In my research for a book on geniuses and their personalities, I am discovering a lot of similar themes that run through their lives. In a few paragraphs, I’ll try to share why they have existential crises and how they struggle to find purpose. Gifted children are usually introverted and have mental processing skills compatible …
Almost all of the people who have generated works that qualified them as a “genius” in mathematics, science or technology were observed to be gifted at an early age, came to school having learned much of what other children learn at a later age. Their grades, especially in those subjects were usually much higher than …
Many decisions in life are fairly straight forward. You’re leaving for work and your neighbor’s car is stuck in snow. You put your car in park, help push the car out of the snowdrift and proceed to work. However, there are many times in life when decision-making has a vital impact on how your life …
Olympic Stadium: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Summer Olympics 2016 We humans are extremely tribal. During his global expeditions, Charles Darwin observed behavior in which individuals sacrificed self-interest to tribal benefit. It occurred to him that the innate biological propensity to pursue self-interest might be partially curtailed by a biological inclination toward cooperation. In The Descent …
While Einstein and Tesla were each gifted with a very high intelligence potential from their genetic inheritance, they were able to maximize this gift through what I call their eureka! addiction. This is the shot of dopamine that hits the joy center of the brain when you solve a problem. Archimedes of Syracuse demonstrated this sensation …
How can I train my brain to be hyper-intelligent/logical like Einstein/Tesla? Read More »
I’m in the middle of writing a book on the personalities of genius, so I’ll answer this question using an excerpt from the chapter on Einstein in that book. Most of the anecdotes pertaining to Einstein’s absent-mindedness derive from his ability to focus so intently on a particular problem that he became entirely unaware of …
Actually, the most common error in understanding scientific or statistical information is conceptual rather than arithmetic. It’s the confusion between correlation and causation. Here is a real-life example in which educators (who should know better) made a colossal blunder. A few years ago, a school board discovered that there was a strong correlation between the …
There are many great mathematical concepts that are relevant to life, but it’s often difficult to help people understand why they are relevant. However, I have found that most people agree on the relevance of money, so I will provide one example that gets the attention of most people, and that is exponential growth. Einstein …
Yogi Berra 1925–2015 First, some Brief Historical Reflections The concept of “genius” has evolved throughout the history of human inquiry. In the ancient world, intellectual brilliance was associated with the prominent philosophers, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as mathematicians such as Thales and Archimedes. This trend to associate genius with philosophy and science …
A substantial level of subject knowledge is almost always necessary to make breakthroughs in a particular academic pursuit. However, there is a danger in being immersed in the current theories and ideas of a scientific community, that resemble the problems the emerge in groupthink. Discussions in a groupthink context are found to “homogenize” the ideas …
