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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.
But it helps!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
But remember kids, you cannot omit that genius part. Without, carrying a blanket around and calling it your waifu only makes you a weirdo.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
Pythagoras ban's on fava beans can be traced back to his having favism.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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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The only difference between brilliance and insanity is success.
I see two distinct, yet likely, possibilities.
1. They were all autistic. Autists don't like change and tend to develop rituals and patterns, such as hammering your feet before bedtime or closing/opening the door 9 times before going through. Autists are sometimes also very sharp (though faaar from all of them) when they manage to focus their behavioral patterns on logical problems.
2. This is visibility bias. We are all quirky in some way, but not all of us invented relativity theory. I have a friend that sleeps 11+ hours a day, but she's not a genius, so no-one cares. I had a friend that only ate cereal, but she wasn't a genius so no-one cared. Looking back, most of my friends have had some quirk or other, and I'm guessing that if I spent some time digging I'd find that everyone has at least one. So, these geniuses aren't special on the quirk side, they are simply the ones we notice because they're 'famous'. I bet you all know of some unique quirk belonging to your favorite actor/actress, not because they're quirky, but because they're covered by the press 24/7 in detail.
So what earns a person certification in being a genius?
150+ on Stanford-Binet? 145+ on Wechsler? A life where one generates a great amount of new science/art/architecture/writing? A ton of Patents?
IQ is just a raw measure of the potential of a mind. The "mental velocity", as they call it. What one does with it. . . That is what really differentiates the geniuses.
Never declare anyone a genius until they are at least 35 years old. The truth is that you just can't tell which ones will bloom – so provide opportunities to all of the ones who exhibit high IQs or similar at a young age. Observe their progress and proclivities, and you might just be part of the formative years of a genius. (or you can quench it, as frequently happens)
...at a time one cannot say to actually be gay...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
There are more quirkly homeless people than quirky geniuses. We don't need to spread the myth about quirks being a fundamental particle of genius. We already have too much self-described geniuses on websites like Slashdot who are arseholes because they read a self-confirming article that many geniuses were arseholes.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
I got quirky habits down pat. Loads of them. Quirky is actually a charitable way to describe them, that much quirky. So where do I collect my certificate for geniusity ? or is it geniusness?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The use of amphetamines isn't a quirk, it's just common sense.
Eat the rich.
There must be at least one more step.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
There are more quirkly homeless people than quirky geniuses.
Just playing devil's advocate but is this actually true and what is the evidence for or against? Are you just assuming it to be true because it sounds right? We're talking about opposite ends of the spectrum in many cases but both tend to be some standard deviations outside the norm. It wouldn't actually surprise me if the number of crazy geniuses in total wasn't all that different from the number of crazy homeless people. I have no evidence for or against but it is an interesting question. (to me anyway...)
We already have too much self-described geniuses on websites like Slashdot who are arseholes because they read a self-confirming article that many geniuses were arseholes.
There's definitely a surviorship bias in play here.
Looks to me like there's a lot of geniuses around here... Wait, I'm here too...
I have some truly peculiar habits, therefor I am a genius.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Don't be ugly?
Many people do similar things. It is a bit of a self fulfilling prophesy. There are sports people who have to go on the field with the right foot first. Some will want to have a lucky number as shirtnumber.
A politician might want to have his tie done in a cerain way.
In programming: Some will use spaces instead of tabs.
The result is the same: It works. Now why is that? Because when you do it, you won't spend time thinking how you did NOT do it. That time can then be used for the task at hand. And when you need to be concentrated 100%, you will be better than using 1% thinking how something is a bit off.
We learn as kids that a kiss on the knee is the bestest way to stop a booboo.
And I am sure that everybody has things like this and that has nothing to do with autism or anything else. Just human behaviour.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There are more homeless people than there are geniuses
It depends on how you define genius. Approximately 2.2% of the population has an IQ above 140 which is the cutoff for MENSA membership. Approximately in the US is homeless. So if you are talking Newton or Tesla level geniuses you might be right but if you define genius as the smartest 1-2% of the population then there are at least as many geniuses as homeless people.
Basically you are simply assuming there are more homeless people than geniuses when in fact the data seems to show that probably isn't actually true, at least in the US and most other modern countries.
It's simply easier to become homeless than be a genius.
That is an assumption not an evidence based fact.
Out of those groups, quirkiness would have to be much much more common in geniuses than in homeless people for there to be roughly similar numbers.
See the data above which seems to disagree with you.
Sure, but doesn't ugly decrease the level of difficulty of at least one of the other prerequisites?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
he eats his own toe jam.
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People who are extremely intelligent are accustomed to being right when everyone around them are wrong and in fact aren't bright enough to realize they're wrong. This is not a good thing.
The smartest person I know (and I know a *lot* of smart people) had an affair with a married man that any idiot would have known was going to end badly. But there was no point in debating that with her because it would be like climbing into the ring and sparring with Ali in his prime. She never, ever loses an argument. I suspect part of the attraction of this guy was that he was kind of a fixer-upper. He in fact did leave his wife, moved in with my friend, and then promptly fell in love with her male apartment-mate. The problems he was having were him coming to terms with being gay, so in an ironic way she did end up fixing him up.
Being able to argue circles around other people invites a kind of stupidity that is the exclusive property of the very smart or very rich. When it's a harmless odd opinion like walking around naked taking "air baths", we call it "quirky". Sometimes it's even right, like Tesla's toe-scrunching; neuroscientists now know that helps the brain with "executive functions" like planning and attention control. But that same mule-headedness can have a darker side, like Nobel laureate Shockley's racial "theories".
This is why I think gifted education is so important, not because the educators themselves can do much for the truly gifted, but having intellectual peers who challenge the gifted student on an equal basis teaches that student a lesson smart people often miss out on.
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Stonewall Jackson held one arm aloft as much as he could, even riding into battle -- supposedly to equalize blood flow. He didn't quit even after he caught a bullet that way.
We all have quirky habits. Quirky habits do not a genius make.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
At that point, it's considered further evidence of the practitioner's brilliance.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
I can definitively say that cerebro-diversity is a thing. Our school focuses on dyslexic and Asperger's kids - their brains are wired differently and as a result, they see the world differently.
I'll bet most of the geniuses found in history also had brains that were wired differently than most of us. That would explain their talents and their quirks.
I don't think you can simply adopt a few odd behaviors in the hopes of attaining genius status.
The fact that a genius does something doesn't imply that if you do the same you are or become a genius.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I wouldn't really describe masturbating five times a day, using your bulbous gut as a potato chip tray, and slurping Red Bull all night as "quirky."
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Perhaps many of those things we generally classify as "fantastically weird" would be a bit more mainstream if we were to get better educated in reality and less "morally righteous"!
What do YOU thing might better serve mankind?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.