Great Minds

[Dunmurry]

What is it about the brains of "Great Minds" (e.g. Newton, Einstein etc.) which makes the different from the majority of people? At birth, do they have something that most other people don't? Or is their no difference in terms of intelligence, it's just that they have trained themselves to think in a particular way?
What are the differences between their brains and other people's? Is a great mind inherited? Do you have to be born with the correct "brain", or can anyone become a "Great Mind"?

[muttrox]

No one knows. Many have argued about it for centuries, and they still are today. I very very much doubt you will get any satisfactory answer here.

Note the distinction between a biological brain and a non-biological mind, your question blurs this crucial point.

[Epimetheus]

IANAD but I think that a great mind is formed as a child and tempered as an adult. The development of the brain and how a person thinks is pretty much determined by a persons younger years.

This is not to say that a person that has had somewhat of a bad childhood in the development department cannot make something of themselves. Only that the competition from somebody with great thinking patterns devolped at a young age will have the upper hand.

Don't think there could be any set answer, how a person thinks, what accomplisments he/she has under her belt or if they are a Great mind has too much of a fuzzy area. What is a great mind? A lot of common sense? Superb education? Erudite vocabulary mixed with a massive book knowledge? Or just a twisted way of thinking that knocks most people off thier feet?

I think it would be a good GB, but I don't think there is definative answer.

[Epimetheus]

Originally posted by Dunmurry
Do you have to be born with the correct "brain", or can anyone become a "Great Mind"?

I hope a person does not have to be born with it. I hope that one can train themselves to think big, be smarter etc, even without a great childhood, or even a 3.0 all through school. I remember vaugely a thread or two with this topic, if it is possible to do this, and I don't think there is any answer other than: Be the first if there is no other. I certainly try.

[DarrenS]

Well, according to some Canadian researchers Einstien's brain really was different physically from the norm.

[Epimetheus]

Brains change with age, and upon inspection I would wager that every brain differs from another. The brain makes new neural connections with every thought, with every sensory input, and through time, those changes add up to some remarkable differences.
A person that spends most of thier life doing math is of course going to have a better developed "math reasoning" part of the brain. Because that part is constantly being used, it is constantly growing, and changing.

[bbeaty]

In the case of physicist Richard Feynman, a large part of his genius was in refusing to follow the crowd, and in distrusting authorities and outward appearances. He says that he learned this during childhood from his father, who sold military uniforms.

"What had gone wrong for Feynman was that he had begun taking too seriously the idea that modern knowledge is a collective enterprise. Just trying to keep up with his field had suppressed his own sources of inspiration, which were in his own solitary questions and examinations. This, indeed, is the fate of most research in most disciplines, to make the smallest, least threatening, possible addition to "current knowledge." Anything more would be presumptuous, anything more might elicit the fatal "Don't you know what so-and-so is doing" from a Peer Reviewer, anything more might invite dismissal as some off-the-wall speculation -- not serious work. "

"So Feynman 'stopped trying to keep up with the scientific literature or compete with other theorists at their own game, and went back to his roots, comparing experiment with theory, making guesses that were all his own...' [p. 186]. Thus he became productive again, as he had been when he had just been working things out for himself, before becoming a famous physicist. " http://www.friesian.com/feynman.htm



"Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an
unhabitual way" - William James


"Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind." - Isaac Asimov


"The voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new horizons, but in seeing
with new eyes." - Marcel Proust


"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what
nobody else has thought." - Albert Szent-Gyoergi


"The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of
existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will
never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea." - Max Planck



In my own experience, some researchers hate the disturbing ideas, and want to cover up unknowns and make everything be "normal", while others seek out unknowns and LIKE the disturbing ideas. Which type of scientist tends to suppress their own creativity?

[Atreyu]

Originally posted by DarrenS
Well, according to some Canadian researchers Einstien's brain really was different physically from the norm.

They may not have been the first.

Unca Cecil has discussed Einsten's brain before, and in the last paragraph of that column (dated 1987), he mentions that some researchers at UC-Berkeley found that Einstein's brain had more glial cells when compared to a sampling of other brains.

[muttrox]

I stand by my first answer. Feynman may have been a genius, but it was not in large part due to his refusal to follow the crowd. Great quotes aside, most people who refuse to follow the crowd are not geniuses by any stretch.

[bbeaty]

Originally posted by muttrox I stand by my first answer. Feynman may have been a genius, but it was not in large part due to his refusal to follow the crowd. Great quotes aside, most people who refuse to follow the crowd are not geniuses by any stretch.

The important word here being "people." As opposed to "scientists."

If you or I refuse to follow the crowd, that's very different than when a theoretical physicist refuses to follow the crowd. Here's what fellow physicist and Nobel Prize winner Julian Schwinger said of Feynman: "An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum."


Feynman didn't test high on intelligence tests. Feynman himself was apparently delighted with this, since he cultivated an image of being just your average Joe. However, Feynman was an amateur scientist and math hobbyist as a kid, so he certainly wasn't just your average Joe.

Maybe that's another formula for genius: be a math freak during high school. Build ham transmitters from scratch, etc.

Another possible formula: become a voracious reader. Are there ANY famous geniuses who hated books and never read all that much?

[muttrox]

Scientists, schmientists. Most scientists who don't follow the crowd are nothing special.

IMO: There are just as many genius scientists who follow the beaten trail (with the exception of whatever innovation it is we consider them a genius for, of course) as don't.

IMO: Assumption 2: There are just as many scientists who don't follow the beaten trail who aren't geniuses of any kind.

Surely if it was as simple as thinking outside the box, it'd be really easy to produce minds of Feynman's calibre? I'm a big Feynman fan myself, but let's generalize too much from one isolated example. Reminds me of these bio's of CEO's and the lessons you're supposed to get out of it. Every single big biz person got to their position by a completely different path and personality, and it's the same with scientists. Just as many genius personalities as there are geniuses.

(BTW, it's just as valid to assume that honesty makes genius from Feynman's example. See Schwingers quote you cited.)

IMO of course!

[bbeaty]

Originally posted by muttrox
Scientists, schmientists. Most scientists who don't follow the crowd are nothing special.

I'm skeptical. Do you have some evidence for this? I'm under the impression that most scientists are quite conservative, and NOT following the crowd is rare, and is extremely frowned upon. I'm a great follower of "different drummer" scientists, so if you can give me a list of unsuccessful ones, I'd be grateful.


Another successful not-crowd-follower is T. Gold, Cornell Astrophysicist, with crazy ideas like thinking that pulsars are neutron stars, that human hearing involves an active amplifier, and that you can drill for oil under mountains (proposing that oil comes from deep methane rather than from decaying ancient sediments, see controversial book THE DEEP HOT BIOSPHERE.)

IMO: There are just as many genius scientists who follow the beaten trail (with the exception of whatever innovation it is we consider them a genius for, of course) as don't.

Uhhh... Aren't you agreeing with me? It sounds like you're saying that their ability to innovate is WHY we think of them as geniuses.

Let's put it this way: how many geniuses are recognized as such BECAUSE they strictly followed the beaten trail? And then how many geniuses are in the opposite situation?

Surely if it was as simple as thinking outside the box, it'd be really easy to produce minds of Feynman's calibre?

In my experience, thinking outside the box is not "simple" at all. On the contrary, it's extremely difficult. It takes years of practice in eliminating unperceived prejudices, as well as a firm decision to ignore what other people think of you.

But you're right that a scientist with crazy ideas doesn't automatically become successful. I'd say that safe, sane ideas will guarantee many small constant forward steps, while "crazy" ideas give you lots of failure but the occasional really huge success. Analogy: longshot betting. Big risk with big payoff, but lots of losses.

[muttrox]

We're gonna get this to GD eventually.

You asked if I had evidence for "Most scientists who don't follow the crowd are nothing special." I think the burden of proof is on you to show that every PhD and patent clerk with uncoventional ideas is an Einstein or Feynman.

Certainly I don't have a list of thousands of scientists correlated with their conservatism, nor do you, which is why I prefaced my comments with "IMO".

Simply naming T Gold gets you nowhere. Certainly there are many geniuses who are unconventional, and certainly there are those who are conventional. You've gone up to N=2, still not enough to make an argument from.

Thinking outside the box is very simple. Thinking good useful elegant scientific paradigm thoughts outside the box is very hard. Lunatics think outside the box, Cosmo Kramer and Rev Jim Ignotowski think outside the box, your random weird friend does also, it doesn't make them geniuses.

The original OP was "What is it about the brains of "Great Minds" (e.g. Newton, Einstein etc.) which makes the different from the majority of people?" Anecdotal after-the-fact examination of a select sample doesn't demonstrate anything. If you were going to do this right, you'd select 100 geniuses, score them on all kinds of attirubtes. Then you'd compare this to a sample of 10,000 "normals" and see what attributes are significantly different. Until you can get those 10,000 normals as a control group, you don't know nuttin' from looking at the 100.

I mentioned biz people before. I think the cases are exactly analogous. There's always someone who has read Lee Iococca's autobiography and thinks "the secret" is whatever he did. Until he reads biographies of the thousand people who failed with the same strategies, I'm not impressed.

P.S. Yes I know that Iggy is Harvard educated.

[bonzer]

Originally posted by bbeaty
Here's what fellow physicist and Nobel Prize winner Julian Schwinger said of Feynman: "An honest man, the outstanding intuitionist of our age, and a prime example of what may lie in store for anyone who dares to follow the beat of a different drum."

While I'd personally broadly agree with Schwinger's assessment, I'd put several caveats on it as a straightforward expression of Schwinger's opinion. The quote comes from the February 1989 Feynman memorial issue of Physics Today. By this stage of his career Schwinger was extremely isolated from the mainstream of theoretical physics, partly for institutional reasons, but mainly because his source theory refashioning of quantum field theory hadn't been well received (and hasn't been to this day). On top of that, this was the period in which he was unfashionably interested in cold fusion. As a result of all this, he'd taken to emphasising marginal figures in science and I'd read "beat of a different drum" as being an expression of this. By contrast, the rather persuasive interpretation of Mehra and Milton, his official biographers (Climbing the Mountain, Oxford, 2000), is that, at his height of his achievement, Schwinger was successful largely by being profoundly conservative in pushing accepted theories beyond what people had previously calculated. And knew it. Indeed, source theory itself can be seen as an extension of this strategy and was often regarded as such by Schwinger himself.
On less formal occasions than what was effectively the AIP's obituary Schwinger could, fairly or otherwise, be rather dismissive of Feynman's "intuition".
Of course, it's Mehra himself who's largely responsible for the quote being remembered; it gave him the title of his earlier biography of Feynman and duly closes that book.