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The Quirky Habits of Certified Science Geniuses (bbc.com)
dryriver shares a report from the BBC: Celebrated inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla swore by toe exercises -- every night, he'd repeatedly "squish" his toes, 100 times for each foot, according to the author Marc J Seifer. While it's not entirely clear exactly what that exercise involved, Tesla claimed it helped to stimulate his brain cells. The most prolific mathematician of the 20th Century, Paul Erdos, preferred a different kind of stimulant: amphetamine, which he used to fuel 20-hour number benders. When a friend bet him $500 that he couldn't stop for a month, he won but complained "You've set mathematics back a month." Newton, meanwhile, bragged about the benefits of celibacy. When he died in 1727, he had transformed our understanding of the natural world forever and left behind 10 million words of notes; he was also, by all accounts, still a virgin (Tesla was also celibate, though he later claimed he fell in love with a pigeon). It's common knowledge that sleep is good for your brain -- and Einstein took this advice more seriously than most. He reportedly slept for at least 10 hours per day -- nearly one and a half times as much as the average American today (6.8 hours). But can you really slumber your way to a sharper mind? Many of the world's most brilliant scientific minds were also fantastically weird. From Pythagoras' outright ban on beans to Benjamin Franklin's naked "air baths," the path to greatness is paved with some truly peculiar habits.
I think it's a bit of stretch to call Newton's proclivities a 'quirky habit'.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
In other words, a lot of geniuses were probably autistic or had other conditions we generally consider to be 'mental illness.' Individuals with exceptionally high intelligence don't tend to integrate fully into society, and society's reaction is largely to consider them broken. As a great philosopher once said, "Only shooting stars break the mold."
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That also works for rich or otherwise successful people. The word for nutty rich or super-smart folks is "eccentric" I suspect that a great many ordinary people have pretty weird quirks and habits too; the difference is that we never hear about them.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The only difference between brilliance and insanity is success.
We're all eccentric, only nobody cares about investigating our eccentricities.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I remember taking a left brain / right brain test in high school and the teacher saying that the only people who scored equal on both sides tended to be either genius or mentally retarded. Whether it is autism, schizophrenia, creativity, or something else, if you want to "think outside the box" then being on the fringe is to your advantage. It doesn't surprise me that great thinkers were far outside the box. The trick is being far outside the box without being so far out that you're unstable. Many great thinkers, artists, etc.. were fairly unstable but still managed to hold it together well enough to give us some novel ideas.
On a somewhat related note, I have a personal theory that the spike in autism is being caused by smart people having children. If intelligence is "balancing on the brink of insanity", then two people on the brink who reproduce sometimes causes their offspring to be over the edge.
No, that's what causes pandemics.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.