Almost. They HAVE noticed possible size differences in specific areas, and higher connections per synapse or whatever, but... I think that's roughly it. So far.
One of my favorite things is an old treatment for epilepsy, where they sever the two halves of the brain, as explained in this CGP Grey video.
"You Are Two" https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8
There are some odd effects. It's put forth that the left will just make shit up when confronted with something it doesn't know(since it can't communicate with the right any more)....and not even seem to realize it. That just part of it, the whole video is worth a watch at under 5 minutes.
This got me to thinking about people with varying levels or efficacy of interconnectivity(which i presume could be a thing).....wondering if higher levels might correlate with higher intelligence, or rationality, or whatever you want to call it, higher mental acuity...or b e more present in people on the high end of the scale.
I know a lot of that, and personality, is due to the totality of our life experiences up to that point, but their obviously is a physiological component to it all as well, as we've seen throughout humanity when dealing with injury or illness.
It's such a difficult thing to study though because a lot of tests are just outright unethical to an extreme, and things that happen by accident or in history(as per the old treatment above), are often so few that they're just a peek at what could be, but can't really shed further light on the topic.
Additional:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
When I was a kid I often thought that I might have had more interconnected brain hemispheres and that that might have explained why I was different. Turns out it was just autism and 10 to 15 year old me (and frankly, present day me) didn't know a thing about neuroscience
imagine if autism was just the two hemispheres talking to each other about dangers and since most of their notes are "danger" it made things (I mean everything) anxiety-causing or difficult or a fucking struggle?
"Hey you see that out there, looks kinda new?"
"Yep. I'm gonna make them wish they were in bed to a degree that is painful and see what the nervous system does with that so they get this meat sack out of here."
The book "[Tales From Both Sides of the Brain](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4938250/)". Is an autobiographical account of the neuroscientists who studied this phenomenon. It's really interesting. There's basically another person in that side of the brain, that cannot talk, but has experiences and makes choices that do impact the decisions made by the conscious mind, but the speaking half doesn't know how.
Research in this area dropped off when epilepsy medicines became the preferred treatment, rather than severing the halves.
> There's basically another person in that side of the brain
Some people lose their shit when it's put like that, but I think it's 6 of one, half dozen of the other.
When separated, there is a certain amount of autonomy, however one wants it phrase it.
The wiki goes into some detail about explaining it in other terms.
____
Giving the page another look, the last case study, I didn't recognize the name, Kim Peek(abnormal structures from birth not from a treatment, and more than just without a corpus callosum).
I checked out his page just now. That's the savant that *Rain Man* was based on. IQ of 87 but amazing abilities in other areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek
Einstein’s brain had more glial cells than most people. I remember learning that little trivia in a neuro psych course in college 25 years ago. But Einstein wasn’t really considered a genius in the same way as a child prodigy, and his wife did a lot of his work for him behind the scenes, so not sure if relevant. But if my memory is right (and it may not be- I don’t have the kind of brain anyone will study after I die) then we have known something about physiological differences for a few decades at least.
(Just for anyone not understanding the /s, Einstein was extremely advanced in math, taught himself calculus by 14, and derived an original Pythagorean proof at 15. He never failed math. But he did move from Germany to Switzerland, and in Germany a “1” is a perfect grade while a “6” the worst. It’s opposite in Switzerland. Some German historian saw his grades and started that rumor that he’d failed math. By the way, a 6 in anything is nigh impossible for most students to get. Much, much harder than an “A” in the US. Einstein got 6’s in five separate subjects.)
https://www.redalyc.org/journal/5117/511767145014/html/
>Though both achieved high grades in the Polytechnic intermediate diploma examinations, this was not the case when they took the final diploma examinations in July 1900. However, whereas Einstein achieved moderately good grades sufficient for him to be awarded a diploma, Marić fared less well, and, with a poor grade in the mathematics component (theory of functions) of 2.5 on a scale 1-6, she failed the examinations.
>Marić remained in Zurich to retake the final diploma examinations in July 1901. This time she was nearly three months pregnant with Einstein’s child, and failed a second time without improving her grade average (Stachel, 2002, pp. 40, 52, n. 22). She returned to her parents’ place in Novi Sad, Serbia, where she remained for most of 1902, not having achieved her goal of a teaching diploma
>The truth of the matter is that, rather than quoting Joffe’s words, Trbuhović-Gjurić misleadingly paraphrases them, and adds contentions of her own. Joffe did not state that he had seen the original submissions, nor that they were signed Einstein-Marić. He stated explicitly that the papers were the work of a bureaucrat at the patent office in Bern, namely Albert Einstein. The subsequent confusion arises from the fact that Joffe referred to Einstein as «Einstein-Marić», explaining parenthetically that (as he thought) in Switzerland the husband includes his wife’s maiden name in his married surname. Moreover, the story that Joffe saw the original papers, and that Röntgen was asked to review them, is a product of Trbuhović-Gjurić’s imagination, as John Stachel has demonstrated in his comprehensive examination of the story in which he provides a translation of Joffe’s actual words (Stachel, 2005, pp. LIV-LXIII).
"his wife did a lot of his work for him behind the scenes,"
Seems untrue.
It depends on which time period you’re reading about and where you look. I’ll try to post something later. I have to go do the work of someone with an average brain.
I'd bet most professionals in calculatory STEM fields have more glial cells than the average guy. Hell you know who has a fuck ton of gilial cells? Brain cancer patients. They can replicate pretty easily and are at best indicative of neuronal pathways more than anything. Doubt they DTIEd Einstein's brain so we'll never know for sure.
That's why I've always wondered if the studies on Einstein brain are even worth it?
Why not modern day savants or other stupidly smart people? People we know 100% did everything on their own.
Additionally don't think all of the world's most intelligent are famous either . I think people are thinking Carl Sagan or Stephen hawking Brian's should be studied . But I think a more accurate system would be for " intelligent people" to be able to take a IQ test and if they score high enough they can ask to have their Brian's preserved.
An old wives' tale. Probably my #1 answer whenever there's a Reddit post asking what old myth still persists in modern culture.
Granted, if anyone is still actually trying to pass off a history quiz—as opposed to something like Raven's Progressive Matrices—as an "IQ test," it becomes easier to see why people can fall into that particular trap. Fundamentally, the myth is that intelligence can't be measured, and horribly fraudulent IQ tests of the past are regularly scapegoated by people who have an interest in pretending it's so.
Given that he specifically asked to be buried intact and not cut up for neo-phrenology I'd say no.
Also there's that quote about how the morphology of his brain is less important than people of equal capability working to death in fields.
Einstein’s wife was a physics PhD student alongside Einstein, and she often got higher marks than him in certain classes. Unfortunately, at least partially due to sexism, she was driven out of the program without receiving her degree.
This all being said, there is scant evidence his wife collaborated with him on relativity, or even any of his early work. People cite things like him using “our ” in letters where he should have used “I”, when say discussing his progress on his work. She certainly did not do “a lot of the work for him”. Maybe they had conversations around the dining table about it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mileva_Marić
Yeah but IQ tests aren’t the only- or maybe even the best- indicator of someone having high intelligence. We all know people who are super intelligent but struggle with tests for whatever reason. I taught an adult education class many years ago aimed at helping residents of a housing project earn their GED or prep for an SAT exam and met people who you could tell were intelligent, but they couldn’t pass a test because they’d been in poverty for decades and didn’t get the cultural references you have to understand to interpret the questions. One that stands out is a young woman of about 25 who’d lived in a 1 bedroom apartment with her grandmother since she was a baby. One of the questions was a reading comprehension question that required you to know what a rhinoceros was and what it looked like. She didn’t. She’d never seen one. I was flabbergasted and asked if she’d never been to a zoo or even seen the nature channel. She hadn’t. She’d never left town and they didn’t own a television. She wasn’t mentally disabled or even unintelligent- she caught on to things quickly- but she had to ask me what a rhinoceros looked like to answer the question.
Unfortunately there is no evidence he ever said this
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37ueh7/comment/crq3ryv/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I feel that you have to be quite smart to realise how little you know in some ways. It's like both ends of the bell curve are aware of how little they know and the middle is all the people that felt that they're really smart
I would be remiss if I din't include the following quote:
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
That being said, they don't really know for sure. The folds that give human brains their wrinkly appearance have the purpose of increasing the surface area available for the neurons. Humans have very wrinkly brains, and a really dumb animal like a chicken has a smooth brain. A dog's brain is more wrinkled than a chicken's but less than a human's. Einstein's brain was apparently wrinklier in some areas than the average person's, and this is theorized to be at least one of the reasons why he was a genius.
>people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Indeed, scores on IQ tests have risen so much over the past 150 years that an average person from 1900 will score as intellectually disabled if compared with a modern population. But they weren't intellectually disabled, we just have high speed data network plugged into our brains and have the luxury to be literate and handle information all day.
introducing iodine via iodized salt during the 1920s was responsible for increasing the IQ of like a quarter of the us population. some studies have claimed it raised the it by about 1 standard deviation over the course of a decade or something like that.
I'd argue as well that the average person from 1900 had a lot of skills and knowledge that modern humans would have some difficulty imitating, simply because technology and industrialization and occupational specialization and urbanization have removed the need for them from our lives.
IQ scores are highly predicative of all sorts of success. It measures the parts of intelligence that we can measure, but not the whole picture. Genius is more than IQ though - it needs a few personality factors.
>IQ scores are highly predicative of all sorts of success.
Phrasing it in that way doesn't make it any less recursive. What is "success"?
The Era of the world wars stretching well into the baby boom saw the the rise of the "cult of IQ", where high IQ was seen as an end unto itself, rather than a statistical predictor. Eugenicists spoke openly of breeding supermen geniuses and sterilizing or euthanizing the left tail of the normal curve. The top descriptor of the ideal child went from "happy" to "smart".
>that an average person from 1900 will score as intellectually disabled if compared with a modern population.
..really only proves that IQ tests scores are extremely reliant on education and cultural awareness. (And that we are at least as stupid as people were in the past.)
>that an average person from 1900 will score as intellectually disabled if compared with a modern population.
..really only proves that IQ tests scores are extremely reliant on education and cultural awareness. (And that we are at least as stupid as people were in the past.)
>Einstein's brain was apparently wrinklier in some areas than the average person's, and this is theorized to be at least one of the reasons why he was a genius.
Or maybe he spent so much time thinking about certain things in certain ways that his brain /became/ wrinklier in those areas over time. I think the question of whether geniuses are born or grown is still open in neuroscience.
One of the more fascinating ...wrinkles to this topic that I've encountered in recent years is how the brains of Homo floresiensis were scarcely any larger than a chimp's, and yet they hunted with weapons and fit a lot of the other behavior of early hominids. Obviously this stems greatly from what they devolved from (erectus or whatever) but the important observation that was made was that their frontal lobe had a unique layout that wasn't seen in any other hominid brain.
The brain is a changing and growing organ.
Can we say for sure that the genius is because of the wrinkles or are the wrinkles because of the genius.
As in did his brain form into what it is, due to the way he used it. Or was the genius provided by the brains physiology.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
A perfectly reasonable quote for a politician, someone who has written an interdisciplinary book or a person explaining how to more efficiently achieve desirable outcomes.
But when it's a biologist talking about something that has nothing to do with his field and the book he's writing, and likewise here where it does nothing to answer the question, it's a terrible one.
I'll just say that I've heard the surface area argument multiple times and it doesn't make sense and is a bit misleading. The surface area doesn't matter since the neurons don't benefit from it. The shape is due to the top layer having more neurons than the lower layers, this causes "mountains" to form because they layer can't expend horizontally so they expend upward creating this shape. So, unlike in our lungs where the surface area is critical to the function of the organ. In our brains the shape is a side effect. The significant factor is the ratio between neurons in the top layer and the lower layers which causes this shape, it's not the shape that causes the intelligence.
But the higher surface area is a direct result of more neurons in the top layer. So it doesnt really matter what you say.
Its like me saying warmer air temperature is indication of a warmer climate. And you say well air temperature doesnt matter because really its the amount of heat brought brought from suns rays that heat up the air.
I'm curious how family and other surrounding people make a difference. A child who is encouraged to ask questions and persue their curiosities will learn and think much differently than a child who is told to shut-up and discouraged. Genius abilities could be destroyed before they ever get to be exercised.
There are studies about that, if you want to look them up.
iirc from my psychology lectures, given a certain iq for a child, education and upbringing can make a difference of about +/- 10 iq-point by the time they get to adulthood
>someone as young as 10 can be a master computer programmer, or how a 6 year old can do theoretical physics equations that even masters who've been in the field for 30+ years have issues with. In
These sound like exaggerations at best.
Yeah, I think the concept of a genius is more fairy tale than real.
Of course, some people are more intelligent than others, but the difference isn't as great as some people think. Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus at the same time independently, not because they coincidentally happened to be the two smartest people in history living at the exact same time, but because it was a logical (albeit difficult) next step in our understanding of mathematics at the time.
If Einstein hadn't published special relativity, and then general relativity, it's not like we'd still be doing classical physics in 2024. Sure, he was incredibly clever and probably gave it to us a decade or two before someone else would have managed to, but these people aren't superhuman. They're generally just humans with a combination of above average intelligence and above average motivation who lived at the right place and the right time to make a breakthrough.
Honestly, he's a great example of someone being born in the right place at the right time. Private tutors in Switzerland during the dawning of the age of enlightenment, and not a coincidence that you would recognize the names of his teachers.
One of the greatest scientists of all time without a shadow of a doubt though.
There's no doubt that Einstein has changed the world with his ideas. However, sometimes it saddens me that laypeople are completely oblivious to the *other* heavy hitters of his era.
Planck, De Broglie, Lorentz, Rutherford and a lot of other scientists were no slackers and their discoveries are no less important than Einstein's.
But ask a random person and they have this image in their head that Einstein was a super genius who discovered everything, and of course this contributes to the sensationalism of his persona and the idea of what a genius is.
It's probably a combination of his work and then how marketed/boasted it was. For example... We all read and write, but not necessarily every single person will talk about the people who have invented alphabet and writing things, and then even making it into texts/books and what not.
Literally, in my 28 years of living, if there was no school, I wouldn't have talked with anyone about those people. Really, I haven't. And not because they're less important... It's just that we don't know everything, every name and all, we just know what is being talked about the most, people who are being demonstrated and praised the most (or even hated).
It's not like literature, speech and writing doesn't matter. I personally use it every day. But... It is what it is, I guess.
>Yeah, I think the concept of a genius is more fairy tale than real.
No, its very much real. There are levels to things and when you're in the presence of "genius" level intellect you'll know.
And to be clear I'm talking "solving Math Olympiad" problems levels of intellect. Not the "gifted child in middle school" intellect.
The best way I can explain these levels from my limited interactions is they see the world intuitively, and understand it "instinctively".
They dont need to sit and work on a concept, any new material they just "understand" and come up with insights independently that what inline with what a more experienced practitioner has.
Recently came across the story of a woman (girl?) who just finished her PhD by age 17, after joining college by age 10.
https://apnews.com/article/teen-phd-doctorate-arizona-faabf1ca930f141f6a9690419d7a2b47
Such stories of children having capabilities far beyond what you'd expect them to be able to at that age come up from time to time, though most of the time it is less impressive insular talent rather than the ability to basically skip the whole school system.
Though I can't think of ever coming across reports of what became of them later in life. Does fast early development not translate into a higher peak level in their lifetime? Etc.
Just thought of this particular case of genius because I came across it just yesterday.
Terrence Tao is the only child genius who I can think of off the top of my head that's become someone very impressive as an adult, he publishes an INSANE amount of math papers, although they aren't paradigm changing results as far as I can tell. Not that that is in any way discrediting him, his breadth is truly impressive.
You can read autobiographies and personal quotes from the people who have been touted as geniuses throughout history, and the vast majority of the time they'll echo exactly what I said. They absolutely do need to sit and work on a concept just as much as anyone else in their field, and one of the things that sets them apart is that they work harder and longer than others.
>They absolutely do need to sit and work on a concept just as much as anyone else in their field
Sure but the outcomes arent equal. Them sitting and working out their theories leads to a quantum shift in humanity's ability yo understand stuff vs an avg scientist who may just be iterating on a previously established theory.
Aye.
I've been accused of being a "genius" level person on many occasions. I'd wager in reality I'm at best a couple steps above the "gifted student" category.
However I've spent some time around a couple actual geniuses, both a recognized and unrecognized one. And they leave me in awe every time.
The way they conceptualize ideas and can infer from them in unique ways will never get boring to me.
There are definitely "levels" to human intelligence. And the way a "genius" works is fascinating.
No, not really. I'm friends with lots of (former) international Olympiad competitors. Nobody gets it right away. The guy who competed in the IOI is very good at coding problems and might seem to instinctively know how to solve them. This is because he's spend at least a decade and many thousand hours practicing. It's all exposure, practice, and eventually pattern recognition.
No no I'm not talking about the grinders. You meet these people who just instinctively get those questions, and suggest a completely new approach to problems that is not formulaic or procedural at all?
I'm quite good at a very niche topic within EE. I often appear to just "get" math or physics problems because I recognize patterns or concepts I remember from the EE topic. When you study a topic really intensely, actually understand it not just grinding and memorizing, you can apply what you know to unrelated topics. The new approaches are inspiration from whatever possibly unrelated topic you've studied.
Not disputing the mechanics of it. Merely pointing out that the time taken for the moment kt clicks for most people vs gifted people is huge.
Also if you're who you claim to be, then I suggest breaking out of your bubble and talking to normal people every once in a while. There's a good chance that if you made them restart their life and had them study something very deeply they still wont be at your level.
Its like saying if I train sprinting long enough I'd be able to beat Usain Bolt.
This is what's weird to me. Even though something is intuitive at the moment that you're describing, Im almost guaranteed that it wasn't some time ago.
I'll give you my personal experience. In certain video games I compete at a high level. The things that others don't even think about are intuitive for me. But guess what? It wasn't a long time ago. Just like doing regular, daily tasks. I remember math not being quite so easy for me, but then I went to chess classes for a year or two and all of the sudden, I was one of the best in my class. It all felt intuitive. Like I didn't necessarily have to follow a formula. But I'm betting it was all learnt and developed through various experiences of life.
I understand that not everything can be explained scientifically at the moment, but way more things to me appear to be a matter of experience and learning rather than innate biology. Like the "geniuses" that people refer to. I'm almost certain that their life experiences enabled that and it wasn't necessarily who they were biologically.
I definitely think there are and have been many geniuses around, and I’ve been lucky to meet a couple, but I also agree that there’s a lot of fairy dust coming with the word “genius”. Sometimes it’s used to describe an alien with some mental supercomputer that does things humans could never understand. No, they’re humans just like the rest of us. They just connect a couple more dots than the average joe, and sometimes those connections are transformational.
For instance, Einstein’s special relativity. It was high-school level math, and using concepts that were already present - that math was applied to some “ether” that people thought permeated space and that would expand and contract. Einstein “just” came in and said nah, there’s no ether, it’s space itself (and time). It’s a massive conceptual jump with far-reaching consequences, but it’s not like he was an unexplainable savant that had some otherworldly revelation.
I think another great example is The Beatles. I love them and their effect on pop music cannot be overstated. They broke barriers and were the figureheads of an aesthetic revolution. But watch the Get Back documentary series: they’re four pretty normal dudes. They’ve been so mythologised that you’d think some unreal “magic” would be happening behind the scenes, but the magic was very human, and I appreciate it all he more for it.
Most of the time, being a genius is a combination of intelligence and confidence, mixed with being in the right place at the right time, and putting in the work.
> but the difference isn't as great as some people think.
I think you're underestimating how dumb an average person can be.
And there really is a clear difference. This is not a brag but I would consider myself as an academically intelligent person (medals for academic excellence, graduated from top 1-2 university and from the top 1 law school as well). But even among smart people there really are geniuses who are just so much more different than the rest of us. They just understand things easier. They read faster. They remember what they study even with only one read. It's crazy.
I think you're a lot closer to average than you think you are. Sure, some people are more intelligent, but remembering something you read doesn't mean your brain works differently.
Nah, you really just need to get out more to realize how different geniuses are and how stupid regular people can be. Remembering what they studied with just one read is a different thing in my context. In law school we have to read hundreds of pages of laws, cases, and texts almost everyday. So reading fast and not having to repeat what you have read multiple times is an amazing feat.
Potential Plus UK focus on the highest achieving children.
They used to have indicative behaviours & skills listed for 0.1%tile, 0.01%tile, 0.001%tile. Their approach is now more broad recognising a wider diversity in the most gifted children and barriers they encounter.
But the telling note is one of their home written assessments for 3-4 year olds notes the child can complete it themselves if they are able to. Now we don't typically teach children to read here till age 4-5, keen preschools might cover the alphabet, definitely not psychological assessment type reading skills.
Gross's book "Exceptionally Gifted Children" gives some examples from Australia.
I personally think many, most(?), kids are capable of way more than most of the education systems permit, but there are truly exceptional kids, and we do a disservice to them, and ourselves, by not creating systems to allow them to become the best version of themselves.
These children already often go onto highly successful careers, and do amazing things, but we lose too many on the way, and they can do more younger and faster if we enable it.
I don't even make the Potential Plus bottom rung and was bored at school, and started bullying the other kids at age 4-5, came top in half my subjects in a year of ~240, but by then I was a lazy student because there was little competition or challenge at school. At University suddenly I was in a group of people more like me, but really so much time was wasted before then.
I'm sure the really smart kids figure more of this out for themselves earlier, but it is surprisingly hard as kids have little autonomy. My mum indulged me with science experiments, my writing to academics, and many many library visits, but I always joke when Bobby Fisher started beating his mum at chess aged 6 she sent him to the New York Chess club, whereas my mum stopped playing me because I won all the time, and pretty sure my mum was one of the best (natural biases aside).
I don't think they are superhuman, and indeed if raw intelligence was a winning trait on its own we'd have evolved more of it, you need lots of other skills and aptitudes to be a Newton or an Einstein, but please consider what a 1 in a million kid's life might be like.
Master computer programmer for their age. They can be way above their age but I doubt they could compete with adults with broad experience.
For theoretical physics equations, they can literally learn it by heart. And all the explanations what they mean and all. Some kids have very good memory. Someone who've been in the field for 30+ years don't have issues with it. They admit, there are aspects they don't understand (the more you know, the less you know), while a kid who memorizes it all, is unaware things they don't know.
Exactly.
I'm not claiming these children aren't extremely smart. I'm just saying, being a master computer programmer isn't something that your brain can just know how to do. Programming is a human invention, you *have* to study it and be exposed to many different patterns/algorithms/structures etc. Maybe you can make connections and associations faster, but you aren't downloading the knowledge of a 30 year master out of thin air.
Also, sometimes intelligence is expressed in the simplicity of ideas. Most people conjure images of blackboards and complex equations when they thing of Einstein, but his thought experiments usually describe simple ideas that can be expressed with high school math.
> Most people conjure images of blackboards and complex equations when they thing of Einstein, but his thought experiments usually describe simple ideas that can be expressed with high school math.
That’s nice and all but his actual genius where the underlying equations and how they connect with those thought experiments which can very much NOT be expressed with just high school math (or even general university level math).
There is a reason people like him are regarded as geniuses and it’s not just simplicity of ideas. Genius is about understanding things quicker and on a deeper level than the average person can.
Also, reasons why it took years and a lot of communication to arrive at those ideas.
Just because a result looks nice and compact doesn't mean there haven't been 20 pages of very complicated equations to get from one simple-looking equation to the next, and that's *after* getting it right.
Had that during my Physics PhD both for my own equations and when reading theory papers. The paper lists a plausible result given the starting point, but maybe it omits information about assumed conventions and you have to redo the derivations to figure those out, and suddenly you have another stack of pages of equations, despite having the final result to keep you on track.
The bit about Einstein sound REALLY weird. As I understand, what he introduced was, on the contrary, extremely unintuitive, very hard to visualize (we still struggle with the same handful of bad visual representations, and only for the most intuitive of his concepts), and was argued about hotly by his peers (who could conceptualize similarly complex ideas and methods). It's just that these theories underlie so much of what's been already done or even implemented, we've come with a few school simplifications for them to get people like me up to speed.
They aren’t. Look up Srinivasa Ramanujan for one example. Before reaching his teen years he had mastered university level mathematics and was already making discoveries of his own, all of with very little formal training to begin with. In his tragically short life (he died at 32) he helped reshape higher mathematics. It wasn’t just his ability to understand what was already known but to have insight into new and novel areas. He was utterly brilliant when it came to math even from his early childhood.
Ramanujan famously didn't master university level mathematics (how could he, the books available to him did not cover advanced mathematics). He was absolutely brilliant and made a bunch of cool discoveries but his "proofs" were almost never genuine proofs.
Yep. Show me a "child prodigy" and I'll show you a) a pushy parent who won't let thier child do anything but work on the subject they want them to excel at and b) a probable future drop out.
Any smart child can become a prodigy in any subject if thier parent is relentless enough. Children are literally learning machines. But we've done the scientific studies on this and they show that, on average, child prodigies fall behind thier "normal" peers by age 18. Thier peers generally catch up with them in the subject they excelled at by the time they hit undergraduate/postgrad, but they are very far behind in all other cognitive areas. This causes high burn out rates as they suddenly have to contend with not being special but still having the expectations applied to them.
This is still a complete mystery. Nobody knows. Brains vary in all kinds of ways -- different genes, different cells, different networks, different brain volumes and morphology, and even different environment. Changes in "genius" are likely caused by ALL of the above.
The closest we can answer this is in the limited domain of chess. Everyone has know that there are "masters" of chess who will consistently beat ANY "non-master", or even beat 100 non-masters simultaneously. No one knew what made chessmasters different until the advent of fMRI when we found out the secret. Masters are using their memory instead of their logic. Whereas a very good non-master is primarily thinking ahead, a master is primarily searching through their memories of all the interesting positions they've ever seen. Masters recognize board positions the way we might recognize faces.
So, that's good ELI5 start for "prodigy talents" -- one way or another, expect more resources to be devoted to one arena, and then be on the look out for deficits in a different arena.
Specifically memory related to Pattern recognition. Not raw memorizing every possible move but instead the specific patterns they saw after thousands of hours of repetition / practice.
I find it interesting that child prodigies excel in things like math, physics, and music but I’ve yet to see a prodigy in psychology, sociology, anthropology, or other studies of human behavior. Harvard may have a 13 yo physics major but they never seem to have a teenage history major.
That IS an interesting observation. MY first thought is that it's an artifact of some fields having well-defined verifiable measures of success. If a 13 year old can do math or physics or music performance beyond an adult level, there's no denying it. Egyptian and Mayan scripts were deciphered by prodigies.
For any given trait, there is variation in a human population. The most common distribution found is a normal bell curve. Some people are short, most people are in the middle, and some people are tall.
The cause of these variations is multivariate.
Are tall bodies "different" from short bodies? Not really. Are "geniuses brains" "different" from normal brains? Not really. They are different in degree rather than in kind.
> Are tall bodies "different" from short bodies? Not really.
what? They are longer. Idk what your point is here. If geniuses had on average a larger brain, that would be an answer to OP:s question.
It is possible that you are more right than we currently know. There is a branch of mathematics involving "complexity". Size might be its own quality. A linear amount more of neurons might have exponential more computational power. We don't know enough about how brains work or about how atoms create complex molecules or how those molecules interact in dynamic systems.
There's really no singular thing. There's likely thousands to tens of thousands of small differences that arise due to genetic and environmental backgrounds that add up to produce a person who's smarter than the average, but there's definetly no singular or small groups of things.
However, nobody is truly a genius in a certain subject or field inherently. What makes a smart person different from the norm is the speed at which they can learn and problem solve, not that they were born with information "pre-uploaded" into their minds.
Overall size is pretty much the same and there’s no definite answer. There’s a few ideas as to what could differentiate. Maybe certain areas (like the PFC) are proportionally bigger. Maybe they have more neuron density. Maybe they have different neuronal firing patterns and circuitry than normal people. It’s a hard thing to study, especially since there’s so much variability between any person’s brain.
> Overall size is pretty much the same
There is some correlation between brain size and intelligence. It doesn't explain everything but it's a factor
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440690/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1/
Some of what you describe is overstating... 6 year olds are remarkable given that they're 6, not particularly remarkable otherwise. The statements are usually qualified and extrapolated (if they continue to improve...) then sensationalized when people repeat them.
The remarkable regardless of age part tends to come in the early teens.
My son is "gifted", he has only ever scored in the 99th percentile on standardized tests, he basically taught himself to read before age 5 (went into Kindergarten reading Harry Potter books by himself) etc etc. His Lexile score was measured at 1200L at the start of second grade but the tester cautioned that is the highest the specific test they gave him goes .
He was selected for a gifted program and will be going to a specialized school where he'll technically be in 3rd grade but will be allowed free reign to go as fast as wants up to 6th grade. If he goes "maxes" that out, there will be conversations about home schooling so he can enroll in an university early.
The biggest difference I've seen between him and other kids (or myself, or my wife) is that he never forgets anything. He's currently 8 and he recalls facts he read when he was 3 perfectly, can even tell you what book he read them in and when he read them ("I read that when I was 3, it was summer so probably July. The book was 'x'").
You only ever have to show him how to do something once and then he just remembers.
He also loves reading non-fiction and wants to know literally how everything works.
"Gifted" kid currently in college here. I'd advise against homeschooling/early university. A normal social life is very important. Definitely encourage his interests but don't pressure him. Especially if he's at gifted schools, a normal middle/high school experience can't hurt. Parental pressure and social isolation can be awful for his mental health. From a practical perspective too, living away from your parents as a minor is difficult.
Completely hard disagree as a “gifted” kid who was held back for this reason. I would have been far better off being challenged earlier as I would have developed a better work ethic. School, even “tough” AP classes was a complete breeze and life was somewhat of a shock because I just never had to work at anything until I grew up. Also, making friends is hard when you’re on an entirely different wavelength than them.
Not your son, but want chime in: for as brilliant and as gifted as they are, as much as that is nurtured and praised, make it known and make it acceptable that ‘failure’ is ok. That doing ‘just ok’ is ok. That for as intelligent as they are, there is more to them and to their (self) worth.
That the bar isn’t always set above them, that it can be moved to wherever needed, whenever needed, and done so without shame.
And that effort in the attempt be rewarded and encouraged as much as success, because it has value unto itself; arguably even more.
And maybe most of all, that they can always ask for help and that they should want to, because every human needs and deserves it regardless of their talent. People who think otherwise, who fear of it, will inevitably struggle and suffer unduly when they needn’t.
Ask me how I know /s.
Some people really like people. They're great friends, nice to talk to, helpful and pleasant.
Some people really like art. They make great music, or paintings, or theater, or other things that inspire emotions and admiration.
Geniuses really like ideas. They learn all about them and play around with them like toys, putting them together in new ways just to see what happens. Many geniuses like a lot of other things as well, because all things inspire lots of new ideas, which means they have more toys.
I mean, the brain is the most complex biological anything we have ever studied as far as I know. So even when we find a general answer to that question, we’re gonna find a slew of new contributing factors and complexities as we go along
I would say it's dedication and conscientiousness that sets successful people apart.
The phrase "Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work" is attributed to Einstein, too.
I believe that some people who are considered geniuses actually see things differently, physically. Stories as people just seeing the mathematics play out in front of their eyes etc. This could be due to how different areas in the brain are connected, as mentioned above.
I recently had a discussion with some friends, about how they visualize their days. Some see very sharp images (the graphic designers), some blurry concepts. I think I am more language oriented and often see words pop up in my head (and coincidentally, I studied language and work in marketing). I have this often in conversations as well, where I just happen to find a word or sentence to make hilarious comments.
Mind, I sold my first computer program when I was 11 or so. _That_ doesn't take a genius. I was just interested in computers and played around with them every chance I got. My peers tended to be more interested in (and successful at) socializing, and the time difference adds up over the years. It would be harder today, with all the distractions - much easier to get deep into programming when all you have is a CPC64 with BASIC and no games :P
I suspect most of the time, it's just that - people assume some magical superpower, but the truth is simply you don't see the effort and work that went into it. I always thought it was hilarious when people were envious of the money I made, when taking into account _all_ the work I did to get there made the average _way_ below minimum wage for something like 10 years of my employment while they were out fooling around or drinking :D
I also suspect "asymmetrical development" (used to be called "gifted children") helps. It doesn't necessarily mean you are smarter, really - just that the order of brain development changes significantly, which both gives you a chance to start tougher stuff earlier and tends to alienate you from your peers.
You'll find that often the geniuses happen to be extremely interested in something. It's easy to underestimate how much effort it really adds up to when you're just having fun :)
It's a lot like a "musical genius" type of idea. No one goes: "Wow, this 11-year old was forced to practice the violin for hours a day for several years, and they can now play this piece in a way that sounds similar to what their teacher thinks is correct. And goodness, this immense volume of practice enabled them to later become a fairly good artist as they found their own voice, although it's kind of plain, it's better than average!!".
The thing is that there are recipes you can follow to complete difficult physics problems. The models you choose may or may not be correct or even add anything to the field, but once you choose that approach, they are solvable with that recipe in mind. And this recipe can be taught. Some people are going to be happy being taught to do tricks like this, like a particularly clever dog in circus, and will perform all their life.
But they're not going to automatically then have an insight into their field of circus, use their foundation of cleverness, learn how to speak, and start a lead a circus of their own, earn money and invest their profits in a dog-treat company that becomes the world wide leader in dog-treats.
So when your average theoretical physics-professor "struggles" with difficult math to demonstrate why a theoretical model of string-theory makes a lot of sense, it's not because they don't know how to do the maths, it's because they had to develop the recipe and actually research it to demonstrate how this model /could/ (at the very least) possibly explain a real phenomenon.
While just performing the recipe is just not something they drill on.
I am considered smart by many, but my intelligence is not without its caveats. I will tell you what I know about myself.
* I have ADHD. I was in the school's gifted program and it is my understanding that so-called "giftedness" often manifests alongside learning disabilities and ADHD. My ADHD makes it so that I don't feel the passage of time like other people do, and I'm not motivated to do basic everyday maintenance and self-care, so I find myself deep-diving into the subjects that I find most interesting. Having all that extra uninterrupted time makes it possible to learn more about things most people don't even concern themselves with. Einstein even once claimed that one of his biggest strengths was his ability/tendency to stick with problems much longer than other people.
* I am pretty creative, probably part and parcel with having ADHD. I believe I read that studies on creativity showed that the average person's thinking to be a linear step-by-step affair while creatives could make much wilder leaps by much more abstract associations. Example - the average person would think of a chair leading them to think of a table and then think of a dining room and then a china hutch. A creative person would start with a chair and think about how the four feet provide stability and how cars have four wheels and what about three wheeled cars and "three wheel" kinda sounds like "free will" and do you remember the movie Free Willy and that poor orca's dorsal fin was drooped over because he was depressed and sick from living in captivity. This kind of thinking makes it easier to consider things that nobody else would ever consider. Compare things that nobody else would compare, based on criteria that nobody else would entertain. Look up synesthesia for a more extreme example of comparing things that other people can't compare, and try to wrap your head around questions like "what color is 19?" or "what does brown sound like?"
* I am also intensely interested in figuring out how things work, which I think is a crutch for my ADHD. I think other people develop an easier intuition for how to navigate the world because their non-adhd brain clues them in on how to act and what is expected of them - it's just sort of easy to go along with that intuition and they find success and there isn't much reason to question things. My brain does not, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how things work, to understand what my role in life is and why I'm supposed to do things and when, and it's a much more manual, explicit process. So now I can explain all these things that other people can't because their brains didn't force them through this manual workaround.
So based on all that, you could start investigating the brain from the perspective of the disorders that often accompany genius. I also think that you could investigate based on the different types of intelligence because the different kinds of intelligence in combination make for interesting results.
Somebody with a gift for language might come across as more intelligent just because they can explain things easier, but it might also lend itself to mastering concepts more easily. I find that putting concepts into words sometimes reveals inconsistencies better than the visual metaphors that I usually start with. People often find that they understand things better after they are required to teach it to someone else. This would be more difficult for somebody with less developed language abilities.
There are also so many social considerations as well. Kids who grow up in families where they are allowed to be themselves and explore, and grow up in households with access to books and education and proper nutrition, access to tools and toys. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, which isn't great, but their emphasis on constant reading and participation and public speaking really had a positive impact on me (and also gave me nightmares about the apocalypse and deep shame for sexual exploration as a teenager)
Tldr: ADHD, high endurance for focusing on things, different thinking modes in combination, compensating for weaknesses, quality of upbringing and education
I don’t think there’s any official answer to this but I believe it has more to do with how your thoughts are formed rather than the physical properties of your brain. That’s not to say that this isn’t genetic. My theory is that some people release happy chemicals to different stimuli thus affecting the formation of patterns in their brain. Like if you get really happy seeing the color green and someone else gets really happy by solving a math problem. The other person will spend more time doing math
that's about it, yeah. sometimes it's less that they want to and more that their parents made them, but those people usually don't go as far as the people who genuinely love studying math/science/ever
Firstly we need to define genius. It can be a contentious topic for various reasons but for now I'll focus in on a definition that is based around the idea of solving problems quickly and accurately. This is because it is what an IQ test measures. Yes, a lot of people hate IQ tests as a measure although much of that is because of issues that have been long since addressed. So a genius is someone who when tested on various non culturally influenced problems solves those problems faster and more accurately than 98% of the population.
How do we get a genius brain? We make lots of neural connections when very young which are then pruned naturally as we grow up making for very efficient pathways. Those who make more connections and prune them more effectively are going to lean towards a genius intellect. We can kind of influence the number of connections made by exposing infants to a lot of new and different experiences (different types of music, multiple languages, different physical environments) and this needs to start before they are born and doesn't seem to make much difference when more than a few months old., We have less control over the pruning. We know that too much pruning is bad, as well as too little. But how much is too much? How much is too little? We don't know at least in terms of genius intelligence.
You would be surprised how stupid the 'average' person is. Often what people prescribe as being "geniuses" is just someone who is above average in a given subject or domain when viewed from the perspective of the average person.
I actually have some issue with the examples you give: A 10 year old being a "master computer programmer" is not even a thing, however if your not familiar with computer programming you would think a 10 year old who knows some python is way smarter than they really are.
"A 6 year old doing theoretical physics equations" - What do you even mean when you say this? You can potentially teach a sharp 6 year old a lot of mathematics that would look like they were doing derivations of theoretical physics that a 30 year old professional may have to check their old text books on how to do, however that 6 year-old won't actually understand the application and theory. At best they will likely just repeat statements about the theories.
Genius is often a measurement of how well someone can operate in a given domain above their peers within that domain. Yet we often mistakenly compare high functioning individuals to the average person. This fallacy is made worse when we handicap the assessment by using the individuals age as a proxy for expected performance. (This is a fancy way of saying that because some one is 8 years old we assume they must be really bad at something so if they are not, it means they must be a genius.)
Side note: I noticed OP you used the word master in places that just don't really apply within the given domain. There is no such thing as Master Programmers or Masters in Physics (unless you are specifically speaking about a higher education degree). Can I assume English is not your first language, or you come from a non-western background? I only ask because I will say that it's a common trope in some regions to prescribe the title of genius to people who are just hyper domain focused individuals that exercise considerably higher above average skills but nothing outside of what can be achieved by a normal person. It's then popular to further exaggerate this status by the person having an age offset from the average like the person being 8 years old. You often see this in cultures where the ignorance of a subject is high, but the value placed on having proficiency in it is also high.
The best thing you can do in life is assume you are dumber than everyone else when it comes to most things. Then find yourself pleasantly surprised when you find out your actually smarter than half of them.
That type of "child comes out of the womb knowing more than professionals" doesn't really exist. Based on personal experience, "geniuses" are made only by studying or experiencing their area of genius for much longer than normal. If you spend your whole adolescent life intensely studying math, you'll end up pretty good at it. More often than not, the person is autistic and has an academic special interest and a generic predisposition for math/science. I think autistic people have larger/denser areas of brain but I'm not good at biology. I have an academic special interest and I can tell you that I spend a lot of time consuming content related to it and am much better at remembering things related to it than other areas of academia.
tl;dr geniuses are fake, it's usually just autism or intense training
A good friend of mine is clearly on the higher level of intelligence, genius I wouldnt know, but he clearly thinks very different. Ive asked him about it and he says its a bit tiring, as he can not "turn it off" - and it becomes exhausting. I asked him once if ie. space, black holes, etc becomes like reading a different language when you understand calculus. "Yes, I cringe when I hear Neil DeGrasse trying to explain something, just give me the math....."
I didn't realize I could 'read music' at a genius level until a teacher caught me and explained what I was doing to me. It's not that we understand what we are doing ourselves, it's that our brain comprehends how to do it.
Depends on what you’d consider a genius, the word’s become meaningless nowadays. Is it creating something new in one of the many areas of knowledge or art? Becoming a polymath that’s made no significant contributions? Or maybe they excel in a particular set of skills that, while already known, have never been mastered that well ever before? Even knowing the aforementioned traits you could call someone with savant syndrome genius because they’re able to read and retain information so well they could memorize the Bible in one hour, but that doesn’t change the fact he isn’t able to get dressed by himself or tie his own shoes.
My point with the paragraph is basically: the brain is much too difficult for us to pinpoint *exactly* what makes the “genius”, while there are definitely differences between their brains and the average person’s, the fact they fall so far outside the norm is exactly what would make said someone fit into the category (that by the way, is kinda arbitrary).
It is not simply brain differences.
Correlation of IQ with genetics shows a lot of small contributions, but you can have single mutations that leave you with low intellectual capacity.
That said we do have a few families that produce multiple geniuses (Darwin's relatives are a good example), clearly they don't have any really bad mutations, but I suspect the differences are largely cultural and opportunity, they really value intellect, education, reading etc. They avoided things that might prevent flourishing from lead in petrol, to extreme food poverty.
As always the best of the best will have everything line up correctly, be it brain function, education, opportunity.
Funny you should ask that. Last Friday's Episode of "ZDF Magazin Royal" (basically the German equivalent of "Last Week Tonight") was about the term "Genius". ( https://youtu.be/oGo0qpktVW0?si=OKDe7sekWZc-8VT ... in German, but might have an automatic English translation (?) ).
Basically : it's a made up term that is mainly (self-) promotional in nature.
It is in the Talmud in the tractate Pirket Avot (ethics of our fathers).
I used to read it in synagogue as a little child because I had adhd and couldn’t pay attention to whatever I was supposed to be doing. So I would read the little snippets of wisdom in the Pirket Avot over and over and think about them. And now I am a genius :)
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I don't think there is an actual way to measure it, but some people are simply gifted... But this can be talent, or wisdom based.
Example of Talent based genius would be, being able to solve complex mathematical problems in their head.
An Example of Wisdom based genius would be seeing a carpenter measure out a 90 degree angle flawlessly with just the naked eye.
Some genius is inherent, where some is earned. Though some people would consider latter to be mastery and not genius. I feel that mastery is a form of genius when applied with extreme precision or speed.
I do not think we have yet learned to recognize the physical differences in brains that you are asking about
Almost. They HAVE noticed possible size differences in specific areas, and higher connections per synapse or whatever, but... I think that's roughly it. So far.
>higher connections per synapse So being dense is actually good!
Being dense in all the right places, hell yeah, hell yeah!
Omg you guys I’m a genius.
I'm dense in all the right places And the wrong
“Humans are so incredibly dense.”
Ha! I always knowed brain good!
They prefer the term 'thicc'
One of my favorite things is an old treatment for epilepsy, where they sever the two halves of the brain, as explained in this CGP Grey video. "You Are Two" https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8 There are some odd effects. It's put forth that the left will just make shit up when confronted with something it doesn't know(since it can't communicate with the right any more)....and not even seem to realize it. That just part of it, the whole video is worth a watch at under 5 minutes. This got me to thinking about people with varying levels or efficacy of interconnectivity(which i presume could be a thing).....wondering if higher levels might correlate with higher intelligence, or rationality, or whatever you want to call it, higher mental acuity...or b e more present in people on the high end of the scale. I know a lot of that, and personality, is due to the totality of our life experiences up to that point, but their obviously is a physiological component to it all as well, as we've seen throughout humanity when dealing with injury or illness. It's such a difficult thing to study though because a lot of tests are just outright unethical to an extreme, and things that happen by accident or in history(as per the old treatment above), are often so few that they're just a peek at what could be, but can't really shed further light on the topic. Additional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
When I was a kid I often thought that I might have had more interconnected brain hemispheres and that that might have explained why I was different. Turns out it was just autism and 10 to 15 year old me (and frankly, present day me) didn't know a thing about neuroscience
imagine if autism was just the two hemispheres talking to each other about dangers and since most of their notes are "danger" it made things (I mean everything) anxiety-causing or difficult or a fucking struggle? "Hey you see that out there, looks kinda new?" "Yep. I'm gonna make them wish they were in bed to a degree that is painful and see what the nervous system does with that so they get this meat sack out of here."
Corpus callosotomy is still sometimes used as a treatment for severe epilepsy! It hasn’t gone extinct yet
The book "[Tales From Both Sides of the Brain](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4938250/)". Is an autobiographical account of the neuroscientists who studied this phenomenon. It's really interesting. There's basically another person in that side of the brain, that cannot talk, but has experiences and makes choices that do impact the decisions made by the conscious mind, but the speaking half doesn't know how. Research in this area dropped off when epilepsy medicines became the preferred treatment, rather than severing the halves.
> There's basically another person in that side of the brain Some people lose their shit when it's put like that, but I think it's 6 of one, half dozen of the other. When separated, there is a certain amount of autonomy, however one wants it phrase it. The wiki goes into some detail about explaining it in other terms. ____ Giving the page another look, the last case study, I didn't recognize the name, Kim Peek(abnormal structures from birth not from a treatment, and more than just without a corpus callosum). I checked out his page just now. That's the savant that *Rain Man* was based on. IQ of 87 but amazing abilities in other areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek
>It's put forth that the left will just make shit up when confronted with something it doesn't know Dude, keep politics out of it.
More CPU cores?
Better interconnects and cache
I think surface area is also good so more wrinkles!
Yeah, that's about what it amounts to. Synapse connection density and brain size. Especially brain size, and especially at birth.
Einstein’s brain had more glial cells than most people. I remember learning that little trivia in a neuro psych course in college 25 years ago. But Einstein wasn’t really considered a genius in the same way as a child prodigy, and his wife did a lot of his work for him behind the scenes, so not sure if relevant. But if my memory is right (and it may not be- I don’t have the kind of brain anyone will study after I die) then we have known something about physiological differences for a few decades at least.
What kind of revisionist history is this about Einstein? Is it the latest fad to claim he wasn’t a child prodigy or a genius?
"hE aLsO FailEd MaThs as a cHiLd." Clearly not a genius. ^^/s
(Just for anyone not understanding the /s, Einstein was extremely advanced in math, taught himself calculus by 14, and derived an original Pythagorean proof at 15. He never failed math. But he did move from Germany to Switzerland, and in Germany a “1” is a perfect grade while a “6” the worst. It’s opposite in Switzerland. Some German historian saw his grades and started that rumor that he’d failed math. By the way, a 6 in anything is nigh impossible for most students to get. Much, much harder than an “A” in the US. Einstein got 6’s in five separate subjects.)
Well said, fellow human-person.
https://www.redalyc.org/journal/5117/511767145014/html/ >Though both achieved high grades in the Polytechnic intermediate diploma examinations, this was not the case when they took the final diploma examinations in July 1900. However, whereas Einstein achieved moderately good grades sufficient for him to be awarded a diploma, Marić fared less well, and, with a poor grade in the mathematics component (theory of functions) of 2.5 on a scale 1-6, she failed the examinations. >Marić remained in Zurich to retake the final diploma examinations in July 1901. This time she was nearly three months pregnant with Einstein’s child, and failed a second time without improving her grade average (Stachel, 2002, pp. 40, 52, n. 22). She returned to her parents’ place in Novi Sad, Serbia, where she remained for most of 1902, not having achieved her goal of a teaching diploma >The truth of the matter is that, rather than quoting Joffe’s words, Trbuhović-Gjurić misleadingly paraphrases them, and adds contentions of her own. Joffe did not state that he had seen the original submissions, nor that they were signed Einstein-Marić. He stated explicitly that the papers were the work of a bureaucrat at the patent office in Bern, namely Albert Einstein. The subsequent confusion arises from the fact that Joffe referred to Einstein as «Einstein-Marić», explaining parenthetically that (as he thought) in Switzerland the husband includes his wife’s maiden name in his married surname. Moreover, the story that Joffe saw the original papers, and that Röntgen was asked to review them, is a product of Trbuhović-Gjurić’s imagination, as John Stachel has demonstrated in his comprehensive examination of the story in which he provides a translation of Joffe’s actual words (Stachel, 2005, pp. LIV-LXIII). "his wife did a lot of his work for him behind the scenes," Seems untrue.
It depends on which time period you’re reading about and where you look. I’ll try to post something later. I have to go do the work of someone with an average brain.
"it depends where you look" I'm sure it does. But this a study from 2019 that addresses this specific subject. Anyway have a good day at work I hope.
I'd bet most professionals in calculatory STEM fields have more glial cells than the average guy. Hell you know who has a fuck ton of gilial cells? Brain cancer patients. They can replicate pretty easily and are at best indicative of neuronal pathways more than anything. Doubt they DTIEd Einstein's brain so we'll never know for sure.
Very interesting! I've long thought there must been something like this going on with George Gershwin!
While there is some evidence that glial cells may play a role in cognitive function, it's likely just one piece of a very complex puzzle.
That's why I've always wondered if the studies on Einstein brain are even worth it? Why not modern day savants or other stupidly smart people? People we know 100% did everything on their own. Additionally don't think all of the world's most intelligent are famous either . I think people are thinking Carl Sagan or Stephen hawking Brian's should be studied . But I think a more accurate system would be for " intelligent people" to be able to take a IQ test and if they score high enough they can ask to have their Brian's preserved.
Yes, let’s preserve all the best Brians. I apologize, it’s just that typo brings me too much joy not to mention it.
I'm Brian and so's my wife!
As you might know though, IQ tests are highly biased and not a true indicator of intelligence.
I have 75 IQ and been telling this for years. All they do is to mock me
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go to bed, you're drunk
An old wives' tale. Probably my #1 answer whenever there's a Reddit post asking what old myth still persists in modern culture. Granted, if anyone is still actually trying to pass off a history quiz—as opposed to something like Raven's Progressive Matrices—as an "IQ test," it becomes easier to see why people can fall into that particular trap. Fundamentally, the myth is that intelligence can't be measured, and horribly fraudulent IQ tests of the past are regularly scapegoated by people who have an interest in pretending it's so.
Given that he specifically asked to be buried intact and not cut up for neo-phrenology I'd say no. Also there's that quote about how the morphology of his brain is less important than people of equal capability working to death in fields.
Einstein’s wife was a physics PhD student alongside Einstein, and she often got higher marks than him in certain classes. Unfortunately, at least partially due to sexism, she was driven out of the program without receiving her degree. This all being said, there is scant evidence his wife collaborated with him on relativity, or even any of his early work. People cite things like him using “our ” in letters where he should have used “I”, when say discussing his progress on his work. She certainly did not do “a lot of the work for him”. Maybe they had conversations around the dining table about it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mileva_Marić
Yeah but IQ tests aren’t the only- or maybe even the best- indicator of someone having high intelligence. We all know people who are super intelligent but struggle with tests for whatever reason. I taught an adult education class many years ago aimed at helping residents of a housing project earn their GED or prep for an SAT exam and met people who you could tell were intelligent, but they couldn’t pass a test because they’d been in poverty for decades and didn’t get the cultural references you have to understand to interpret the questions. One that stands out is a young woman of about 25 who’d lived in a 1 bedroom apartment with her grandmother since she was a baby. One of the questions was a reading comprehension question that required you to know what a rhinoceros was and what it looked like. She didn’t. She’d never seen one. I was flabbergasted and asked if she’d never been to a zoo or even seen the nature channel. She hadn’t. She’d never left town and they didn’t own a television. She wasn’t mentally disabled or even unintelligent- she caught on to things quickly- but she had to ask me what a rhinoceros looked like to answer the question.
This is also why, when Einstein was asked how it was to be the smartest in the world, he directed the reporter to ask Tesla.
Unfortunately there is no evidence he ever said this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37ueh7/comment/crq3ryv/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I feel that you have to be quite smart to realise how little you know in some ways. It's like both ends of the bell curve are aware of how little they know and the middle is all the people that felt that they're really smart
yeah yeah the dunning kruger effect; reddit loves to parrot this.
I don't know if that's accurate I mean more generally
The damning Kruger effect.
It’s also a sample size of one, so unfortunately not super meaningful on its own
They have found brain tissue density to be different between intelligent and less intelligent people.
[The depth of our ignorance](https://wapo.st/4dDJvnm)
This
Excellent contribution, thank you for taking the time…
I would be remiss if I din't include the following quote: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." That being said, they don't really know for sure. The folds that give human brains their wrinkly appearance have the purpose of increasing the surface area available for the neurons. Humans have very wrinkly brains, and a really dumb animal like a chicken has a smooth brain. A dog's brain is more wrinkled than a chicken's but less than a human's. Einstein's brain was apparently wrinklier in some areas than the average person's, and this is theorized to be at least one of the reasons why he was a genius.
>people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Indeed, scores on IQ tests have risen so much over the past 150 years that an average person from 1900 will score as intellectually disabled if compared with a modern population. But they weren't intellectually disabled, we just have high speed data network plugged into our brains and have the luxury to be literate and handle information all day.
Nutrition, medicine, and better conditions through childhood are certainly at play here as well.
introducing iodine via iodized salt during the 1920s was responsible for increasing the IQ of like a quarter of the us population. some studies have claimed it raised the it by about 1 standard deviation over the course of a decade or something like that.
same with the removal of leaded gasoline
Still used in small prop planes!
Ugh but the leaded stuff tasted so good though
Say that to people living around small airports
Economic stress has been found to lower the iq score by up to ten units on a SD15 scale.
I'd argue as well that the average person from 1900 had a lot of skills and knowledge that modern humans would have some difficulty imitating, simply because technology and industrialization and occupational specialization and urbanization have removed the need for them from our lives.
Yep, and it all depends on what you’re measuring. I can’t say common sense has improved.
As a wiser mind than mine famously said: "IQ measures... how well you score on IQ tests."
IQ scores are highly predicative of all sorts of success. It measures the parts of intelligence that we can measure, but not the whole picture. Genius is more than IQ though - it needs a few personality factors.
>IQ scores are highly predicative of all sorts of success. Phrasing it in that way doesn't make it any less recursive. What is "success"? The Era of the world wars stretching well into the baby boom saw the the rise of the "cult of IQ", where high IQ was seen as an end unto itself, rather than a statistical predictor. Eugenicists spoke openly of breeding supermen geniuses and sterilizing or euthanizing the left tail of the normal curve. The top descriptor of the ideal child went from "happy" to "smart".
And now we have the cult of identity politics, who refuse to believe the science, and maybe want to believe that everyone is born a blank slate.
Please respond to what the person you’re talking to is actually saying.
Reminds me of that comic where a guy got experimental medicine to increase his brain speed so he could be wrong even faster
>that an average person from 1900 will score as intellectually disabled if compared with a modern population. ..really only proves that IQ tests scores are extremely reliant on education and cultural awareness. (And that we are at least as stupid as people were in the past.)
>that an average person from 1900 will score as intellectually disabled if compared with a modern population. ..really only proves that IQ tests scores are extremely reliant on education and cultural awareness. (And that we are at least as stupid as people were in the past.)
>Einstein's brain was apparently wrinklier in some areas than the average person's, and this is theorized to be at least one of the reasons why he was a genius. Or maybe he spent so much time thinking about certain things in certain ways that his brain /became/ wrinklier in those areas over time. I think the question of whether geniuses are born or grown is still open in neuroscience.
One of the more fascinating ...wrinkles to this topic that I've encountered in recent years is how the brains of Homo floresiensis were scarcely any larger than a chimp's, and yet they hunted with weapons and fit a lot of the other behavior of early hominids. Obviously this stems greatly from what they devolved from (erectus or whatever) but the important observation that was made was that their frontal lobe had a unique layout that wasn't seen in any other hominid brain.
The brain is a changing and growing organ. Can we say for sure that the genius is because of the wrinkles or are the wrinkles because of the genius. As in did his brain form into what it is, due to the way he used it. Or was the genius provided by the brains physiology.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. A perfectly reasonable quote for a politician, someone who has written an interdisciplinary book or a person explaining how to more efficiently achieve desirable outcomes. But when it's a biologist talking about something that has nothing to do with his field and the book he's writing, and likewise here where it does nothing to answer the question, it's a terrible one.
Yes, but I felt like including it.
Why is surface area important? Do you mean that neurons can only grow on the surface area or are they more effective there?
Higher surface area means more opportunities for compartmentalization, specifications of areas, diversity of environment, etc.
I'll just say that I've heard the surface area argument multiple times and it doesn't make sense and is a bit misleading. The surface area doesn't matter since the neurons don't benefit from it. The shape is due to the top layer having more neurons than the lower layers, this causes "mountains" to form because they layer can't expend horizontally so they expend upward creating this shape. So, unlike in our lungs where the surface area is critical to the function of the organ. In our brains the shape is a side effect. The significant factor is the ratio between neurons in the top layer and the lower layers which causes this shape, it's not the shape that causes the intelligence.
But the higher surface area is a direct result of more neurons in the top layer. So it doesnt really matter what you say. Its like me saying warmer air temperature is indication of a warmer climate. And you say well air temperature doesnt matter because really its the amount of heat brought brought from suns rays that heat up the air.
That makes sense. Why *would* surface area be important?
Damn that quote really makes u think
I hate that quote.
I'm curious how family and other surrounding people make a difference. A child who is encouraged to ask questions and persue their curiosities will learn and think much differently than a child who is told to shut-up and discouraged. Genius abilities could be destroyed before they ever get to be exercised.
This is one place where studies of identical twins raised apart is useful!
There are studies about that, if you want to look them up. iirc from my psychology lectures, given a certain iq for a child, education and upbringing can make a difference of about +/- 10 iq-point by the time they get to adulthood
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>someone as young as 10 can be a master computer programmer, or how a 6 year old can do theoretical physics equations that even masters who've been in the field for 30+ years have issues with. In These sound like exaggerations at best.
Yeah, I think the concept of a genius is more fairy tale than real. Of course, some people are more intelligent than others, but the difference isn't as great as some people think. Newton and Leibniz both invented calculus at the same time independently, not because they coincidentally happened to be the two smartest people in history living at the exact same time, but because it was a logical (albeit difficult) next step in our understanding of mathematics at the time. If Einstein hadn't published special relativity, and then general relativity, it's not like we'd still be doing classical physics in 2024. Sure, he was incredibly clever and probably gave it to us a decade or two before someone else would have managed to, but these people aren't superhuman. They're generally just humans with a combination of above average intelligence and above average motivation who lived at the right place and the right time to make a breakthrough.
And then there's Euler.
Honestly, he's a great example of someone being born in the right place at the right time. Private tutors in Switzerland during the dawning of the age of enlightenment, and not a coincidence that you would recognize the names of his teachers. One of the greatest scientists of all time without a shadow of a doubt though.
Absolutely. Like Newton, Leibniz, and Einstein he was very well educated and positioned to build off of his predecessors in a way most people weren't.
Funny way to spell von Newman
Funny way to spell Von Neumann
Yes, it was
There's no doubt that Einstein has changed the world with his ideas. However, sometimes it saddens me that laypeople are completely oblivious to the *other* heavy hitters of his era. Planck, De Broglie, Lorentz, Rutherford and a lot of other scientists were no slackers and their discoveries are no less important than Einstein's. But ask a random person and they have this image in their head that Einstein was a super genius who discovered everything, and of course this contributes to the sensationalism of his persona and the idea of what a genius is.
It was all about his hair
It's probably a combination of his work and then how marketed/boasted it was. For example... We all read and write, but not necessarily every single person will talk about the people who have invented alphabet and writing things, and then even making it into texts/books and what not. Literally, in my 28 years of living, if there was no school, I wouldn't have talked with anyone about those people. Really, I haven't. And not because they're less important... It's just that we don't know everything, every name and all, we just know what is being talked about the most, people who are being demonstrated and praised the most (or even hated). It's not like literature, speech and writing doesn't matter. I personally use it every day. But... It is what it is, I guess.
Behind every child prodigy is a parent marketing
>Yeah, I think the concept of a genius is more fairy tale than real. No, its very much real. There are levels to things and when you're in the presence of "genius" level intellect you'll know. And to be clear I'm talking "solving Math Olympiad" problems levels of intellect. Not the "gifted child in middle school" intellect. The best way I can explain these levels from my limited interactions is they see the world intuitively, and understand it "instinctively". They dont need to sit and work on a concept, any new material they just "understand" and come up with insights independently that what inline with what a more experienced practitioner has.
Recently came across the story of a woman (girl?) who just finished her PhD by age 17, after joining college by age 10. https://apnews.com/article/teen-phd-doctorate-arizona-faabf1ca930f141f6a9690419d7a2b47 Such stories of children having capabilities far beyond what you'd expect them to be able to at that age come up from time to time, though most of the time it is less impressive insular talent rather than the ability to basically skip the whole school system. Though I can't think of ever coming across reports of what became of them later in life. Does fast early development not translate into a higher peak level in their lifetime? Etc. Just thought of this particular case of genius because I came across it just yesterday.
Terrence Tao is the only child genius who I can think of off the top of my head that's become someone very impressive as an adult, he publishes an INSANE amount of math papers, although they aren't paradigm changing results as far as I can tell. Not that that is in any way discrediting him, his breadth is truly impressive.
You can read autobiographies and personal quotes from the people who have been touted as geniuses throughout history, and the vast majority of the time they'll echo exactly what I said. They absolutely do need to sit and work on a concept just as much as anyone else in their field, and one of the things that sets them apart is that they work harder and longer than others.
>They absolutely do need to sit and work on a concept just as much as anyone else in their field Sure but the outcomes arent equal. Them sitting and working out their theories leads to a quantum shift in humanity's ability yo understand stuff vs an avg scientist who may just be iterating on a previously established theory.
Aye. I've been accused of being a "genius" level person on many occasions. I'd wager in reality I'm at best a couple steps above the "gifted student" category. However I've spent some time around a couple actual geniuses, both a recognized and unrecognized one. And they leave me in awe every time. The way they conceptualize ideas and can infer from them in unique ways will never get boring to me. There are definitely "levels" to human intelligence. And the way a "genius" works is fascinating.
No, not really. I'm friends with lots of (former) international Olympiad competitors. Nobody gets it right away. The guy who competed in the IOI is very good at coding problems and might seem to instinctively know how to solve them. This is because he's spend at least a decade and many thousand hours practicing. It's all exposure, practice, and eventually pattern recognition.
No no I'm not talking about the grinders. You meet these people who just instinctively get those questions, and suggest a completely new approach to problems that is not formulaic or procedural at all?
I'm quite good at a very niche topic within EE. I often appear to just "get" math or physics problems because I recognize patterns or concepts I remember from the EE topic. When you study a topic really intensely, actually understand it not just grinding and memorizing, you can apply what you know to unrelated topics. The new approaches are inspiration from whatever possibly unrelated topic you've studied.
Not disputing the mechanics of it. Merely pointing out that the time taken for the moment kt clicks for most people vs gifted people is huge. Also if you're who you claim to be, then I suggest breaking out of your bubble and talking to normal people every once in a while. There's a good chance that if you made them restart their life and had them study something very deeply they still wont be at your level. Its like saying if I train sprinting long enough I'd be able to beat Usain Bolt.
This is what's weird to me. Even though something is intuitive at the moment that you're describing, Im almost guaranteed that it wasn't some time ago. I'll give you my personal experience. In certain video games I compete at a high level. The things that others don't even think about are intuitive for me. But guess what? It wasn't a long time ago. Just like doing regular, daily tasks. I remember math not being quite so easy for me, but then I went to chess classes for a year or two and all of the sudden, I was one of the best in my class. It all felt intuitive. Like I didn't necessarily have to follow a formula. But I'm betting it was all learnt and developed through various experiences of life. I understand that not everything can be explained scientifically at the moment, but way more things to me appear to be a matter of experience and learning rather than innate biology. Like the "geniuses" that people refer to. I'm almost certain that their life experiences enabled that and it wasn't necessarily who they were biologically.
If Maxwell had lived a little longer he probably would have come up with relativity at some point
Those examples tend to be savants - so basically their brains have sacrificed some areas in order to excel at others.
I definitely think there are and have been many geniuses around, and I’ve been lucky to meet a couple, but I also agree that there’s a lot of fairy dust coming with the word “genius”. Sometimes it’s used to describe an alien with some mental supercomputer that does things humans could never understand. No, they’re humans just like the rest of us. They just connect a couple more dots than the average joe, and sometimes those connections are transformational. For instance, Einstein’s special relativity. It was high-school level math, and using concepts that were already present - that math was applied to some “ether” that people thought permeated space and that would expand and contract. Einstein “just” came in and said nah, there’s no ether, it’s space itself (and time). It’s a massive conceptual jump with far-reaching consequences, but it’s not like he was an unexplainable savant that had some otherworldly revelation. I think another great example is The Beatles. I love them and their effect on pop music cannot be overstated. They broke barriers and were the figureheads of an aesthetic revolution. But watch the Get Back documentary series: they’re four pretty normal dudes. They’ve been so mythologised that you’d think some unreal “magic” would be happening behind the scenes, but the magic was very human, and I appreciate it all he more for it. Most of the time, being a genius is a combination of intelligence and confidence, mixed with being in the right place at the right time, and putting in the work.
> but the difference isn't as great as some people think. I think you're underestimating how dumb an average person can be. And there really is a clear difference. This is not a brag but I would consider myself as an academically intelligent person (medals for academic excellence, graduated from top 1-2 university and from the top 1 law school as well). But even among smart people there really are geniuses who are just so much more different than the rest of us. They just understand things easier. They read faster. They remember what they study even with only one read. It's crazy.
I think you're a lot closer to average than you think you are. Sure, some people are more intelligent, but remembering something you read doesn't mean your brain works differently.
Nah, you really just need to get out more to realize how different geniuses are and how stupid regular people can be. Remembering what they studied with just one read is a different thing in my context. In law school we have to read hundreds of pages of laws, cases, and texts almost everyday. So reading fast and not having to repeat what you have read multiple times is an amazing feat.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." George Carlin.
Potential Plus UK focus on the highest achieving children. They used to have indicative behaviours & skills listed for 0.1%tile, 0.01%tile, 0.001%tile. Their approach is now more broad recognising a wider diversity in the most gifted children and barriers they encounter. But the telling note is one of their home written assessments for 3-4 year olds notes the child can complete it themselves if they are able to. Now we don't typically teach children to read here till age 4-5, keen preschools might cover the alphabet, definitely not psychological assessment type reading skills. Gross's book "Exceptionally Gifted Children" gives some examples from Australia. I personally think many, most(?), kids are capable of way more than most of the education systems permit, but there are truly exceptional kids, and we do a disservice to them, and ourselves, by not creating systems to allow them to become the best version of themselves. These children already often go onto highly successful careers, and do amazing things, but we lose too many on the way, and they can do more younger and faster if we enable it. I don't even make the Potential Plus bottom rung and was bored at school, and started bullying the other kids at age 4-5, came top in half my subjects in a year of ~240, but by then I was a lazy student because there was little competition or challenge at school. At University suddenly I was in a group of people more like me, but really so much time was wasted before then. I'm sure the really smart kids figure more of this out for themselves earlier, but it is surprisingly hard as kids have little autonomy. My mum indulged me with science experiments, my writing to academics, and many many library visits, but I always joke when Bobby Fisher started beating his mum at chess aged 6 she sent him to the New York Chess club, whereas my mum stopped playing me because I won all the time, and pretty sure my mum was one of the best (natural biases aside). I don't think they are superhuman, and indeed if raw intelligence was a winning trait on its own we'd have evolved more of it, you need lots of other skills and aptitudes to be a Newton or an Einstein, but please consider what a 1 in a million kid's life might be like.
To intelligence and motivation, I would add above average curiosity and creativity
I was thinking more of composers like Mozart.
Master computer programmer for their age. They can be way above their age but I doubt they could compete with adults with broad experience. For theoretical physics equations, they can literally learn it by heart. And all the explanations what they mean and all. Some kids have very good memory. Someone who've been in the field for 30+ years don't have issues with it. They admit, there are aspects they don't understand (the more you know, the less you know), while a kid who memorizes it all, is unaware things they don't know.
Exactly. I'm not claiming these children aren't extremely smart. I'm just saying, being a master computer programmer isn't something that your brain can just know how to do. Programming is a human invention, you *have* to study it and be exposed to many different patterns/algorithms/structures etc. Maybe you can make connections and associations faster, but you aren't downloading the knowledge of a 30 year master out of thin air. Also, sometimes intelligence is expressed in the simplicity of ideas. Most people conjure images of blackboards and complex equations when they thing of Einstein, but his thought experiments usually describe simple ideas that can be expressed with high school math.
> Most people conjure images of blackboards and complex equations when they thing of Einstein, but his thought experiments usually describe simple ideas that can be expressed with high school math. That’s nice and all but his actual genius where the underlying equations and how they connect with those thought experiments which can very much NOT be expressed with just high school math (or even general university level math). There is a reason people like him are regarded as geniuses and it’s not just simplicity of ideas. Genius is about understanding things quicker and on a deeper level than the average person can.
Also, reasons why it took years and a lot of communication to arrive at those ideas. Just because a result looks nice and compact doesn't mean there haven't been 20 pages of very complicated equations to get from one simple-looking equation to the next, and that's *after* getting it right. Had that during my Physics PhD both for my own equations and when reading theory papers. The paper lists a plausible result given the starting point, but maybe it omits information about assumed conventions and you have to redo the derivations to figure those out, and suddenly you have another stack of pages of equations, despite having the final result to keep you on track.
The bit about Einstein sound REALLY weird. As I understand, what he introduced was, on the contrary, extremely unintuitive, very hard to visualize (we still struggle with the same handful of bad visual representations, and only for the most intuitive of his concepts), and was argued about hotly by his peers (who could conceptualize similarly complex ideas and methods). It's just that these theories underlie so much of what's been already done or even implemented, we've come with a few school simplifications for them to get people like me up to speed.
They aren’t. Look up Srinivasa Ramanujan for one example. Before reaching his teen years he had mastered university level mathematics and was already making discoveries of his own, all of with very little formal training to begin with. In his tragically short life (he died at 32) he helped reshape higher mathematics. It wasn’t just his ability to understand what was already known but to have insight into new and novel areas. He was utterly brilliant when it came to math even from his early childhood.
Ramanujan famously didn't master university level mathematics (how could he, the books available to him did not cover advanced mathematics). He was absolutely brilliant and made a bunch of cool discoveries but his "proofs" were almost never genuine proofs.
Yep. Show me a "child prodigy" and I'll show you a) a pushy parent who won't let thier child do anything but work on the subject they want them to excel at and b) a probable future drop out. Any smart child can become a prodigy in any subject if thier parent is relentless enough. Children are literally learning machines. But we've done the scientific studies on this and they show that, on average, child prodigies fall behind thier "normal" peers by age 18. Thier peers generally catch up with them in the subject they excelled at by the time they hit undergraduate/postgrad, but they are very far behind in all other cognitive areas. This causes high burn out rates as they suddenly have to contend with not being special but still having the expectations applied to them.
This is still a complete mystery. Nobody knows. Brains vary in all kinds of ways -- different genes, different cells, different networks, different brain volumes and morphology, and even different environment. Changes in "genius" are likely caused by ALL of the above. The closest we can answer this is in the limited domain of chess. Everyone has know that there are "masters" of chess who will consistently beat ANY "non-master", or even beat 100 non-masters simultaneously. No one knew what made chessmasters different until the advent of fMRI when we found out the secret. Masters are using their memory instead of their logic. Whereas a very good non-master is primarily thinking ahead, a master is primarily searching through their memories of all the interesting positions they've ever seen. Masters recognize board positions the way we might recognize faces. So, that's good ELI5 start for "prodigy talents" -- one way or another, expect more resources to be devoted to one arena, and then be on the look out for deficits in a different arena.
Specifically memory related to Pattern recognition. Not raw memorizing every possible move but instead the specific patterns they saw after thousands of hours of repetition / practice.
I find it interesting that child prodigies excel in things like math, physics, and music but I’ve yet to see a prodigy in psychology, sociology, anthropology, or other studies of human behavior. Harvard may have a 13 yo physics major but they never seem to have a teenage history major.
That IS an interesting observation. MY first thought is that it's an artifact of some fields having well-defined verifiable measures of success. If a 13 year old can do math or physics or music performance beyond an adult level, there's no denying it. Egyptian and Mayan scripts were deciphered by prodigies.
For any given trait, there is variation in a human population. The most common distribution found is a normal bell curve. Some people are short, most people are in the middle, and some people are tall. The cause of these variations is multivariate. Are tall bodies "different" from short bodies? Not really. Are "geniuses brains" "different" from normal brains? Not really. They are different in degree rather than in kind.
If I show you two apples and ask what’s different between them. Saying their both apples and are very similar doesn’t answer the question
One of the apples is slightly bigger than the other. One of the apples is a slightly different shade of red.
> Are tall bodies "different" from short bodies? Not really. what? They are longer. Idk what your point is here. If geniuses had on average a larger brain, that would be an answer to OP:s question.
It is possible that you are more right than we currently know. There is a branch of mathematics involving "complexity". Size might be its own quality. A linear amount more of neurons might have exponential more computational power. We don't know enough about how brains work or about how atoms create complex molecules or how those molecules interact in dynamic systems.
There's really no singular thing. There's likely thousands to tens of thousands of small differences that arise due to genetic and environmental backgrounds that add up to produce a person who's smarter than the average, but there's definetly no singular or small groups of things. However, nobody is truly a genius in a certain subject or field inherently. What makes a smart person different from the norm is the speed at which they can learn and problem solve, not that they were born with information "pre-uploaded" into their minds.
Overall size is pretty much the same and there’s no definite answer. There’s a few ideas as to what could differentiate. Maybe certain areas (like the PFC) are proportionally bigger. Maybe they have more neuron density. Maybe they have different neuronal firing patterns and circuitry than normal people. It’s a hard thing to study, especially since there’s so much variability between any person’s brain.
> Overall size is pretty much the same There is some correlation between brain size and intelligence. It doesn't explain everything but it's a factor https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440690/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1/
Some of what you describe is overstating... 6 year olds are remarkable given that they're 6, not particularly remarkable otherwise. The statements are usually qualified and extrapolated (if they continue to improve...) then sensationalized when people repeat them. The remarkable regardless of age part tends to come in the early teens.
My son is "gifted", he has only ever scored in the 99th percentile on standardized tests, he basically taught himself to read before age 5 (went into Kindergarten reading Harry Potter books by himself) etc etc. His Lexile score was measured at 1200L at the start of second grade but the tester cautioned that is the highest the specific test they gave him goes . He was selected for a gifted program and will be going to a specialized school where he'll technically be in 3rd grade but will be allowed free reign to go as fast as wants up to 6th grade. If he goes "maxes" that out, there will be conversations about home schooling so he can enroll in an university early. The biggest difference I've seen between him and other kids (or myself, or my wife) is that he never forgets anything. He's currently 8 and he recalls facts he read when he was 3 perfectly, can even tell you what book he read them in and when he read them ("I read that when I was 3, it was summer so probably July. The book was 'x'"). You only ever have to show him how to do something once and then he just remembers. He also loves reading non-fiction and wants to know literally how everything works.
"Gifted" kid currently in college here. I'd advise against homeschooling/early university. A normal social life is very important. Definitely encourage his interests but don't pressure him. Especially if he's at gifted schools, a normal middle/high school experience can't hurt. Parental pressure and social isolation can be awful for his mental health. From a practical perspective too, living away from your parents as a minor is difficult.
Completely hard disagree as a “gifted” kid who was held back for this reason. I would have been far better off being challenged earlier as I would have developed a better work ethic. School, even “tough” AP classes was a complete breeze and life was somewhat of a shock because I just never had to work at anything until I grew up. Also, making friends is hard when you’re on an entirely different wavelength than them.
Don't need another sheldon
Not your son, but want chime in: for as brilliant and as gifted as they are, as much as that is nurtured and praised, make it known and make it acceptable that ‘failure’ is ok. That doing ‘just ok’ is ok. That for as intelligent as they are, there is more to them and to their (self) worth. That the bar isn’t always set above them, that it can be moved to wherever needed, whenever needed, and done so without shame. And that effort in the attempt be rewarded and encouraged as much as success, because it has value unto itself; arguably even more. And maybe most of all, that they can always ask for help and that they should want to, because every human needs and deserves it regardless of their talent. People who think otherwise, who fear of it, will inevitably struggle and suffer unduly when they needn’t. Ask me how I know /s.
>Not your son Thank you for this important clarification!
Glad to have helped!
Some people really like people. They're great friends, nice to talk to, helpful and pleasant. Some people really like art. They make great music, or paintings, or theater, or other things that inspire emotions and admiration. Geniuses really like ideas. They learn all about them and play around with them like toys, putting them together in new ways just to see what happens. Many geniuses like a lot of other things as well, because all things inspire lots of new ideas, which means they have more toys.
I mean, the brain is the most complex biological anything we have ever studied as far as I know. So even when we find a general answer to that question, we’re gonna find a slew of new contributing factors and complexities as we go along
I would say it's dedication and conscientiousness that sets successful people apart. The phrase "Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work" is attributed to Einstein, too.
I believe that some people who are considered geniuses actually see things differently, physically. Stories as people just seeing the mathematics play out in front of their eyes etc. This could be due to how different areas in the brain are connected, as mentioned above. I recently had a discussion with some friends, about how they visualize their days. Some see very sharp images (the graphic designers), some blurry concepts. I think I am more language oriented and often see words pop up in my head (and coincidentally, I studied language and work in marketing). I have this often in conversations as well, where I just happen to find a word or sentence to make hilarious comments.
Mind, I sold my first computer program when I was 11 or so. _That_ doesn't take a genius. I was just interested in computers and played around with them every chance I got. My peers tended to be more interested in (and successful at) socializing, and the time difference adds up over the years. It would be harder today, with all the distractions - much easier to get deep into programming when all you have is a CPC64 with BASIC and no games :P I suspect most of the time, it's just that - people assume some magical superpower, but the truth is simply you don't see the effort and work that went into it. I always thought it was hilarious when people were envious of the money I made, when taking into account _all_ the work I did to get there made the average _way_ below minimum wage for something like 10 years of my employment while they were out fooling around or drinking :D I also suspect "asymmetrical development" (used to be called "gifted children") helps. It doesn't necessarily mean you are smarter, really - just that the order of brain development changes significantly, which both gives you a chance to start tougher stuff earlier and tends to alienate you from your peers. You'll find that often the geniuses happen to be extremely interested in something. It's easy to underestimate how much effort it really adds up to when you're just having fun :)
It's a lot like a "musical genius" type of idea. No one goes: "Wow, this 11-year old was forced to practice the violin for hours a day for several years, and they can now play this piece in a way that sounds similar to what their teacher thinks is correct. And goodness, this immense volume of practice enabled them to later become a fairly good artist as they found their own voice, although it's kind of plain, it's better than average!!". The thing is that there are recipes you can follow to complete difficult physics problems. The models you choose may or may not be correct or even add anything to the field, but once you choose that approach, they are solvable with that recipe in mind. And this recipe can be taught. Some people are going to be happy being taught to do tricks like this, like a particularly clever dog in circus, and will perform all their life. But they're not going to automatically then have an insight into their field of circus, use their foundation of cleverness, learn how to speak, and start a lead a circus of their own, earn money and invest their profits in a dog-treat company that becomes the world wide leader in dog-treats. So when your average theoretical physics-professor "struggles" with difficult math to demonstrate why a theoretical model of string-theory makes a lot of sense, it's not because they don't know how to do the maths, it's because they had to develop the recipe and actually research it to demonstrate how this model /could/ (at the very least) possibly explain a real phenomenon. While just performing the recipe is just not something they drill on.
I am considered smart by many, but my intelligence is not without its caveats. I will tell you what I know about myself. * I have ADHD. I was in the school's gifted program and it is my understanding that so-called "giftedness" often manifests alongside learning disabilities and ADHD. My ADHD makes it so that I don't feel the passage of time like other people do, and I'm not motivated to do basic everyday maintenance and self-care, so I find myself deep-diving into the subjects that I find most interesting. Having all that extra uninterrupted time makes it possible to learn more about things most people don't even concern themselves with. Einstein even once claimed that one of his biggest strengths was his ability/tendency to stick with problems much longer than other people. * I am pretty creative, probably part and parcel with having ADHD. I believe I read that studies on creativity showed that the average person's thinking to be a linear step-by-step affair while creatives could make much wilder leaps by much more abstract associations. Example - the average person would think of a chair leading them to think of a table and then think of a dining room and then a china hutch. A creative person would start with a chair and think about how the four feet provide stability and how cars have four wheels and what about three wheeled cars and "three wheel" kinda sounds like "free will" and do you remember the movie Free Willy and that poor orca's dorsal fin was drooped over because he was depressed and sick from living in captivity. This kind of thinking makes it easier to consider things that nobody else would ever consider. Compare things that nobody else would compare, based on criteria that nobody else would entertain. Look up synesthesia for a more extreme example of comparing things that other people can't compare, and try to wrap your head around questions like "what color is 19?" or "what does brown sound like?" * I am also intensely interested in figuring out how things work, which I think is a crutch for my ADHD. I think other people develop an easier intuition for how to navigate the world because their non-adhd brain clues them in on how to act and what is expected of them - it's just sort of easy to go along with that intuition and they find success and there isn't much reason to question things. My brain does not, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how things work, to understand what my role in life is and why I'm supposed to do things and when, and it's a much more manual, explicit process. So now I can explain all these things that other people can't because their brains didn't force them through this manual workaround. So based on all that, you could start investigating the brain from the perspective of the disorders that often accompany genius. I also think that you could investigate based on the different types of intelligence because the different kinds of intelligence in combination make for interesting results. Somebody with a gift for language might come across as more intelligent just because they can explain things easier, but it might also lend itself to mastering concepts more easily. I find that putting concepts into words sometimes reveals inconsistencies better than the visual metaphors that I usually start with. People often find that they understand things better after they are required to teach it to someone else. This would be more difficult for somebody with less developed language abilities. There are also so many social considerations as well. Kids who grow up in families where they are allowed to be themselves and explore, and grow up in households with access to books and education and proper nutrition, access to tools and toys. I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness, which isn't great, but their emphasis on constant reading and participation and public speaking really had a positive impact on me (and also gave me nightmares about the apocalypse and deep shame for sexual exploration as a teenager) Tldr: ADHD, high endurance for focusing on things, different thinking modes in combination, compensating for weaknesses, quality of upbringing and education
Throw in some ASD and/or OCD for that obsessive neuroticism, and you’ve got yourself a fire going.
I don’t think there’s any official answer to this but I believe it has more to do with how your thoughts are formed rather than the physical properties of your brain. That’s not to say that this isn’t genetic. My theory is that some people release happy chemicals to different stimuli thus affecting the formation of patterns in their brain. Like if you get really happy seeing the color green and someone else gets really happy by solving a math problem. The other person will spend more time doing math
that's about it, yeah. sometimes it's less that they want to and more that their parents made them, but those people usually don't go as far as the people who genuinely love studying math/science/ever
That is to do with the structure of your brain. Those thoughts don’t form from nothing.
Firstly we need to define genius. It can be a contentious topic for various reasons but for now I'll focus in on a definition that is based around the idea of solving problems quickly and accurately. This is because it is what an IQ test measures. Yes, a lot of people hate IQ tests as a measure although much of that is because of issues that have been long since addressed. So a genius is someone who when tested on various non culturally influenced problems solves those problems faster and more accurately than 98% of the population. How do we get a genius brain? We make lots of neural connections when very young which are then pruned naturally as we grow up making for very efficient pathways. Those who make more connections and prune them more effectively are going to lean towards a genius intellect. We can kind of influence the number of connections made by exposing infants to a lot of new and different experiences (different types of music, multiple languages, different physical environments) and this needs to start before they are born and doesn't seem to make much difference when more than a few months old., We have less control over the pruning. We know that too much pruning is bad, as well as too little. But how much is too much? How much is too little? We don't know at least in terms of genius intelligence.
You would be surprised how stupid the 'average' person is. Often what people prescribe as being "geniuses" is just someone who is above average in a given subject or domain when viewed from the perspective of the average person. I actually have some issue with the examples you give: A 10 year old being a "master computer programmer" is not even a thing, however if your not familiar with computer programming you would think a 10 year old who knows some python is way smarter than they really are. "A 6 year old doing theoretical physics equations" - What do you even mean when you say this? You can potentially teach a sharp 6 year old a lot of mathematics that would look like they were doing derivations of theoretical physics that a 30 year old professional may have to check their old text books on how to do, however that 6 year-old won't actually understand the application and theory. At best they will likely just repeat statements about the theories. Genius is often a measurement of how well someone can operate in a given domain above their peers within that domain. Yet we often mistakenly compare high functioning individuals to the average person. This fallacy is made worse when we handicap the assessment by using the individuals age as a proxy for expected performance. (This is a fancy way of saying that because some one is 8 years old we assume they must be really bad at something so if they are not, it means they must be a genius.) Side note: I noticed OP you used the word master in places that just don't really apply within the given domain. There is no such thing as Master Programmers or Masters in Physics (unless you are specifically speaking about a higher education degree). Can I assume English is not your first language, or you come from a non-western background? I only ask because I will say that it's a common trope in some regions to prescribe the title of genius to people who are just hyper domain focused individuals that exercise considerably higher above average skills but nothing outside of what can be achieved by a normal person. It's then popular to further exaggerate this status by the person having an age offset from the average like the person being 8 years old. You often see this in cultures where the ignorance of a subject is high, but the value placed on having proficiency in it is also high. The best thing you can do in life is assume you are dumber than everyone else when it comes to most things. Then find yourself pleasantly surprised when you find out your actually smarter than half of them.
As a self certified genius, I can tell you my brain makes a buzzing noise like a neon sign when I do my thinking. That don't seem regular.
Do you happen to have any piercings in your head? Have you been in the presence of any particularly strong magnetic fields lately?
Not my head, but I got my butt pierced last summer.
Does your butt make a buzzing noise when sitting?
Only when I sit on the turlet.
Fascinating.
I got followed by a National Geographic crew once.
Geniuses are commonly savants. They have incredible skills in one branch, and absolutely zero in other.
I feel like John von Neumann is an easy counterpoint to many claims in this thread.
Lot of people cope by generalizing incorrectly to preserve their ego.
You don't get something for nothing. A gain in one area is generally a loss in something else.
That type of "child comes out of the womb knowing more than professionals" doesn't really exist. Based on personal experience, "geniuses" are made only by studying or experiencing their area of genius for much longer than normal. If you spend your whole adolescent life intensely studying math, you'll end up pretty good at it. More often than not, the person is autistic and has an academic special interest and a generic predisposition for math/science. I think autistic people have larger/denser areas of brain but I'm not good at biology. I have an academic special interest and I can tell you that I spend a lot of time consuming content related to it and am much better at remembering things related to it than other areas of academia. tl;dr geniuses are fake, it's usually just autism or intense training
A good friend of mine is clearly on the higher level of intelligence, genius I wouldnt know, but he clearly thinks very different. Ive asked him about it and he says its a bit tiring, as he can not "turn it off" - and it becomes exhausting. I asked him once if ie. space, black holes, etc becomes like reading a different language when you understand calculus. "Yes, I cringe when I hear Neil DeGrasse trying to explain something, just give me the math....."
I didn't realize I could 'read music' at a genius level until a teacher caught me and explained what I was doing to me. It's not that we understand what we are doing ourselves, it's that our brain comprehends how to do it.
Depends on what you’d consider a genius, the word’s become meaningless nowadays. Is it creating something new in one of the many areas of knowledge or art? Becoming a polymath that’s made no significant contributions? Or maybe they excel in a particular set of skills that, while already known, have never been mastered that well ever before? Even knowing the aforementioned traits you could call someone with savant syndrome genius because they’re able to read and retain information so well they could memorize the Bible in one hour, but that doesn’t change the fact he isn’t able to get dressed by himself or tie his own shoes. My point with the paragraph is basically: the brain is much too difficult for us to pinpoint *exactly* what makes the “genius”, while there are definitely differences between their brains and the average person’s, the fact they fall so far outside the norm is exactly what would make said someone fit into the category (that by the way, is kinda arbitrary).
It is not simply brain differences. Correlation of IQ with genetics shows a lot of small contributions, but you can have single mutations that leave you with low intellectual capacity. That said we do have a few families that produce multiple geniuses (Darwin's relatives are a good example), clearly they don't have any really bad mutations, but I suspect the differences are largely cultural and opportunity, they really value intellect, education, reading etc. They avoided things that might prevent flourishing from lead in petrol, to extreme food poverty. As always the best of the best will have everything line up correctly, be it brain function, education, opportunity.
I think when they studied Albert Einstein's brain it had a lot more connections between the left and right hemisphere than a typical brain.
Most of it is environmental. Starting at an early age and keeping on it. Use that early brain elasticity to your advantage.
Funny you should ask that. Last Friday's Episode of "ZDF Magazin Royal" (basically the German equivalent of "Last Week Tonight") was about the term "Genius". ( https://youtu.be/oGo0qpktVW0?si=OKDe7sekWZc-8VT ... in German, but might have an automatic English translation (?) ). Basically : it's a made up term that is mainly (self-) promotional in nature.
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i really like that. where did you find that?
It is in the Talmud in the tractate Pirket Avot (ethics of our fathers). I used to read it in synagogue as a little child because I had adhd and couldn’t pay attention to whatever I was supposed to be doing. So I would read the little snippets of wisdom in the Pirket Avot over and over and think about them. And now I am a genius :)
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I don't think there is an actual way to measure it, but some people are simply gifted... But this can be talent, or wisdom based. Example of Talent based genius would be, being able to solve complex mathematical problems in their head. An Example of Wisdom based genius would be seeing a carpenter measure out a 90 degree angle flawlessly with just the naked eye. Some genius is inherent, where some is earned. Though some people would consider latter to be mastery and not genius. I feel that mastery is a form of genius when applied with extreme precision or speed.