what is the point of geniusness?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Agent@5, Jun 24, 2002.

  1. le coq Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    75
    What's the point of left-handedness?

    Genius is an outlier, as much as mental retardation. While the strict definition will always be colloquially defined, I would say that a genius is more commonly used to define people who are not completely socially retarded (autism) that have exceptional mental functioning. While autism has extraordinary abilities of recall and recitation, they are generally inept at true genius, i.e., synthesis of concepts and the advancement of knowledge. For those who can recite entire pieces after the first hearing on the piano, or those who can paint quite well, their performance tends to be more technically competent yet lacking in warmth and personality. This, I think, is the key to understanding and differentiating the qualities of just talent or skill and that of genius. At first we tend to look at geniuses as being of Einstein's and Erdos's ilk, and only later on in this introspection do we tend to acknowledge the ability of other accomplished persons such as musicians and artists as being geniuses. Jimi Hendrix, a personal favorite, may not have solved any physics problems but he has forever colored the landscape of popular music and will probably do so for as long as Western Civilization remains solvent, much as Shakespeare has remained a heavy hitter in the written word (in any language). Hendrix had the hands, as well as the innate musical ability, that sets him apart from the legions of pickers copying his style. Some people have a genius or charisma for leadership, and can automatically take the upper hand in any social setting. These types of people have no fear about public appearance and speaking, a task the average person fears almost as much as death.

    On emotional intelligence and logical intelligence, I find that the people who are generally "smart" and "rational" tend to have longer fuses, are less selfish (abstraction), and are less influenced by base emotions, which is what I would consider emotional intelligence: maximizing the good, while minimizing the effects of- and healthily acknowledging- negative feelings.

    In close, I would argue that genius or GI is going to be mostly genetically-based, though the expression and devolopment of this ability into a usable skill is going to be somewhat dependent on nurturance. A study published in JAMA correlates age of breastfeeding weaning with intelligence, for example.
     
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  3. fluxoid Registered Member

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    3
    I couldn't agree more with le coq! Very well put!

    fluxoid
     
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  5. nitetrax Registered Member

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    22
    I have to disagree with everything ...

    You said about autism, Le coq.

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    Now tell me if you can figure out why. Boone drew these when he was four years old.

    Do you know what he's doing here? And why is a 4YO kid doing it at all? This 4YO autistic kid has been taught nothing about ratios, so it's not "persistance of memory" or recitation or anything else a typical autistic savant would do.

    A researcher from the University of London's Institute of Psychiatry is coming here in two weeks. We live in Georgia. He's coming to test Boone. That's a long way to travel for a typical savant with exceptional memory, don't you think?

    And I've got your Jimi Hendrix covered too. This is Boone's 10YO brother, Dillon's webpage:
    http://www.geocities.com/flaremusic

    He's probably got Asperger's Syndrome, undiagnosed -- and I'll probably leave it that way since only his teachers have caught on so far.


    I hate to tell you this, but high-functioning autism is the evolution of intelligence.
     
    Last edited: Oct 21, 2002
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  7. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

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    4,467
    I have moderate autism and I have never been shy to say so. Socially I am a cripple but in fields of creativity and booksmarts I am better than most.

    Those who know commonly try to put me in the catagory of somebody that eats paste.
     
  8. nitetrax Registered Member

    Messages:
    22
    Clockwood,

    This is exactly the dilemma I have with having Dillon evaluated. Boone is often put in that category by people who think like
    le coq and fluxoid.

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    I see no reason to put Dillon through that.
     
  9. kmguru Staff Member

    Messages:
    11,757
    A shocking report from California last week suggested that a large increase in childhood autism in that state in the last 15 years is a true epidemic, not a statistical mirage inflated by artificial factors. If that judgment holds up after further analysis and research, it raises disturbing questions about just why this brain-distorting disease is on the rise and what can be done about it.
    .
    Experts have known for some time that there seemed to be a big upsurge in autism in California - a tripling in little more than a decade of the number of children with profound autism receiving services from the state. The state's Department of Developmental Services found that the number of children with "full spectrum" autism jumped from 2,778 in 1987 to 10,360 in 1998 and continued to rise thereafter. That was bad news indeed, given that autism is a crippling brain disorder which often leaves its victims unable to speak, rocking compulsively and unable to form social relationships or behave normally in everyday life.
    .
    Last week's report, commissioned by the California Legislature and conducted by researchers at the University of California at Davis, concluded that the upsurge could not be explained away by demographics, changes in the way autism is diagnosed or increased migration of autistic children into California. The question of whether the study looked hard enough for all possible explanations will need to be addressed when outside experts have a chance to review the findings.
    .
    California's self-examination has underscored the surprising lack of information about the prevalence of this relatively rare brain disorder elsewhere in America. Studies carried out by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recent years found that the number of cases in metropolitan Atlanta and in one New Jersey township were significantly higher than previous estimates of prevalence would suggest. But nobody knows for sure what the nationwide trends are. The CDC is financing studies in a dozen other states to determine the prevalence there.
    .
    Virtually all experts agree that genetics play an important role in autism, but genes don't propagate fast enough to cause a sharp change in a decade. Some experts believe that environmental factors can trigger autism in people with susceptible genes, with suspicion falling at various times on vaccines, infections, heavy metals and other environmental insults. The evidence, unfortunately, is sparse. It could take years of study to unravel the widening mystery of autism. A shocking report from California last week suggested that a large increase in childhood autism in that state in the last 15 years is a true epidemic, not a statistical mirage inflated by artificial factors. If that judgment holds up after further analysis and research, it raises disturbing questions about just why this brain-distorting disease is on the rise and what can be done about it.
    .
    Experts have known for some time that there seemed to be a big upsurge in autism in California - a tripling in little more than a decade of the number of children with profound autism receiving services from the state. The state's Department of Developmental Services found that the number of children with "full spectrum" autism jumped from 2,778 in 1987 to 10,360 in 1998 and continued to rise thereafter. That was bad news indeed, given that autism is a crippling brain disorder which often leaves its victims unable to speak, rocking compulsively and unable to form social relationships or behave normally in everyday life.
    .
    Last week's report, commissioned by the California Legislature and conducted by researchers at the University of California at Davis, concluded that the upsurge could not be explained away by demographics, changes in the way autism is diagnosed or increased migration of autistic children into California. The question of whether the study looked hard enough for all possible explanations will need to be addressed when outside experts have a chance to review the findings.
    .
    California's self-examination has underscored the surprising lack of information about the prevalence of this relatively rare brain disorder elsewhere in America. Studies carried out by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recent years found that the number of cases in metropolitan Atlanta and in one New Jersey township were significantly higher than previous estimates of prevalence would suggest. But nobody knows for sure what the nationwide trends are. The CDC is financing studies in a dozen other states to determine the prevalence there.
    .
    Virtually all experts agree that genetics play an important role in autism, but genes don't propagate fast enough to cause a sharp change in a decade. Some experts believe that environmental factors can trigger autism in people with susceptible genes, with suspicion falling at various times on vaccines, infections, heavy metals and other environmental insults. The evidence, unfortunately, is sparse. It could take years of study to unravel the widening mystery of autism. A shocking report from California last week suggested that a large increase in childhood autism in that state in the last 15 years is a true epidemic, not a statistical mirage inflated by artificial factors. If that judgment holds up after further analysis and research, it raises disturbing questions about just why this brain-distorting disease is on the rise and what can be done about it.
    .
    Experts have known for some time that there seemed to be a big upsurge in autism in California - a tripling in little more than a decade of the number of children with profound autism receiving services from the state. The state's Department of Developmental Services found that the number of children with "full spectrum" autism jumped from 2,778 in 1987 to 10,360 in 1998 and continued to rise thereafter. That was bad news indeed, given that autism is a crippling brain disorder which often leaves its victims unable to speak, rocking compulsively and unable to form social relationships or behave normally in everyday life.
    .
    Last week's report, commissioned by the California Legislature and conducted by researchers at the University of California at Davis, concluded that the upsurge could not be explained away by demographics, changes in the way autism is diagnosed or increased migration of autistic children into California. The question of whether the study looked hard enough for all possible explanations will need to be addressed when outside experts have a chance to review the findings.
    .
    California's self-examination has underscored the surprising lack of information about the prevalence of this relatively rare brain disorder elsewhere in America. Studies carried out by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in recent years found that the number of cases in metropolitan Atlanta
     
  10. nitetrax Registered Member

    Messages:
    22
    There's a theory about the rise in autism too ...

    http://www.aspergerinfo.org./wiredarticle.htm
    The Geek Syndrome


    Autism - and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome - is surging among the children of Silicon Valley. Are math-and-tech genes to blame?

    By Steve Silberman

    Nick is building a universe on his computer. He's already mapped out his first planet: an anvil-shaped world called Denthaim that is home to gnomes and gods, along with a three-gendered race known as kiman. As he tells me about his universe, Nick looks up at the ceiling, humming fragments of a melody over and over. "I'm thinking of making magic a form of quantum physics, but I haven't decided yet, actually," he explains. The music of his speech is pitched high, alternately poetic and pedantic - as if the soul of an Oxford don has been awkwardly reincarnated in the body of a chubby, rosy-cheeked boy from Silicon Valley. Nick is 11 years old.

    Nick's father is a software engineer, and his mother is a computer programmer. They've known that Nick was an unusual child for a long time. He's infatuated with fantasy novels, but he has a hard time reading people. Clearly bright and imaginative, he has no friends his own age. His inability to pick up on hidden agendas makes him easy prey to certain cruelties, as when some kids paid him a few dollars to wear a ridiculous outfit to school.

    One therapist suggested that Nick was suffering from an anxiety disorder. Another said he had a speech impediment. Then his mother read a book called Asperger's Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals. In it, psychologist Tony Attwood describes children who lack basic social and motor skills, seem unable to decode body language and sense the feelings of others, avoid eye contact, and frequently launch into monologues about narrowly defined - and often highly technical - interests. Even when very young, these children become obsessed with order, arranging their toys in a regimented fashion on the floor and flying into tantrums when their routines are disturbed. As teenagers, they're prone to getting into trouble with teachers and other figures of authority, partly because the subtle cues that define societal hierarchies are invisible to them.

    "I thought, 'That's Nick,'" his mother recalls.

    Asperger's syndrome is one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum - a milder form of the condition that afflicted Raymond Babbitt, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. In the taxonomy of autism, those with Asperger's syndrome have average - or even very high - IQs, while 70 percent of those with other autistic disorders suffer from mild to severe mental retardation. One of the estimated 450,000 people in the US living with autism, Nick is more fortunate than most. He can read, write, and speak. He'll be able to live and work on his own. Once he gets out of junior high hell, it's not hard to imagine Nick creating a niche for himself in all his exuberant strangeness. At the less fortunate end of the spectrum are what diagnosticians call "profoundly affected" children. If not forcibly engaged, these children spend their waking hours in trancelike states, staring at lights, rocking, making high-pitched squeaks, and flapping their hands, repetitively stimulating ("stimming") their miswired nervous systems.

    In one of the uncanny synchronicities of science, autism was first recognized on two continents nearly simultaneously. In 1943, a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner published a monograph outlining a curious set of behaviors he noticed in 11 children at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. A year later, a pediatrician in Vienna named Hans Asperger, who had never seen Kanner's work, published a paper describing four children who shared many of the same traits. Both Kanner and Asperger gave the condition the same name: autism - from the Greek word for self, autòs - because the children in their care seemed to withdraw into iron-walled universes of their own.

    Kanner went on to launch the field of child psychiatry in the US, while Asperger's clinic was destroyed by a shower of Allied bombs. Over the next 40 years, Kanner became widely known as the author of the canonical textbook in his field, in which he classified autism as a subset of childhood schizophrenia. Asperger was virtually ignored outside of Europe and died in 1980. The term Asperger syndrome wasn't coined until a year later, by UK psychologist Lorna Wing, and Asperger's original paper wasn't even translated into English until 1991. Wing built upon Asperger's intuition that even certain gifted children might also be autistic. She described the disorder as a continuum that "ranges from the most profoundly physically and mentally retarded person ... to the most able, highly intelligent person with social impairment in its subtlest form as his only disability. It overlaps with learning disabilities and shades into eccentric normality."

    Asperger's notion of a continuum that embraces both smart, geeky kids like Nick and those with so-called classic or profound autism has been accepted by the medical establishment only in the last decade. Like most distinctions in the world of childhood developmental disorders, the line between classic autism and Asperger's syndrome is hazy, shifting with the state of diagnostic opinion. Autism was added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, but Asperger's syndrome wasn't included as a separate disorder until the fourth edition in 1994. The taxonomy is further complicated by the fact that few if any people who have Asperger's syndrome will exhibit all of the behaviors listed in the DSM-IV. (The syn in syndrome derives from the same root as the syn in synchronicity - the word means that certain symptoms tend to cluster together, but all need not be present to make the diagnosis.) Though Asperger's syndrome is less disabling than "low-functioning" forms of autism, kids who have it suffer difficulties in the same areas as classically autistic children do: social interactions, motor skills, sensory processing, and a tendency toward repetitive behavior.

    In the last 20 years, significant advances have been made in developing methods of behavioral training that help autistic children find ways to communicate. These techniques, however, require prodigious amounts of persistence, time, money, and love. Though more than half a century has passed since Kanner and Asperger first gave a name to autism, there is still no known cause, no miracle drug, and no cure.

    And now, something dark and unsettling is happening in Silicon Valley.

    In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids diagnosed with autism throughout California. In August 1993, there were 4,911 cases of so-called level-one autism logged in the state's Department of Developmental Services client-management system. This figure doesn't include kids with Asperger's syndrome, like Nick, but only those who have received a diagnosis of classic autism. In the mid-'90s, this caseload started spiraling up. In 1999, the number of clients was more than double what it had been six years earlier. Then the curve started spiking. By July 2001, there were 15,441 clients in the DDS database. Now there are more than seven new cases of level-one autism - 85 percent of them children - entering the system every day.

    Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."
    The article continues ...


    and
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/baron-cohen_pr.html
     
  11. pumpkinsaren'torange Registered Senior Member

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    2,159
    the point is: to know that there is no actual word like "genuisness".

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  12. nitetrax Registered Member

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    Refuse to be a slave to grammar!

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  13. pumpkinsaren'torange Registered Senior Member

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  14. Clockwood You Forgot Poland Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,467
    your Bob Dole?

    Or newt gingrich spelling potato with an "e" on national television
     

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