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A Beautiful Mind
The John Nash of Nasar's biography, while less likable, is far more fascinating and multidimensional than his cinematic counterpart; he is a draft dodger, a vicious prankster (one practical joke of Nash's involved filling a light fixture with water, which could have electrocuted a hapless victim when he turned on the light), and an arrogant braggart.
Hollywood has whitewashed much from Nash's life; besides working to dodge the Korean War draft out of fears that it would hurt his career, Nash fathered an illegitimate son whom he refused to help care for, despite the fact that his own circumstances were far better than those of the child's mother. The woman he married, Alicia Larde, is portrayed in the film as the one and only love of Nash's life; no mention is made of their 1963 divorce. (Nearly forty years later, the couple remarried.) To read Nasar's biography is to discover fascinating episodes like Nash's stint in Europe, when he attempted several times to renounce his American citizenship and obtain political asylum, and his encounters with fellow patient and Pulitzer prizewinning poet Robert Lowell in a Massachusetts mental hospital.
The book is as absorbing a history lesson as it is a story; Nasar sets Nash's life beautifully in the context of his time. Nash's bisexuality, for example, was much more of an issue then than it would be now; while today many areas have laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation, in 1954 not only was it legal for employers to dismiss a homosexual employee, but any evidence of homosexuality was sufficient grounds to deprive a government employee of security clearance. Later, the reader learns of many once-credited treatments for mental illness, like insulin injections (thought to deprive the brain of sugar and thus kill off defective brain cells), colonic irrigation, and even "fever therapy," given by inoculating patients with malaria or typhoid. Nasar's description of the politics by which Nobel prizes are awarded, a process purposely shrouded in mystery by the various committees involved, is a particularly fascinating read. Her inclusion of these and other details paints a rich historical picture that's a pleasure to read.
The one thing missing from A Beautiful Mind is, of course, the voice of John Nash himself. Where possible, Nasar plucked quotes from his writings and the recollections of friends and colleagues, but Nash himself maintained, as he put it to a New York Times reporter, "a position of Swiss neutrality" toward his biographer. Throughout the extraordinary story of Nash's life -- his rapid rise to fame, his loves, his illness, his disappearance for decades from the academic community, and his recognition at last as a Nobel laureate, one wants to ask him, "What were you thinking?" Unfortunately, it's a question Nasar was unable to answer.
One true merit of the movie, so highly altered from Nash's real story (and, considered apart from the facts, it is both moving and interesting), is that it will undoubtedly inspire many to pick up Nasar's beautifully written biography. It's time to meet the real John Nash.
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I saw the movie, and it got me wondering about the real John Forbes Nash, Jr. He's got a short (but interesting) online autobiography here, although he skips over his schizophrenic years and focuses on his academic work.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
What geek isn't?
Girl geeks.
We just don't like other women
If a and b in c, and a can create b, and a can create a, and b can create b, and b cannot create a, then a created c.
My girlfriend's father is an economics professor, and was excited to see him speak this year. It seems, however, that he is a shadow of what he once was.
Apparently, his presentation was not terribly insightful. And when asked by an audience member about some of his famous work, he responded that he "doesn't remember any of that anymore."
The entire event was very awkward for everyone in attendance. Here is a man who made some brilliant discoveries in his heyday that are very useful in game theory and economics. People come to hear him speak and it only displays how his mind has gone-- he can't even relive the old glory.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
It's quite unfortunate that it happened. So many times people's works are not judged by the content, but by who wrote it. Perhaps it's too much effort to actually peruse the work and digest the content, so people rely on arguing ad hominem on its worthiness.
It's refreshing though that he actually did earn the Nobel Prize that he deserved.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
Ron Howard has said from the very beginning of the project that the film was not a mirror of the book. He didn't make it that way for a reason. Now, his reasoning may not be good, but I think this case of book-to-film is different than most. He did not hide out somewhere pretending to make the film based on the book, he was very public about the inentions and the process.
Yeah the movie was too much of a "feel good" one for me to believe that it was all true. So I did some reading on the net about him and found out about how RAND fired him for suspected homosexuality, and his illegitimate son.
I also thought the movie portrayed him a little too "Forrest Gumpish" like he was retarded in some way but they never made any reference to it.
The bad thing thing was how the movie strung you along to believe that he was actually sane the whole time. Even the whole scene where Nash was being shot at while speeding along in the car. I know its hard to imagine, but it they made it seem real enough.
I guess when you question how a scizophrenic person can imagine such strange things and believe them, I think about when humans dream. How many strange dreams have you had that were totally unbelievable yet you didn't question them in the dream? A person with this disorder just has part of their dreams occurring during the day while awake.
I guess if they told the real story of John Nash, you'd not like him as much, and Russle Crowe wouldn't be getting so many accolades for this movie if he portrayed John Nash as a bisexual, draft dodging, dead-beat dad.
Indeed, it is an excellent biography, and this review is right on target: the Nash of the book is far more multidimensional and interesting than any Hollywood creation could be.
Something the book draws out wonderfully is the tension between Nash's tremendous virtue as a thinker, and the fact that he was a really dislikable person for much of his life. His attitude generally seemed to be that his intelligence was the sole measure of his merit as a human being, and should open the doors of the world to him regardless of whether or not he was a pleasant or decent person. The places where he was right and wrong about this -- and how that changed during the "lost years" of schizophrenia -- is a fascinating cautionary tale for all of us fringy geeky types, whether fighting mental illness or not.
After two weeks of reading praise in the reviews, I finally went to see the movie. I must say I didn't like it, possibly because it hits too close to home.
Watching Nash's life suddenly reveal itself as an empty shell, a madman's delusion, was too painful. It creeped me out so much that I lost interest in the rest of the film and the recovery to normal life that he made. I guess I became afraid of what it would be like to lose control of your mind in this manner, a very disturbing perspective.
Needless to say, beyond the amount forced upon me by the movie, I could not sympathize with the character much because of the pride and prejudice and contempt and even, I would say, malice in his competitiveness (while he had it), that he touts.
To summarize, I felt sorry for him, but even more repulsed by him, and thus by the movie.
As for his portrayal as a mathematician, it had both parts that I liked and those that I didn't. There wasn't much specifics to it though, predictably.
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The way he was portrayed in the movie, there is absolutely no way that such a man could score a woman as beautiful as Jennifer Connelly!
His presentations were pretty much always like that, even before the schizophrenia. He was a terrible speaker, disorganized and unclear, who gave the impression of babbling nonsense off the top of his head. He was also a terrible teacher, who bored his students out of their skulls. His presentations always made other mathematicians skeptical that he was actually generating any valid ideas at all -- until he managed to get them down on paper, and proved himself a genius.
So I'm not sure that a bumbling presentation now is a sign that "his mind has gone".
I have seen the movie, it ok , more enttertaining when you watch it as FICTION, which basically it is.
Only hollywood could turn a Bisexual, Schitophrenic, Deadbeat dad into someone you fell for, or the Nazi's propoganda machine did with that whole crew of loonies.
Its amazing, it sells so sugar coat it. I doubt many would have wanted to see Crowe portay the REAL Nash.
BUT in this country, and much of the world, the CONSUMER rules, who wants to see a movie about an asshole no matter how smart he is.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
when people compare books to movies. I've never come across a single instance where someone said, "Man, the movie was SO much better than the book!" It's intellectual snobbery at its finest. So next time you go to a Mozart concert, make sure you bring the sheet music, and as you're walking out, loudly proclaim, "That performance was NOTHING like the score! The London Symphony left out critical intricacies of Mozart's work!"
It seems, however, that he is a shadow of what he once was.
And you're surprised? Nash was a mathematician. Mathematicians tend to do their best work before the they are 25 years old, and it's rare for a mathematician to make major discoveries after 40.
Mathematicians have also had a long history of mental disorders; as my supervisor once said, "you can count on your fingers the number of sane great 20th century mathematicians". (which is just slightly worrying...)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Have you ever thought that sometimes you just don't want to talk about the past anymore? What was your girlfriend's father hoping for a 'Nobel' quality rant on genius, thus validation of the intellectual superiority of all present? If you want to move into the future think, if not collect baseball cards and talk to collegues about how cool you were at university.
Everybody knows that beautiful, attractive women invariably go for the guys that abuse them most. :)
This is a great movie from what I hear, but it makes one simple mistake:
It makes people with mental illness think they can also be like Nash and 'fight back'.
This isn't the case, and gives people an unrealistic look into the life of someone who is mentally ill. As an advocate, I find it kind of hard when the public is shown a movie like this. They think... "why can't `they` all do like he did?"
A mistake indeed. Not that a story where someone overcomes a great hurdle is bad, but it's dangerous in this case.
Next movie: A person who has AIDS, but fights it and somehow beats it. Then everyone will think it's possible.
[Before you flame me, I'm not alone on this issue. Also, if you want to flame me, look around and see why someone like me has to become an advocate.]
Get your Unix fortune now!
While others like Andrew Sullivan probably disagree, I think his bisexuality was intentionally kept out the film because the producers of the movie did not want to associate bi/homosexuality with mental illness.
Brian Ellenberger
I'm about half way through the book.
Von Neuman plays a role in the book.
Von Neuman invented the min-max algorithm which
is widely used in artificial intelligence game
playing programs such as chess. Nash's equilibrium
point is supposed to be a powerful generalisation
on min-max, but I don't see it often used in A.I. programs.
Also in the book Von Neuman flips off Nash as being a pompous grad student.
Nash gets the final laugh when he WINS the Nobel prize
and Von Neuman doesn't.
The founders of Artificial Intelligence John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky
were classmates of Nash and have cameos in the book.
Later in his career Nash becomes something of
a computer hacker, but I haven't reached that part of
the book yet.
Both the book and movie are rare lterary depictions of grad school life.
They capture the stresses of science/engineering nerds.
Also things have changed since the 1950s and now,
but not as much as you'd think.
I completely agree... while Fight Club might not be as profound as, say, A Clockwork Orange, it certainly is a worthwhile commentary on socitey.
Regardless, it is also a well filmed, engaging movie with some truly enlightened moments and effects (and example of the latter being the walk through Ikea catalog)
_sig_ is away
I am an academic economist and saw Nash give two lectures a couple of years ago. The one talk was not bad, he was trying to pick up where he left off but didn't realize that some of his "new" ideas had already been developed by others while he was "absent." The second talk was pretty nutty, although not entirely out of the range of the nutty ideas you sometimes see in economic seminars.
Here is one example of what he missed out on while he was mad. He had figured out that computers are now useful for numerical solutions to equations that would have been very difficult to characterize. However, his model had some greek letters in it and he thought that a computer could not ("of course") print out letters of a non-latin alphabet -- he was thinking of a simple typewriter style printer.
water, which could have electrocuted a hapless victim when he turned on the light)
Probably nonsense. If the 'victim' weren't actually touching the fixture in question, (i.e tuyrning on via a wall switch) there is no possibiliy of electrocution. If the victim were touching the fixter it would require all of the following to occur:
The media have created this illusion that you can be electrocuted by being anywhere in the same county with water and electricity. This just isn't the case. The electricty must somehow flow through you, and it doesn't do this unless you are a path between 'hot' and neutral or ground. The classic example of the radio falling into the bathtub is probably harmless unless you touch the faucet or the drain, for example.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
The problem is that the book itself is full of evidence that this picture of genius is simplistic in the extreme. While Nash was there, Princeton was full of first-rate intellects --- geniuses by any yardstick --- who shared nothing of Nash's sociopathic nature. Einstein was reserved and eccentric, but good-natured. Von Neumann was articulate and cosmopolitan, and heavily involved in politics. Godel (before his paranoia set in) was sophisticated and urbane. Each of these men easily outrank Nash. None of them shared his tendency to strut around proclaiming his own genius or his habit of sneering at the worthlessness of other minds. And yet both the film and the book push all the old myths of genius. When I was a grad student at Princeton the main consequence of this myth, as far as I could tell, was that everyone had to put up with jerks who thought they could induce genius in themselves by being an asshole to everyone else.
So in other words he's almost as nuts as Larry Wall...
John Nash never received a Nobel Prize. The only "real" Nobel prizes are the ones in chemistry, peace, literature, physics, and medicine/physiology. Those were the ones established by Alfred Nobel in his will, and first awarded in 1901. The Nobel prize for Economics was established about 70 years later, in 1968. The Bank of Sweden created a foundation to award, "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". It was basically a marketting ploy to celebrate it's 300th anniversary. :)
While the selection process is done similarly (the Economics award is done by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, which also awards the prizes for chemistry and physics), the awards are quite distinct. Some physicians will complain bitterly if one mentions the Nobel Prize in Economics, since economics is not a "real" science.
Disclaimer: I read the book a couple of years ago, so much of this is from memory.
Irony: People who discover the book because of the movie tend to be more critical of the movie.
I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the movie. Sure I was aware of things that got left out, but as we all know from for example LOTR, when movies are made from books choices have to be made. I really appreciate the way them movie chose to emphasize the importance of relationships in Nash's li fe, as troublesome as they may have been at times.
Nash's bisexuality: The book shows this ambiguously, not as a well-developed preference. It reflects Nash's narcissism more than anything else.
Nash's divorce: Although they did separate for a short time after the divorce, they lived together for 25 years before getting remarried. When they were remarried last summer, Nash referred to the event as a retraction of the divorce, like a journal would retract a publication error.
Terry Gross interviewed Sylvia Nasar on last night's Fresh Air (Real Audio). She was strongly supportive of the choices made while writing the screenplay. She suggested that if more emphasis had been put on Nash's sexuality or political views, it would have detracted from the more important stuff, ie, Nash's lifelong relationship with Alicia and his descent into schizophrenia.
Timothy's text isn't Latin-1 compliant; most likely due to his use of a Microsoft editor to write his article. For Linux users like myself please turn off the smart quotes if you insist on using a Microsoft editor to write your articles.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I'm also suffering from mental illness.
I should have said 'fight back, on your own'.
I used to think I could do this, but I slipped into the worst 4 years of my life.
for the record: Rapid Cycling Bi-Polar.
I would like to continue, but I've got to catch a bus to get medicaid so when my sample medicine runs out I'm not back to square one.
Get your Unix fortune now!
You say that you felt sorry for him, but repulsed at the same time.
The movie got a reaction out of you, and apparently a strong one at that. I think that in a way, that was the intention, and by getting that reaction out of you, it accomplished it's objective.
I, too, had many of the same feelings toward Nash. However, by actually having those feelings, I believe the movie was good. If I didn't feel that way towards the character, I would consider the movie "a bad movie".
In essence, I think the movie ROCKED! 'Grats to Russell Crowe and the rest of production for making me both sympathize, admire and loathe Mr. Nash. What a ride.
Plus, a 120V house-current is unlikely to electrocute most people. It's not fun, but not usually fatal.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
However I felt Sylvia Nasar's defense of the film's intentional disregard of John Nash's sexual history to be disingenuous. Yes he may be bi or gay or straight or it may have been a mistake or experimentation or whatever but the arrest had a profound affect on his life, one certainly relevant to the film.
Frankly the author lost a great deal of creditability with me when she broke down in tears describing Nash's recent remarriage to his wife and kept babbling about how wonderful and beautiful a person he is. While biographers doubtless have opinions on their subjects I've never heard one get so maudlin or express such overt and unconditional adulation.
It will be interesting to someday compare Nasar's Nash biography with another perhaps more objective one. In the meantime both this book and the film appear deeply flawed by their attempts to present overly sympathetic views of their subject.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Now wait a minute. Suddenly it's OKAY to not tell the whole story and make a movie from a book and not put everything in because one's a book and a movie can never include everything from a book (let alone this guys REAL story). Your egregious duplicity is undeniably annoying!
Some spoilers follow, but not many.
I am paraphrasing here what Philip K. Dick said about the movie from memory:
I have just seen the rough cut of Blade Runner. It is terrific! It has nothing to do with the book. What my book will become is a futuristic alien shoot-em-up. This is just as well, because my book would have made a terrible movie. It is full of Deckard's introspection and wondering about humanity. But a book is something to be read, and a movie is an experience that moves.
IMO, the book is excellent. I came to reading Dick as a result of seeing Blade Runner. The book isn't much like the movie. There is Deckard, and there are Replicants (called Andys in the book), and Deckard kills them, and there's a Rachel who's a borderline, and both book and movie approach the question of what is humanity, though from complementary directions. The main plot set of the book (A post-apocalyptic world, Mercerism, the ethic of taking care of animals and artificial animals as fakes, Sydney's catalogue with the E for extinct species, the attempt by the Andys who control the media to discredit Mercerism, the schism between the thought processes of the Andys who cannot understand empathy and cannot take part in polycephalic fusion, the Ezekiel-like tomb world) is almost completely absent from the movie, except for some bits about manufactured animals. Also absent are many subplots (the phantom police agency, the concept of fake fakes, Deckard's wife and the Penfield mood organ, and the [shudder] scene with the spider). Nevertheless, the book is excellent if you don't expect it to be like the movie.
Seems to me like the best way to get a Golden Globe or Academy Award or one of those other 10,000 self-congradulating things is to play an eccentric genius or loveable mentally-handicapped person. After all, is there anyway easier to examine humanity than to observe someone who is extremely polarized one direction in the head? Yeesh. A Beautiful Mind was a well done movie and well acted movied but cliche in plot (even if it was based on a true story).
My pick for favorite movie? Probably "Amelie." Though a bit long, its sweet without being too saccerine and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's style is just incredible.
The Fresh Air program segment with the interview with Sylvia Nasar is here (RealAudio).
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Many of the posters here have mentioned that Nash was a "bisexual, schizophrenic, deadbeat dad" not deserving the lovable storyline. This really hacks me off! Have you people learned nothing? Bisexuality is a natural fact, nothing to be ashamed of..and nothing to be scorned. Also, schizophrenia is a mental disorder, again something not to be stigmantized but something to be dealt with as a disease. Dead-beat dad? Well ok but that guy was bat-out-of-his-gourd for most of his life so maybe his priorities werent exactly in order. In his day, there was no viable treatment for schizophrenia, just a bunch of pseudoscience mumbo-jumbo that probably just made things worse.
That fact is the man, flaws and all, made some major contributions to mathematics despite serious personal difficulty.
Even if this is not the case, the stuff (ions, etc.) that comes of the human body in the water will make it conductive. If you don't believe that then give it a shot.
Even so, you still have to be part of the path from 'hot' to 'ground' - I suppose it might happen if you were between the radio and the drain, though, but I'd still expect that the paths witin the radio itself would be preferred. I'll admit, I don't want to try it out, though. Not the best time to find out a theory is wrong.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
The Nash Equilibrium is a very strange beast. It's a solution to the non-zero-sum game corresponding generally to a solution to the zero-sum game, but nastier. Interestingly, a number of the workers in Game Theory, in ESS Theory, and more generally in sociobiology have had similar mental illnesses. I suspect it has something to do with the nature of the problems game theorists like to work on.
As a person who graduated with almost a dual-degree in math and psychology, I was interested to read Naser's recounting of Nash's story. About a quarter of the way through, however, I am having trouble continuing.
The book is a dedicated biography and reads a lot more like a text book than "the actual story of his life." (emphasis on "story"). It is not a very easy read, even for someone used to reading biographies (especially of mathematicians) and pscyhology textbooks.
Be forewarned: It is an interesting book, but not an easy one to tackle.
On a completely different note, one problem I had with the movie (of many, I did not think very highly of the movie) is the phrase "Based on a true story." I think that a much better phrase would have been "Inspired from a true story." I think that the English language, and Hollywood, have agreed on what these two phrases mean. Having seen the movie, and having known a bit of Nash's life, I think that "inspired" is a much closer description of what the movie is.
It is a nitpick,but an important one, especially for people out there who are not going to research Nash's exact life.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Dead Man Walking, the book, is half about the two convicts Sister Helen Prejean "adopts" on death row. Although not a professional writer, Prejean's story is quite interesting, even though I had no previous interest about capital punishment. The other half of the book (interspersed) is a listing of facts and figures and data about which states have more prisons, effectiveness of different procedures, etc. I began to skip those parts. Overall, I liked the book, even with it's faults.
The movie is totally different. Where the book focused on facts and a literal storytelling, the film concentrated entirely on the Sister's relationship with the death-row inmate (a composite of the two real people.) Susan Sarandon rightly won the Oscar for this role.
The movie is emotional, the book is factual, but they both fit together perfectly as two viewpoints on the same story. Amazing!
The question is -HOW?
How do you get work done without being eccentric?
Feynmann rightly noted that thinking about things requires long uninterruptable periods of time. He compared thinking to building a house of cards.
Other "geniuses" have agreed. (They are also almost universal in saying that there is nothing particularly special about their brains or way of thinking. Einstein was quite adament about this.)
The question in my mind is: How do you do it?
I'm addicted to thinking, but I also value the happiness of the people around me. Feynmann was okay with declaring himself irresponsible in order to make time for his intellectual persuits, but what is the father of a needy daughter to do?
Torvalds has two kids, but I get the impression that he neglects them, given the way that he holds his behavior in contempt ("I'm not a nice person; I'm a hard-boiled bastard who doesn't give a damn about anything but the technology", or something like that). If I recall right, Feynmann had his kids after he did his major works.
Einstein is famous for rocking a cradle while working on a paper. That's relatively easy; I've written architecture on paper while rocking Sakura's when she was just 1 month old. I'm sure anyone could; 1 mth olds don't really DO much. Einstein has attributed much of his ability to work on problems to time available at the patent office.
So, can you think a lot and Love your Neighbors at the same time? I'm not really all that sure. I think you just have to wait for steady blocks of time to show up, or start fucking people over with an angry temper.
I think that's a very unfair reading of Nasar's writing.
She makes it clear throughout the book that many of Nash's colleagues were also geniuses, and that there were all very different from him and from each other. Some were also assholes; some were extraordinarily generous. She gives them their credit both as being geniuses and as not all fitting the same "genius" mold.
Nasar does make the argument that Nash's particular genius and his particular personality were tied together, which is almost certainly true. Certainly Nash was a driven, competitive, egotistical fellow -- and that had a great deal to do with what problems he chose to tackle (usually the ones that would grab the most attention if solved), and how he tackled them (angrily, obsessively, jealous of others working on the same problem).
I didn't read that as anything other than a description of Nash. It is one model of one genius, and certainly Nasar does not present it as a model for all geniuses everywhere. I think your reaction may be based on a (very reasonable!) general irritation with the myth of the genius, and what you read into the book based on that irritation.
As for the movie, I haven't seen it and can't comment on it.
I really have a low tolerance for this sort of thing. I'm not going to talk about my own diagnosis, because that comes across as whiny. However, in 1999 my ex-wife and I started what was only the second program in the United States to teach English to residents who were not native speakers of English. Most of these were schizophrenics.
Our success was phenomenal, at least prima facie. The discharge rate amongst our students was twice the discharge rate of the hospital at large. Most of these were long-term residents. All students who attended more than one class achieved dramatically improved functioning. One woman had a chronic undifferentiated schizophrenic who also had a seizure disorder, had been there for four years, and was understandable neither in English nor in her native Spanish came to one lesson, and after that, we recieved reports that she was much more understandable. It was a very simple class, with a simple "Hi, how are you" dialogue. She went out and enlisted other residents to practice the dialog with her.
Now, of course, this remains at the anecdotal level. The program was effectively killed by administration after a couple of months, though this was after we had gotten the Florida Department of Children and Families volunteer of the year award.
It could also be said that I'm biased. We did, of course, recieve reports from other people who weren't part of the program, but as someone who was a research scientist for 13 years and has been active in the skeptic movement, I am aware of those dangers. On the other hand, there is also a danger of dismissing something casually. In any event, I don't think it can be rationally said that it isn't at least promising.
One would, ideally, try this sort of thing at a larger scale, doing extensive followups to test the long-term effects if any and also trying to find out just what it was about the teaching that was effective if it was. What we did was a mixture of the European Direct method, in which both my ex and I got trained and certified, and the Dartmouth method, in which I had taught German some years earlier. Both methods belong to the class of "intensive" methods, and perhaps subjecting a schizophrenic to that kind of highly social rigor has unexpected side-effects. I don't know, but it would be interesting to study.
My best guess is that we could do a hell of a lot better than we're doing. As the administrative reaction highlights, people don't want this. They want to look at the "green monkey" and go eeeew and put him into a warehouse run by sadists. (Up until 1991, at this hospital, any resident who tried to bite a staff member had all their teeth extracted as punishment. If anything, Ken Kesey pulled his punches. The reality is way worse.)
To talk about the dangers of giving people "false hope" seems to me a rationalization. Sure, Hollywood isn't realistic. The guy in Awakenings, in real life, didn't do much but masturbate. OK. But still, the danger of squelching real hope which spurs real effort that sometimes works is much greater.
If I look at the text using Mozilla 0.9.7 as HTML or as source I see question marks where the apostrophes should be. If I save it as HTML and look at it, the apostrophes are replaced with �.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
I don't know if the author of the book got this confusion, but it doesn't help to promulgate it.
Sociopathy (nowadays usually called Antisocial Personality Disorder, which I think is too euphemistic) and schizophrenia are completely different things. Schizophrenia is a thought disorder, diagnosed on Axis I. Sociopathy is a personality disorder, diagnosed on Axis II.
Sociopathy doesn't seem to be related to genius at all, except that sociopaths tend to be pretty intelligent. Schizophrenia, or at least schizoaffective disorder, and manic depression (which often has schizoaffective features in manic and mixed states), on the other hand, do appear to be related to genius.
I would go so far as to say that the cluster B personality disorders, of which sociopathy is one, aren't mental illnesses at all, but rather styles of dealing with others. It is certainly possible that someone could develop sociopathy as a result of being tormented for being schizophrenic, but it could happen for boatloads of other reasons as well.
...here.
After seeing the movie several weeks back(I thought it sucked), I found an old review of this book in the mathematics zine "Ferment." This review pretty much dismantles every shred of purported clueness in Sylvia Nasar's book.
t m# RH
http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/zeta/nash.h