
How Geniuses Think - tokenadult
http://www.creativitypost.com/create/how_geniuses_think
======
thaumaturgy
A reasonable book covering some of this topic is _Origins of Genius_ by Dean
Keith Simonton.

Unfortunately, aside from being excessively wordy and light on supporting
evidence for some of its assertions, it suffers from the same problem as this
article and most of the comments here: people can't agree on what a genius is.

Debates about the foundations of genius are meaningless until we get a better
idea of what a genius is. Some people, like this article's author, try to
limit the term just to those people in history that have made significant
advances in some field or another. But, then they cherry-pick their examples,
usually from a list of their personal heroes, and then try to draw some
conclusions from that.

Feynman wasn't a household name until really just a few years ago. Citing him
as an example of a genius, and then going further to say that he was
("acknowledged by many to be") the last great American genius, is supremely
silly. There are brilliant people right now working in every field; what do
you think the odds are that, many years from now, after their death, at least
one of them might be regarded as a genius by someone writing next century's
version of this same article?

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mensa, a worldwide organization of
self-described geniuses, who even have a very serious test to keep out all of
the non-geniuses. Should they not be regarded as geniuses? Why or why not?

If we're going to spend any time on utterly vacuous navel-gazing like this ...
I think we ought to at least agree first on a useful definition for the thing
we're trying to discuss.

~~~
crntaylor
_Mensa, a worldwide organization of self-described geniuses ... Should they
not be regarded as geniuses? Why or why not?_

The condition for membership of Mensa is that you score "at or above the 98th
percentile on certain standardised IQ or other approved intelligence tests"
[1]. I don't think it makes sense to refer to the 140 million potential
members of Mensa as "geniuses" no matter what your definition of genius is.

Also, if it's true that Richard Feynman's IQ was around 122, then he wouldn't
have qualified for membership of Mensa.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Membership_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Membership_requirement)

~~~
Luc
> Also, if it's true that Richard Feynman's IQ was around 122, then he
> wouldn't have qualified for membership of Mensa.

Just for a second this gave a lesser mind like me some hope, but this IQ test
may have been stressing verbal over mathematical ability.

"Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the
notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined
the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also
reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate
admission exams at Princeton."

[http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-
einstei...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-
einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-
another)

------
jacquesm
Think of 'genius' as something you get for free.

You can make up for that lack to a certain extent by applying yourself. A
person applying themselves with merely average innate ability more often than
not will outperform a person born with some windfall. This goes for money,
brains, the lot. Apply yourself, that's half the battle.

Plenty of people never learn to apply themselves and that includes plenty of
geniuses and people born into wealth.

The best part: whether or not you apply yourself is under _your_ control. What
you're born with is the luck of the draw.

And knowing a few things will make it that much easier to learn a bit more,
knowledge begets more knowledge and insight.

~~~
harscoat
cf. _Talent is overrated_ Geof Colvin, 2008 & "Deliberate Practice" in _the
making of an expert_ , Harvard Business Review, K Anders Ericsson, 2008
[http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Ex...](http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Expert.pdf)

~~~
mattmanser
And hard work oversold.

~~~
_debug_
Thank you. I've been quite sceptical of 10000 hours of Deliberate Practice,
etc; esp. after seeing Tiger Woods play golf at the age of two :
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxPmzIKBris>

It's been a long standing tradition to oversell the power of hard work. I
believe the word for it is "hopium".

~~~
mattmanser
hopium, I like it!

------
mvzink
Genius is a sort of myth. For example, people seem to have the idea that
before Charles Darwin, biology was in a dark age without any ideas other than
intelligent design or some such. Well, no, Darwin was actually relatively
unoriginal in his ideas about evolution, which was already commonplace in
biological circles. He really just added a bit of sciency-but-not-quite-
scientific rigor and coined the term "natural selection", then got famous for
it.

I know several drastically unsuccessful people who exhibit the traits in this
article. None of them have stumbled upon an idea or work that would cause
society to label them a genius.

I don't think a genius is very different from any other person. It's just that
a genius gets lucky with their novel ideas. Society calls them geniuses really
just because people know their names.

I guess my gripe is simply that genius is a social phenomenon, not a trait of
an individual, and that it's really quite embarrassing that everyone goes
around licking the metaphorical feet of everyone they can think of who did
something interesting, or "genius".

That said, I do think this is an interesting article, and knowing how to think
like a "genius" is probably worth quite a lot.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Darwin was actually relatively unoriginal in his ideas about evolution,
> which was already commonplace in biological circles. He really just added a
> bit of sciency-but-not-quite-scientific rigor and coined the term "natural
> selection", then got famous for it._

That’s entirely unfair. Darwin spent his whole life furiously gathering
evidence from everywhere he could and communicating with the rest of the
biology community worldwide. If you read any of his books (the most fun, I
think, is the Voyage of the Beagle) the constant probing and questioning
shines through. The man made hypotheses about everything he saw and tested
them where he could, or suggested possible tests even when they were beyond
him. The character I see when I read Darwin is a passionately curious,
perceptive, insightful, and careful man.

To call, for instance, The Origin of Species, one of the most remarkable
presentations of evidence of the 19th century, “sciencey-but-not-scientific”
is to project modern standards onto the past. There were certainly other
people with similar ideas in the biology community (Wallace for one), but they
weren’t anywhere close to mainstream. Darwin’s evidence in The Origin,
however, was overwhelming. And It stands up remarkably well today; some parts
could certainly use updates after 150 more years of inquiry by many more
people with better tools, but it’s mostly very good.

~~~
olalonde
There actually exists some "hard-wired" geniuses, but not the kind of genius
we would use to describe e.g. Darwin. See
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd1gywPOibg>

edit: Found a better reference: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhuman>

------
joe_the_user
What an empty and contentless post!

It isn't that we should dismiss the unique contributions of people like
"Einstein, Edison, daVinci, Darwin, Picassos, Michelangelo, Galileo, Freud,
Mozart et all". These individuals certainly made contributions beyond what be
measured by a number-of-manipulations-per-second IQ test and some of these
approaches can even be somewhat systematized as "lateral thinking", "wholistic
thinking" "getting outside the box" and variety of others.

But lumping these high-performing individuals together with the single
_glittering generality_ "genius" leaves us less enlightened for the trouble.
Edison and Einstein, for example, were worlds apart and while we can find
commonalities between them, we can find commonalities between any two people.
And there we are. At another logical level, a "genius" confronted with some
given problem might say "what do these things have in common" yes but a moron,
an opportunist and a lazy thinker might do the same. One more try folks.

~~~
aik
Do you disagree with the effort in trying to find the commonalities between
high-performing people, or merely the stated results?

I agree that they may not have the whole answer here, but it's a whole lot
better than any random commonality between any two people (e.g. they both like
the color blue, or they both lived in the US).

I think there's some insight here, even if you just take the idea of how high-
performers think ("productively" rather than "reproductively"). I definitely
believe most things I see are a result of reproductive thinking (many of my
own thoughts included), and I have many times more respect for things that
have come out of "productive" thinking.

------
nikcub
> Richard Feynman, who many acknowledge to be the last great American genius
> (his IQ was a merely respectable 122).

I've always wanted a quick, one-line, anecdote as to why IQ is bullshit. I
think I just found it.

~~~
mangodrunk
If the IQ test is bullshit, this anecdote and your reasoning aren't good
reasons to conclude that for several reasons, and to mention a few:

1\. It may not be true that he had an IQ of 122

2\. A score of 122 is still kind of high

3\. If it were wrong in one case it doesn't invalidate it, especially since
we're talking about a Nobel prize winner in physics

4\. If he did take a test, that was several decades ago and I'd imagine the
test has evolved from then

5\. This test may have not been good for Feynman since he is much better in
science and math

On another point, I think the author is incorrectly using Feynman as a person
of average intelligence when it's obvious he was very much well above average
in math being that he was a Putnam Fellow.

>He obtained a perfect score on the graduate school entrance exams to
Princeton University in mathematics and physics—an unprecedented feat—but did
rather poorly on the history and English portions. [0]

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#Early_life>

~~~
aik
There's so much misinformation about what the IQ test is for. It has become
common understanding that it's a measure of intelligence (or ability, or
potential), however it was never created for that nor ever intended to be
that. In addition, intelligence is often seen as a fixed thing. Any reasonable
and practical definition of intelligence is in complete contradiction to this
idea.

Study after study shows that an apparent talent (or intelligence) in one
moment does not correlate with future potential talent, intelligence, or
general potential for achievement in anything.

So to add to your point -- who knows when Feynman took the test and got a 122,
and who knows which test he even took -- to me this point decreases any
commonly understood value of the IQ test to an even greater extent.

Quote from Alfred Binet (creator of the first IQ test) himself: “I have not
sought in the above lines to sketch a method of measuring, in the physical
sense of the word, but only a method of classification of individuals. The
procedures which I have indicated will, if perfected, come to classify a
person before or after such another person or such another series of persons;
but I do not believe that one may measure one of the intellectual aptitudes in
the sense that one measures length or a capacity. Thus, when a person studied
can retain seven figures after a single audition, one can class him, from the
point of his memory for figures, after the individual who retains eight
figures under the same conditions, and before those who retain six. It is a
classification, not a measurement…we do not measure, we classify.”

------
sidman
In the text it states that " _Genius often comes from finding a new
perspective that no one else has taken_ ".

I think this is clear and people not even considered geniuses can also perform
this feat. The defining part is that geniuses seem to come by those
alternatives so easily, its just always there. So for example if we devote
years to programming we can tell ourselves OK, if i have a problem invoke all
my years of experience and look at this problem from many different angles, we
can formulate and combine our thinking into something unique that even
surprises ourselves because the combination of all the data we we know to get
this new idea is far greater then adding the single idea's and pieces of data
that we have. Over time we can build on that to get better ideas.

But if i say ok, i know the method of thinking like X helps me do great things
when im programming and i try to do the same for say math problems, if i havnt
had the experience no matter what I tell myself, i just can not look at the
problem from different perspectives or if i do, its not such a great leap, its
incremental. Its still step by step, A->B not to A->C, it still follows a
logical thought process and we do not surprise ourselves by our solution

For the genius it seems after reading something once or by some method unknown
(and having no experience) they can still have all those different
perspectives. Then it leaves us normal people thinking, how did they get from
A->C without going through the normal steps A->B->C ... this is specially the
case when the individual is very young and has managed to soak that
information without college or any formal learning ...

~~~
Mz
I think a lot of people have their difference of perspective socialized out of
them at a pretty young age. My oldest son has a long list of differences from
the norm. I was very tolerant if his oddities. Then I got really sick and a)
actively avoided being inculcated with the conventional view of my problem and
b) bounced a lot of ideas off my son, who knows way more science than I know
and was never broken to fit the normal social mold. Then I gradually got well.
So I think it is very possible to cultivate that different point of view.

~~~
sidman
Yeh thats true, but i think the key is (as you suggested) he had many
differences/oddities from the beginning (a very young age), you being a good
father didnt tell him to change or fit the normal mold but encouraged that
differences in thought. If that different way of thinking for your son are
signs of genius then you cultivated it but its origins can not be explained or
learnt by trying to think in the same way .... which frankly sucks.

I guess we can try and get so far, but for most normal people, we can do it to
an extent in our field of expertise but still somewhat bound by previously
learnt data that needs to be accumulated over a substantial period of time to
get that A->C thinking .. without it problems in a differing field are still
just solved step by step.

~~~
Mz
Sorry to not be clear. I meant that _I_ figured out how to get myself well, in
part by intentionally avoiding the conventional views of my condition. My son
was enormously helpful and my academic record is reasonably respectable. But
it was very much a conscious choice on my part to find another answer in part
by intentionally putting on blinders.

------
bane
I've long thought that the model of "genius" as a "really smart person" was a
hopelessly flawed model. There are simply too many different kinds and
measures of "smartness" to collapse all of them under such a simple umbrella.

For example, consider the notion that IQ is a measure of capacity. To wit,
let's use an extended and natural analogy -- a container.

Consider a notional container measured only by its depth.

A yard of beer is 36 inches (~91.5cm) tall and most people would consider this
a lot of beer. This plays out in people who are extreme specialists --
extremely knowledgeable in only one or two areas. But are they geniuses?

So we have to consider breadth. I have a large mixing bowl I use when
marinating meat that's about 26 inches (66.04cm) across, and most people would
consider it to hold a lot of meat. This plays out in people who are extreme
generalists, not particularly good in any one area, but can cut across
disciplines easily.

Yet both containers pale when compared to a 55 gallon (~208.2L) drum in terms
of volume. Yet the drum is not as tall as the yard of beer and not as wide as
my marinating bowl!

But volume is not the only thing that matters!

I wouldn't pour molten steel into any of the containers above. And I've used
stoneware that cracks when used with extremely cold liquids.

What about containers with different compartments that can hold both?

We also know about people who have perfect recall but almost no creativity,
and creative geniuses that can barely remember their own name.

Can somebody who is a generalist only know about several topics or can they
synthesize it into something new and novel?

How about the person that, regardless of depth or breadth, can see far
reaching implications -- second, third, forth degree effects -- when new
information is presented? Or the extreme tactical thinker that can react to
new things with extreme speed?

Napoleon and Einstein are both commonly regarded as geniuses, but the nature
of their intelligence couldn't be more different.

~~~
calydon
I totally agree and in fact I would go further to say that the notion of
'genius' is nothing more than an inchoate, rudimentary classification system
used to group together successes or extremes in the realm of mental pursuits.
Handy when you want to evince notions of extreme-ness but since there are
thousands of different possible mental pursuits, the term is basically
meaningless.

------
sopooneo
First you have to define what you mean by "genius", preferably in some way
that is at least generally consistent with the commonly understood meanings.
Then you have to assemble an unbiased set (very difficult) of people that fit
your definition. Then you have to see what styles of thought that you _didn't
explicitly or implicitly filter for by your definition_ are also largely (and
disproportionately) present in your set of geniuses.

Then after you have found you styles of thought dominant among geniuses, you
have to see if they actually work as predictors.

I don't feel that the author of this article did these things.

------
casca
This article lists a few characteristics that intelligent and successful (for
some definition thereof) people have. The characteristics seem to be neither
necessary nor sufficient and the examples are clearly cherry-picked. If
there's any scientific or research basis for asserting them, the author hasn't
shared.

It's like the author looked a some intelligent people and superficially
extracted their secret. It's like looking at a successful company and
concluding that the reason for their success is that almost everyone is titled
an Associate rather than their flat hierarchy.

~~~
ljlolel
That's basically the premise of Good to Great and Built to Last.

~~~
astrofinch
Has there ever been a book or news article that actually made an attempt to
randomly sample individuals/companies and tease out relationships between some
hypothesized factor and outcome?

It doesn't even seem like you have to be much of a genius to do this...

------
delluminatus
This article is quite interesting.

I thought it was good that the author restricted himself to a description of
genius traits, instead of implying that applying these traits would make one a
genius. At least, until the summary, where he threw that out the window.

It's important to not engage in some kind of magic thinking here: altering
your behavior patterns to match "genius" behavior is self-defeating. When one
is dealing with the kind of outlier that a genius represents, wholesale
emulation is an insufficient strategy to duplicate their success.

~~~
m_for_monkey
Well, in the summary he cites some evidence that "geniusness" can be learned,
at least if your teacher himself is a genius. "J. J. Thompson and Ernest
Rutherford between them trained seventeen Nobel laureates" - quite a
coincidence.

~~~
jimhefferon
Of course, they were the top people in their fields and so attracted the top
students. Having good people coming in helps with a person's production of
great people.

------
lhnz
I have been working and thinking in many of these ways but as I am not
prolific at creating revolutionary ideas I suspect that this mindset is not
enough for genius to arise. The article also lacks consideration over the
positional requirements for acclaim.

There is an extra strategy that is missing and I feel is of utmost importance.
You must be in the habit of normalizing your knowledge. You need to generalise
and compose ideas into principles. Without doing so, it is extremely difficult
to quickly and correctly compose and verify new ideas, draw relationships
between them, and visualize at the appropriate level of abstraction.

Does anybody else keep a text file of recurring patterns that occur in
thought, biology, architecture and nature?

------
jakeonthemove
First of all, IQ tests are bullshit.

Second, everyone can be a "genius" as long as they put a lot of work into
anything. It doesn't take much to become better than the average person - you
just have to be slightly better.

Once you start working on something for a long time and thinking about it more
than 50% (arbitrary, but about right) of all your waking time, your brain will
dedicate a big part of its new neurons and synapses towards that, leading to
new thought that would've otherwise never occurred.

Genius also directly relates to discipline - if you don't have the self-
control (whether through willpower or some sort of OCD-like disorder) to learn
and create something, anything, you'll be just average.

~~~
jakeonthemove
P.S. Just my opinion, please don't downvote (or downvote just this comment,
it's separated for that reason): I don't believe creativity in arts equals
genius. I find that most of the expensive pictures of old plain and simply
suck and are only popular/expensive because of their exclusivity and because
the people who can afford them are willing to pay that price (I understand
that - I would probably want to buy the first painting a human ever made).

I don't mean Leonardo Da Vinci and others who created new processes for
painting - I mean specifically the squares, buckets of paint on canvas and
Picasso-like LSD-induced paintings, which are just works of art, not genius.
Any decent artist with Photoshop can do better nowadays.

~~~
scott_s
I was recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and I saw many
paintings that were, in my view, works of genius. One in particular was a 19th
century, full-length portrait of what was clearly a bored teenager. That is, I
could clearly tell, through facial expression and posture, that this young
woman was _bored_. My claim is that the artist who made it had a genius-level
understanding of how to paint people. He had to be able to consciously
recognize the visual cues that most of us unconsciously process, and he had to
be able to convey that in paint. Because of the thought processes required to
create it, I consider it a work of genius.

------
Zaheer
"GENIUSES PRODUCE"

IMO that's the best section of the article. Einstein learned by failing and
reiterating. That's exactly the type of mentality that entrepreneurs should
have.

------
zdw
The "making lots of stuff whether it's good or not" is my biggest issue -
frankly, being prolific results in faster iteration on ideas, which
contributes to genius.

I find that I tend to self-edit before I've even started on something, which
prevents me from doing what I want. I chalk this up to over-ambitious
perfectionism, which is a negative trait in this case.

------
drumdance
A more in-depth exploration of the topic is in _Creativity: Flow and the
Psychology of Discovery and Invention_ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

[http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-
Discovery-I...](http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-
Invention/dp/0060928204)

------
Mz
Re finding a needle in a haystack: On an email list for parents of gifted
kids, some folks shared the unconventional "mom, you are a retard" reactions
of bright kids to this proverbial problem. The one I recall: Set the haystack
on fire. The needle will survive but the hay will not.

------
zobzu
Genius is just a word. As someone said before, we're all geniuses. It's all
about your willpower to use it, train it, or not.

It's often not even about working hard, training hard, or something. It's just
having a proper state of mind, and the right conditions.

As simple as it sounds, it's complicated. If it was simple, we'd all be happy
right now. Not because we'd feel like geniuses but because we'd be able to
achieve _anything_ we want.

Even thus, some points of the article correlate with having a proper state of
mind, for example, you need to be able to think out of the box (note: you
don't need 3 f. paragraphs to express that idea). You need to attempt to have
a complete understanding of things, from every angle.

But all this still boils down to will power and proper conditions.

My 2 genius cents anyway.

------
repos
All these comments seem to be missing the point.. Sure these aren't the traits
that make up 'genius, sure 'genius' probably can't even be quantified or
reduced to this level, but nonetheless these are all qualities we can learn
from and adapt as we pursue our own paths.

------
astrofinch
I stopped reading when they quoted Freud as a genius.

~~~
pcrh
You have to consider how things were before Freud before dismissing him.
Before Freud there was no idea that the mind subconsciously processed
information. Although his ideas of how psychology works were very "infantile",
they were the first attempt to investigate the subconscious, thus
revolutionary.

------
ericHosick
I think Genius is the ability to take two different ideas, merge them, and
come up with a new idea: invention through prediction. Children are amazing at
this until it is torn out of them via the education system, peers and adults
(in general).

~~~
zobzu
I think a lot is due to side effects, such as the need to fit in / be like
everyone else. The easiness of following what's already there, basically, the
laziness of the mind.

The laziness of the mind which so many of us are taking advantage of to
control people, as it's so easy to let others think on your behalf.

And then again, this makes you right: the education system was made precisely
for this. The education system might be actually one of those "genius" ideas.

By formatting people and putting some barriers in their minds, you make them
controllable and productive, and thus, you may actually advance humanity in
some ways. But at which cost?

------
K2h
I really like the point that there are often more than one possibly "right
answers" and many people look to give the same answer everyone else is giving.

..others, look for other, strange, non traditional right answers. I like those
people.

------
peanuteldrummer
Most of these geniuses also fall under 10% of the worlds' population :
Lefties.

------
5partan
No mention of polyphasic sleeping?

------
ktizo
I tend to phrase this as intelligence by attitude.

You get people who are bright, but have virtually no curiousity and who stay
within their specialism of knowledge, often due to setting a high value on
others views, so not wanting to look stupid.

Conversely you also get creative and determined slow people. And they will
thrash the merely bright in almost any problem that contains significant
depths.

------
calibraxis
I don't know what a "genius" really is, unless it just means someone who's a)
prolific in an intellectual field, b) releases high quality work and c) maybe
contributed to a fairly "revolutionary" understanding of their field.

But it's unlikely that Feynman is "the last great American genius". Maybe the
most well-known example is Chomsky (but there are no doubt many others), and
he answers his emails quickly. So, it's not like we necessarily have to pore
through notebooks and quips of dead people, guessing at their mental states.

~~~
zerostar07
Au contraire, i think, just like really great art, it's easy for an average
person like me to identify genius when we see it.

~~~
bmelton
Except that generally, the average person knows little about the inner
workings of things.

It is easy for the average person to believe that building Twitter was hard,
though surely it was. Our ability to understand things decidedly maps to
things we can already understand.

To give a completely made up scenario about how this might have gone:

Stupid person: "Wow. Building twitter is hard. You type on a website and
something comes to my phone. AMAZING."

Average person: "Eh. They probably just use some sort of service. I mean, if I
can send a text, why is it amazing that somebody else can?"

Smarter-than-average person: "Twitter is down again? WTH? How hard is it to
keep a website up? My Wordpress blog has never crashed, and all the posts in
it are WAY more than 140 characters."

Smart person: "Yeah, I can see how scaling to x-thousand reads and x-hundred
writes per second IS a big task. I guess you have to put in a really beefy
database server to handle the writes and distribute the reads out to slaves,
then do all your queries from there."

Smarter person: "If we get rid of relational database stores altogether, we
can scale these records much better, and our only upper limit is memory."

etc.

Yes, it's a completely contrived example and I'm sure I probably insulted
everyone who's ever done any Twitter-based naval-gazing, but that's what it
is.

In short though, the average person is more easily fooled into thinking things
are brilliant when in reality, they're made by equally average people who have
studied in that particular field more than they have.

~~~
zerostar07
Twitter s not genius, it's great incremental technology. Wolfram alpha is
genius

