Perspective

Recently at work I overheard someone (a friend) saying they thought genius-level intelligence must be pretty similar to schizophrenia. Of course, I wasn't part of the conversation so I just held my tongue ... not like I would have known how to answer at the time. Okay, I could have said that it's not like that - well, based on what I've heard of schizophrenia anyway, not any direct experience.

But just to be official here:

1 : a psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with the environment, by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life, and by disintegration of personality expressed as disorder of feeling, thought (as delusions), perception (as hallucinations), and behavior

Okay, genius-level intelligence people can have a tendency to live in their own head, but hallucinations? Not a chance.

Actually, I've been trying to think of a good metaphor for a couple of days now ... the closest I can come is this quote: "It's like ... a whirlwind in my mind." You're always thinking, there is never a time when ideas aren't popping into your head. It's not like voices in your head, there is only you in there, but you're living in a tornado with everything flying around.

You know, when I was a little kid they said I'd never amount to anything. I could never make up my mind. No, it's not being indecisive really, you just see too many possibilities. Choosing between one or two options is pretty easy, but even a "simple" question has hundreds of possibilities. If I choose this, then that will happen, if I choose this other choice then another thing and quickly the possibilities branch out into a whole landscape of alternatives. "What would you like for lunch?" If I choose a hot dog, is that with mustard and onions or chili and cheese? A hamburger - ketchup and pickles perhaps? Tacos? All great choices, and no reason to pick one over the other.

But it isn't all that bad. What it is, is you are considering 100 possibilities as once. So when some challenging question really does show up you have a dozen ways to try to find the answer while a normal person is lucky to have one.

So it is that when I answer a question here I'll usually have several answers. They're all good, correct answers, but they aren't quite the same and you might prefer one or another depending. I would be doing you a disservice if I pretend there's only one answer.

So, did you recognize that quote. Probably before your time, but maybe you saw the movie at some point ... it's the character of Duncan McLeod, aka "The Highlander", describing "the prize". A well-adjusted genius just lets his mind work by itself and grabs ideas as they come at him. He doesn't try to "work" at it because there's too much going on at once, he'd have to fight too hard against everything else in his head to do that. Rather he just let's the answer come to him and then goes on.

I guess I'm starting to repeat myself, I can't really put it in any other terms. It's just there, you're not trying to work on any particular thing. You have this massively parallel computer doing millions of things at once, and you try to skim off the parts you can use as they come by.

Yes, there is something else I'm trying to say here. It doesn't really "just happen", but it feels like it does. There's really lots of stuff going on in the background without you trying to think about any of it. Trust yourself. Despite what they said about me all those years ago, I think I've done pretty good. Okay, I'm no Thomas Edison or Bill Gates - but I don't want to be either.

Honestly, I have to wonder what it would be like to be "average". I imagine that we're really the same, that the difference is I just let my brain do its thing whereas "normal people" try to control it. Okay, maybe it happens faster in my head, there is no way to actually control it when so much is going on - the best you can do is try to direct it. A "normal" person with less going on might believe they can control it - but really they're just blocking out the other 99% and therefore missing so much more ...

Did I answer the question? Absolutely, maybe, and sort of. There doesn't have to be one answer. Life is like that.