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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 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.
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."
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
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 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.
Not at all. Most insanity is destructive. These people are/were not insane at all. They just did not give a damn what others think. The average human being, however, is so focused on what others think that they can regularly not even recognize clear nonsense. The critical characteristic needed for making mental breakthroughs is not high intelligence. That one, a lot of people have. It is the ability to use it independently and most people (even most highly intelligent ones) fail at that completely. Intelligence does not help if you do not use it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
I'd even take it a step further. It's their obsessiveness about that one thing. There are many people in this world that are dedicated to their work. They work hard, work all nighters, get stressed, study, etc... but there are very, very, very few people in this world so obsessed with a *SINGLE* topic that almost literally consumes them, all day, every day, for years and years. To the point they're not just neglecting themselves, they often consider their bodies a physical nuisance. They also shun everything else that doesn't seem important, like spending social time with others, what other people think, eating, cleaning, other mundane tasks. If you could free your mind of those things and spend every waking second on a single topic, then it should be no surprise one would argue that you already have clinical issues. Most of us are not wired to do that, we'd probably psychologically break down instead of thriving like these guys.
No, that's what causes pandemics.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The problem with this argument is that some of the geniuses under discussion were polymath generalists, not specialists in one thing. And even with the specialists, people like Tesla and Erdos covered an enormous range of topics within their specialization. The common factor with most of them is an enormous amount of energy bordering on mania, coupled with enough intelligence to make productive use of it instead of repeatedly rearranging the dishes in the kitchen at 3am.
I suspect that our knowing about their weird habits is just a side-effect of self-confidence in some (Newton, Franklin), and an utter disregard for social convention (Tesla, Erdos) in others. Lots of people have weird habits -- and I'm looking at YOU, fellow Slashdot users -- but prefer to be discreet about them.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.