Time to Get Your Inner Genius Out

Genius: Can Anybody Be One?

Genius: Can Anybody Be One?

Genius can be defined as a high IQ, extreme creativity, or something else altogether.

Credit: DeepArt

What makes a genius?

Perhaps for athletes, a genius is an Olympic medalist. In entertainment, a genius could be defined as an EGOT winner, someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award. For Mensa, the exclusive international society comprising members of “high intelligence,” someone who scores at or above the 98th percentile on an IQ or other standardized intelligence test could be considered genius.

The most common definition of genius falls in line with Mensa’s approach: someone with exceptional intelligence.

In his new science series “Genius” on PBS, Stephen Hawking is testing out the idea that anyone can “think like a genius.” By posing big questions — for instance, “Can we travel through time?” — to people with average intelligence, the famed theoretical physicist aims to find the answers through the sheer power of the human mind.

“It’s a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived,” Hawking said in a statement. “Being an optimist, I think they will.”

Optimism aside, answering a genius-level question does not a genius make — at least, not according to psychologist Frank Lawlis, supervisory testing director for American Mensa.

“The geniuses ask questions. They don’t know the answers, but they know a lot of questions and their curiosity takes them into their fields,” Lawlis told Live Science. “[They’re] somebody that has the capacity to inquire at that high level and to be curious to pursue that high level of understanding and then be able to communicate it to the rest of us.”

You must statistically be a genius to qualify for Mensa, with a measured intelligence that exceeds 98 percent of the rest of the population. However, Lawlis said even these tests can exclude some of the most brilliant of thinkers.

“The way you put items together to test for intelligence is that you already know the answer,” Lawlis said. “That’s the whole point. You create questions that have real answers.”

For instance, Albert Einstein would have likely done poorly on IQ tests, Lawlis said.

“It really comes down to thinking outside the box, and you really can’t test that,” Lawlis said. “When they take these tests, instead of directing their attention to the correct answer, they think of a jillion other answers that would also work, so consequently they get confused and do very poorly.”

Consisting of a mixture of intelligence, creativity and contribution to society, genius is hard to pinpoint, said Dean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.

In the Scientific American Mind magazine’s special issue on genius, Simonton hypothesized that all geniuses use the same general process to make their contributions to the world.

They start with a search for ideas, not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. From this search, geniuses will generate a number of questions, and begin a long series of trials and errors. They then find a solution, for a problem others may not have even been aware of.

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see,” Simonton said, quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

“Exceptional thinkers, it turns out, stand on common ground when they launch their arrows into the unknown,” Simonton said.

In an attempt to “discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains,” psychiatrist and neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.

Andreasen selected the creative subjects from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a control group from a mixture of professions. The control group was matched to the writers based on age, education and IQ — with both test and control groups averaging an IQ of 120, considered very smart but not exceptionally so, according to Andreasen.

Based on these controls, Andreasen looked for what separated the creative’s brains from the controls.

During the fMRI scans of participants, the subjects were asked to perform three different tasks: word association, picture association and pattern recognition. The creatives’ brains showed stronger activations in their association cortices. These are the most extensively developed regions in the human brain and help interpret and utilize visual, auditory, sensory and motor information.

Andreasen set out to find what else, in addition to brain processes, linked the 13 creatives’ brains.

“Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses,” Andreasen wrote in The Atlantic, referring to participants in her study. “Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill.”

And then there are people who fit into both categories.

What Andreasen found is that there is another common mark of creative genius: mental illness.

Through interviews and extensive research, Andreasen discovered that the creatives she studied had a higher rate of mental illness, which included a family history of mental illness. The most common diagnoses were bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and alcoholism. The question now is whether the mental illness contributes to the genius or if it’s the other way around, she said.

In a study of the brain of one of the most famous geniuses in history, Einstein, scientists found distinct physical features, which may help to explain his genius, Live Science reported when the study came out in the journal Brain in 2012.

Previously unpublished photographs of the physicist’s brain revealed that Einstein had extra folding in his gray matter, the part of the brain that processes conscious thinking, the study researchers found. His frontal lobes, the brain regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had particularly elaborate folding.

“It’s a really sophisticated part of the human brain,” Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, told Live Science, referring to gray matter. “And [Einstein’s] is extraordinary.”

Be it high IQ, curiosity or creativity, the factor that makes someone a genius may remain a mystery. Though Mensa can continue to test for quantitative intelligence in areas such as verbal capacity and spatial reasoning, there is no test for the next Einstein, Lawlis said.

“I don’t know anybody that could really predict this extremely high level of intelligence and contribution,” Lawlis said. “That’s the mystery.”

Original article on Live Science.

– See more at: http://www.livescience.com/55028-what-makes-a-genius.html#sthash.Rw8Wqa9N.dpuf

Autism or Genius?

Autistic Boy With Higher IQ Than Einstein Discovers His Gift After Removal From State-Run Therapy

Jacob Barnett4th June 2013

By Carolanne Wright

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

In yet another example of how an out-of-control Goliath state system can cause more harm than good, a teenage boy who was diagnosed with autism at a young age has risen to stellar heights after quitting the special ed system with the help of his concerned mother.

State therapy specialists claimed Jacob Barnett would never tie his shoes, read or function normally in society. But the boy’s mother realized when Jacob was not in therapy, he was doing “spectacular things” completely on his own.

She decided to trust her instinct and disregard the advice of the professionals. Instead of following a standardized special needs educational protocol, she surrounded Jacob with all the things that inspired passion for him – and was astonished at the transformation that took place.

Don’t fix what’s not broken

Following a diagnosis of autism at age two, Jacob was subjected to a cookie cutter special education system that focused on correcting what he couldn’t do compared to normal children. For years, teachers attempted to convince Kristine Barnett that her son would only be able to learn the most basic of life skills.

When exposed to the state system of educational therapy, Kristine noticed Jacob would withdraw deeply and refuse to speak with anyone. Even though she found it “terrifying to fly against the advise of the professionals,” she knew in her heart “that if Jake stayed in special ed, he would slip away,” Kristine relates in her memoir, The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing Genius.

So began a journey for Jacob that would lead to such unexpected achievement that the whole premise of standardized therapy for this ‘special needs’ child would be blown to bits.

A path of passion and discovery

After years of frustration and little progress, Kristine made a radical decision in the eyes of the special ed system — she took Jacob out of school and prepared him for kindergarten herself. As described in the New York Daily Times:

She let him explore the things he wanted to explore. He studied patterns and shadows and stars. At the same time, she made sure that he enjoyed “normal” childhood pleasures – softball, picnics – along with other kids his age.

“I operate under a concept called ‘muchness’,” Kristine said “which is surrounding children with the things they love – be it music, or art, whatever they’re drawn to and love.”

By the time Jacob reached the age of 11, he entered college and is currently studying condensed matter physics at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. According to an email Professor Scott Tremaine wrote to Jacob’s family:

“The theory that he’s working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics … Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize.”

Jacob also has an IQ of 170 — higher than that of Einstein. He is history’s youngest astrophysics researcher, has spoken at a New York TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) conference, and appeared on a variety of news interviews, including 60 Minutes and the Time magazine website.

Not bad for someone who was classified by state experts as so severely disabled that he would never tie his own shoes or learn to read. If Jacob had stayed within the system, the prediction may very well have come true.

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2013/06/04/autistic-boy-discovers-gift-after-removal-from-state-run-therapy/