Some musings on Genius...

[Squareinthecircle]

From an article I wrote:

It Takes a Genius To Understand Genius, Right?

The Green Manalishi With The Two Prong Crown

We call something genius when it exceeds our ability to conceive. Smart is something maybe we could have caught up with in time, but genius is that realm that is out of reach, the unknown. And that mysterious element perseveres, no matter how many geniuses we have around to try and explain it to us. We try to learn from them if we can, but people fear what they don’t understand, making genius guilty by association. The term ‘evil genius’ is well known right? I mean ‘evil fireman’ isn’t a trope is it? ‘Evil square dancer’? So what gives?

Every era produces its share of cleverness, a crop of smarty-pants types, but genius comes at its own pace, often not even recognized. Consider it a transmitter that few have the receiver to. It’s probably the intersection of genetics and experience. A mind of this kind is rarely born into peace. It can be influenced into being when the perceived demands of life itself require a higher synthesis — where survival equals insight rather than repetition.

And how does one arrive at such a designation? By appointment? A high score on a test? In the definition I usually recognize there has to be the capacity for original thought as well as the courage to take it to the world. So one part magic and one part big brass ones. The ‘Genius’ score on an IQ test only suggests potential, aptitude. One still has the burden of proof ahead of them: take your original thought and help change the world. The designation then arrives from recognition, handing the luxury/responsibility of coronation to the people.

Two primary shapes emerge. The first is narrow genius — surgical, precise, able to move through a single channel of understanding with devastating accuracy. A hot-knife-through-butter. The second is integrative genius, the form that dares to unite domains and cross thresholds between sciences, arts, and moral vision. Narrow genius creates the instrument; integrative genius creates the orchestra. Both are necessary. Both attempt to fill the same vacuum: to bring order to excess and excess to order.

Wisdom, when present, acts as the stabilizer of genius. It prevents brilliance from collapsing into self-destruction or spectacle. Yet wisdom itself often arrives later — an artifact of survival, earned through the failures that genius almost guarantees. Many of these failures are only failures of timing, that gap of recognition that always accompanies emerging concepts that challenge what is known or adds to the landscape. The wise are those who have lived long enough to accept their present ability to convince.

So are we any smarter? Probably not, but maybe we can look at this stuff a little differently. Dispelling some of the myths and coming to an understanding of the mysterious phenomenon of genius could do us all some good, before we again mistake the next potential fellow that could have moved us all forward as evil and burn him at the stake.





https://kasspert.wordpress.com/2025/11/06/it-takes-a-genius-to-understand-genius-or-does-it/

[rgray222]

There is a school of thought slowly emerging over the years that believes all genius is some form of abnormality. It is not uncommon for exceptional intellect, genius, to coexist with mild or even severe psychopathology. Albert Einstein couldn't spell with a dam and struggled mightily with language. Thomas Edison was considered difficult and lazy. He dropped out of school and then won over 1000 patents. Elon Musk even stated, "The amount I torture myself is next level." Most people know that he suffers from Asperger's syndrome. While I'm sure there are some very happy and well-adjusted geniuses, it generally does not go with the turf.

Autistic Genius: Is Autism Associated with Higher Intelligence?

There have been theories about underlying connections between autism and intelligence for years. The stereotypes of the autistic genius were cemented in our collective psyche with the 80’s classic movie Rain Main, a story inspired by the real-life autistic genius Kim Peek. But the connection goes a lot deeper than that, and the history of that connection goes a lot further back too. In fact, some modern psychologists theorize that illustrious scientists such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein might have been autistic.

A handful of years ago, Cambridge University undertook a study to explore the concept of the autistic genius. The study looked at almost half a million people and uncovered intriguing evidence that autistic traits (although not necessarily full-blown autism) are more common among people involved in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields… careers historically requiring quite a lot of brainpower.

This doesn’t prove any connection between autism and intelligence, let alone a causative one connecting autism with high IQ, but other research has gone further.

Another study that same year uncovered a likely genetic link between autism and intelligence, even the kind of extreme intelligence that we could call genius. That study, led by professors from Ohio State University in collaboration with the Battelle Center for Mathematical Medicine and the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital concluded that families that were more likely to produce autistic children were also more likely to produce geniuses.

https://www.appliedbehavioranalysisedu.org/is-autism-associated-with-higher-intelligence/

[Squareinthecircle]

Looking at the landscape today I agree that the presence of the intelligent is abnormal. This is a reframing, a negative one that humans always get around to eventually. And perhaps that's the right way to go- we probably won't know what fits like Cinderella's slipper until we give it a go. In the end it's difficult to argue with success, and where it's concerned the previous rules may not apply. Clearly genius rewrites definitions, it isn't bound by them.