What do we mean by genius and does that category really matter? Do we really
need to study this kind of way of categorizing one individual or another? So, let me begin with
Dean you've spent a lot of your career thinking about these kinds of issues.
So just pose the question: you know, who first defined genius? Where does that idea come from? Well,
I mean the idea of genius itself dates back to the ancient Romans. It used to be thought that every single person
was born with a genius and...
Well at least every single male was born with a genius women had a women had a Juno,
which you probably haven't heard of. And we're not - noticed - we're not talking about junos. We're only talking about geniuses.
But it was something that was special. It looked out for your welfare.
We'd probably call it a guardian angel, and it was a thing that made you kind of unique.
So, it really didn't have the special connotations that it has today.
But later on after the Renaissance , when we had these incredible geniuses - people like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci -
people started coming with this idea
of genius as being something really special. And notice, it's very important, because in this new idea
not everybody had a genius only a few people had a genius. And
and one of the major figures to do this is Immanuel Kant in his Critique of
Aesthetics or judgment. And in there, he talked about geniuses as fulfilling two requirements:
The first is they have to do something original,
something that stands out, different than the crowd. And the second thing -and this is very important because you got to remember that
a lot of crazy people can produce original ideas...they do it all the time...
there's even art museum consisted of nothing but work by mad people -
you have to produce something that's not just original,
but also exemplary. It's something that other people would look up to and admire and use as a basis
for their own creativity. So that was those two things, originality and
being exemplary, where the primary things. But it's interesting that should add this because we included scientists amongst the genius...
According to Kant,
only artists could be geniuses.
Scientists didn't have to be geniuses because they had a scientific method.
He even says, Isaac Newton wasn't a genius because he could teach anybody to do what he was doing.
So it's an interesting thing. But let me just add one more thing, and that is - since I'm a psychologist -
psychologists like to take over the people's fields and other people's ideas, and
in the early part of the 20th century somebody came up with an IQ test
and decided to find genius in terms of your IQ score, instead of in terms of your "exemplary originality".
This was actually done at Stanford . And
this IQ score
was set arbitrarily and one hundred and forty. And that's ended up in the dictionary.
Just it...it means you're in the top 1% of the population. That's all it means.
And so, if you don't produce something that's original and exemplary, then just get a high IQ score;
Two ways of doing it. (laughs)
So with that definition is and was genius typically identified
early in age with the young, or is it I mean... I have an example. You know. when I
was going to high school, I had a high school classmate who maybe some of you know, - Mark you may know - Noam Elkies.
You know Noam? No, yeah you do? So he's the youngest tenured Mathematician at
Harvard. And
when I was in high school, you know, we would hang around sometimes talk about Pi, and you know...[laughter]
... you know, to sort of break the monotony of those math conversations?
I once, you know, said to him that I loved the Brahms Rhapsody in G.
And he said to me, "Oh do you mean this?" And he proceeded to
simultaneously whistle and hum two lines of music of that piece.
And I mean, do you know how hard... I mean I... just to learn how to hum whistle at the same...?
I mean, here i go...
(trying to hum and whistle at the same time)
* laugh *
You laugh? You try it. In this area. Hum and whistle the same time. And to have two separate voices simultaneously...
It was clear immediately this guy was just off
scale. Is that the kind of way in which genius has been identified?
Uh well that's kind of genius that people often talk about: The polymath; the people who have multiple skills. And some people argue that
general intelligence - they actually call it "G" ...the 'G' factor -
can be applied a lot of different areas. And so if you have
tremendous general intelligence, you can learn how to whistle and hum at the same time, and doing a lot of other things as well.
That's your problem. That's why I'm not over there, right? If I could, I'd be sitting one of your seats.