anyone else.
But with that altered perception, with that hightened awareness of life, with those rewired cerebral pathways comes a price. The more information that is processed, or lower the brains ability to filter out certain unwanted information, the greater the levels of perception - overload it you want to see it that way. The brain is forced to deal with this in one way or another, blurring the distinctions between realtity and the imagined.
If you are accoustomed to seeing thing that no one else see's anyway (for instance someone who see's patterns that are invisible to the rest) then how do you convince your own brain that something is delusion when all the evidense (as far as your cells are aware) is to the contrary. If you have the ability to understand people and to empathise, and do not have the ability to filter emotion and restrict how it affects you, surely it would make sense to develop multiple personalities so that the overload of feeling can be manageed effectively. If you are contantly aware of everything around you; how it fits together, how colour compliment (or not), how the negative space fits with the objects in a room, how the light reflects outwards from numerous surfaces... then surely it is understandable to develop a need for perfection and order.
Although what I've just said seems to point to distinct a "cause" and "effect" scenario... I don't think that this is the case. It is the fact that someone has a hightened or altered perception of this universe that allows them to ask the questions no body thinks of, see the answers that the world is blind to whlst simultaneously causing their brain to handle other information in a way which is completely alien to the rest of us. Delusional? Obsessive? Perfectionistic? Hyperactive? Socially inept? Insanity and genius do not so much come together... they are the two sides of one coin.
And along side both comes complete social exile.
No one likes to feel stupid. No one likes to read as though they were a book. No one likes to hold conversation with someone who points out their failings loudly. No one likes to have missed the *obvious* answer. No one likes to be second best. No one likes to associate with the delusional. No one likes to live with the obsessive. No one likes to work with someone who has to have things *right*. No one likes to share answers with someone who will question their every word. No one likes to spend a day with someone unafraid to ask the awkward/difficult/poignant questions....
And when you're living in a world that no one else seems to see and moreover no one elsee wants to see...
Well... I think we've all see what that leads to.
There *is* a reason why I don't watch those films... Except I know that I will always watch them. There is nothing more facinating that the human brain and social dynamics that are connected directly to how we each individually perceive the world. By what criteria do we judge insanity or genius or cruelty or ignorance or manipulation? Why do we categorise people and drug them to conform to out ways of thinking... When is this necesary? When is this wrong? What is malfunction of the brain and what is simply a way of dealing with an excess of inputs into on nervous system?
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