Quote: (04-19-2015 02:31 PM)Monolithic Wrote:
I remember reading something like most of the time we use 40% of our brain power - probably far less, that's probably what we use in an exam or a high stress assessment - but a genius is somehow able to harness 80, 90%.
This is pseudoscience. I give you Edward Fredkin of MIT:
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“There is a popular view that the human mind is this fantastic thing that most of us are just barely using – 5 or 10 percent of its capacity. If we could only unleash the whole human mind and all its powers, we’d be supermen. Now my notion is that for an ordinary person to get along in society in a conventional way requires about 110 percent of the capacity of the human mind, causing breakdowns and troubles of various sorts. Basically, the human mind is not most like a god or most like a computer. It’s most like the mind of a chimpanzee and most of what’s there isn’t designed for living in high society but for getting along in the jungle or out in the fields.”
Fredkin was one of the authorities on human and artificial intelligence. This quote comes from
Machines Who Think. Use this as a reset for how to think about the human mind and what it's capable of.
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I've been reading a lot about Leonardo da Vinci, recently and it seemed he really did have to work at it. We have this idea of genius as something fluid, natural, easy - but it seems this is a misnomer.
My Macquarie Dictionary defines genius as--
1. Exceptional natural capacity for creative and original conceptions; the highest level of mental ability
2. A person having such capacity.
We have the idea of genius as fluid, natural, easy because
that's exactly what it is. It is inbuilt, and by definition an aberration from human norms because it's exceptional.
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How can a person unleash his true potential? It's something I've been fascinated with for a long time and I though you folk could maybe help.
And it's here I think we get to the nub of the problem, which is equating the "gen" in "genius" with "general" competence, ability, and so on - suggesting that a genius is one of these people who are incredibly adept and intelligent in all areas of their life and has optimised their entire existence. I'm reminded of John Travolta's bullshit movie "Phenomenon" where a brain malfunction causes him to start absorbing languages in 20 minutes, sensing earthquakes ahead of time, building new energy sources, having telekinesis, and so on.
High intelligence does not work that way. There are many different types of intelligence, and typically they don't overlap. The easiest example of this is the idiot savant: the guy who can count 2,458 toothpicks spilled on a floor with a glance but who cannot tie up his own shoelaces. Social intelligence does not equal an effective memory does not equal the ability to write evocatively does not equal the ability to solve mathematical equations at a glance.
The phrase "unleashing our true potential" always makes me sigh. It's Tony Robbins stuff, the sort of shit that gets sold to people who feel unhappy with their lives or seriously envious of others who seem to have or do more. It plays into the demand that we get what we want without effort, without mastery, just with a magic pill. Queen unconsciously hit on the great underlying obsession of the West when they wrote their mid-eighties lyric:
I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now. Patience, study, and incremental improvement are not things that modern Western society wants to hear.
"Unleash your true potential" can be a poisonous phrase. It suggests you're not already living up to your "real" potential. First question being -- what
is your potential? Can you put a number on it? How do you define it?
The answer is as given in the underrated movie
Man of Steel: "
the only way to know how strong you can be is by testing your limits."
In other words: constant practice, constantly taking on stuff that seems hard. There's no magic pill, no meditative practice, no shortcut to achieving skill or doing the best you can. It is constant work, constantly challenging yourself, constantly feeling that you are up against an unsolveable problem, constantly improving albeit gradually and in increments.
Don't be too quick to hand out the title "genius" to others. You can easily fall victim to the Halo Effect. This is a psychological blind spot we all have akin to the durability of first impressions: if someone is very competent in one field that we observe them in, we tend to assume that person is very competent in all other fields of their life as well. Genius can easily be disguised as focused practice by someone average in a narrow field.
If you're interested in the art of
learning to do something, which is the real heart of genius, look up a long-recommended book here on ROK:
The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. He may well represent the closest to the idea of genius as being discussed: he was a preadolescent chess master (the subject of the film
Searching for Bobby Fisher), but threw it all away at 19 and went on to become a Tai Chi world champion in about three or four years. His book is full of seriously good insights on how to learn, and learn effectively.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm