April 27, 2010 • 35 mins
When you hear the word 'genius,' names like Einstein and Mozart probably spring to mind. Defining what makes them geniuses, however, is much more complicated. Josh and Chuck discuss the many theories about genius in this episode.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot com. Ahoy, and welcome to
the love boat. I'm Julie, your cruise director, with me
as always as Isaac, your bartender. How are you doing?
(00:23):
I just did the little double gun the double guns
looking good. You're a genius. Thank you for coming up
with that. Thank you. You're a genius to chuck, thank you.
Do you want to know how we can callague to
each other geniuses without cracking up? I'm cracking up on
the inside, but sure, because we have no idea what
constitutes a genius, do we? Right? We like to throw
(00:46):
the word around, as you were pointing out earlier. Oh,
he's a genius, or he's a socialist, story's a fascist,
he's a genius. You should see the bathroom he designed.
He's genius. You know. Yeah, it definitely is a word
that gets to run a lot. But the way that
we use the word genius now, actually uh is kind
(01:07):
of a throwback to its original meaning in the Greco
Roman era, the word genius when everyone was wrestling. Yeah,
like you could be a genius at wrestling. Really? What
it what it? What it described was somebody's um natural
enthusiasm inclination towards certain activities, not just your your abilities,
(01:30):
but you know how revved up you were, so so
somebody who was pretty good at bathroom design would have
been considered a genius at bathroom designs. Like the word vintage,
people always thinks vintage just means old, But I think
vintage specifically means like characterized by that person's best work,
like a tailor, their best five pairs of pants they made.
(01:53):
I think so I might just learned that just now
I might be wrong thanks to you. Are we picking
up Jerry's laugh? Because we're in a yeah, two ft
by two ft space right now? This room is not genius. No,
it stinks of volatile organic compounds. We should say what.
They actually moved us for one day into an even
smaller office like the sign Felds. Remember when Castanza they
(02:15):
kept moving him around because they didn't like him, and
he were eventually going to end up in a storage
closet like he did. Yeah, I think we've arrived there.
I'm sure it's lovely. It's just not for podcasting. Well,
I'm a little lightheaded. So if this, if this goes oddly,
that's why it's the paints and the airplane glue. That's
airplane glue. Is genius, it is. Yeah, we were talking
(02:37):
about genius for some reason. Where are we? Yeah? Because
this is about genius. Okay, Oh so yeah, I was
saying the original idea of genius was enthusiasm, throwing yourself
into something where you were into right. Um. And then
thanks to a guy named Francis Galton, who he was
(02:58):
a pretty smart guy himself, but he had a long
history of just kind of missing the big picture with
his ideas, he came up with eugenics. Sure, he was
the first one to start attributing um genius to intellect.
He kind of narrowed it a little more, and eventually
this led to our idea of genius being quantifiable e g.
(03:23):
Through i Q tests or g which we'll get to. Nice. Nice, Yeah, Yeah,
I don't. I'll just go ahead and say I don't
know how quantifiable it is. Well, it's not. And there's
actually two pretty big reasons why quantifying genius is virtually
impossible at least with our current understanding of the mind.
(03:43):
And they are they are uh Well, the first one
is pretty obvious. Genius is a very subjective thing. Um.
Some people think it's like an i Q higher than
one forty or one seventy five I've heard, which you know,
that's just a smart quantifying, quantify quantifier And I'm clearly
(04:06):
no genius. And the other thing is, like you said,
it's a it's a big picture thing. In science and
medical inquiries, that kind of thing is all about the detail.
So it's really hard to like analyze and study. It's
like studying intercessory prayer. How do you study that? How
do you quantify happiness or prayer or genius? You know? Um,
(04:27):
our colleague Tracy V. Wilson, I like how she put it. Yeah,
she did a good job just kind of getting rid
of the crud that's often associated with genius. And and
just if you have like crazy hair and a big
mustache and you know math, you're a genius, do you
get rid of all that? And uh, for the for
the purposes of this podcast, will adopt her description, right,
(04:49):
which was that a genius is an extraordinarily intelligent person
who breaks new ground with discoveries, inventions, or works of art. Right,
Because you can't just be a really smart person, you
have to do something with it to truly be a genius.
That's what makes a genius. It's not just intelligence, it's
intelligence with creative energy. Well, the creative part is huge,
(05:11):
and we'll get to that, but it's um She goes
on to say, and I agree that they usually will
change the way we look at the world, or at
least the way people in whatever field they're in look
at their field. They make a difference or difference makers.
Have you ever heard of a guy named William James
sidis Now, he reportedly had the highest um i Q
(05:32):
in history. I'm higher than ask Maryland of Parade. As
a matter of fact, yes, asked Maryland says, hers is
two thirty. She claims the highest ever measured. This guy
supposedly was to fifty. Yeah. Um, let me let me
keep you more than a q a at the end
of Parade magazine. Sadly, no really, Okay, So let me
let me give you a little background on sittence. Okay, uh.
(05:54):
He was eighteen months old when he started reading the
New York Times. Okay, so far so uh. At two
he taught himself Latin. Three, he taught himself Greek. Uh.
He could speak more than forty languages by the time
he was an adult. Uh. He graduated kum laude at
sixteen from Harvard and became the youngest professor ever in
(06:17):
the history of Rice University. I imagine he was like
seventeen or something. Who's a young guy, and then within
I think about a year at Rice, he dropped his
position and spent the rest of his life working like
menial jobs. He went from job to job just doing
normal labor. So he's not a genius though he would
(06:39):
not qualify as a genius by this definition. You have
a two ft Q. You're clearly a prodigy. You're an
incredibly brilliant person. But if you don't contribute to humanity,
what are you worth? You're like a Buddhist monk who
goes and spends your life meditating in a cave. We
curse you, sorry, but but that's that's the point. And
(07:00):
geniuses are incredibly valuable in society. I don't remember what
podcast it was in what we were talking about, um
mauthis and the idea that the more the larger the
world population, the more incidents of the births of geniuses happens. Right, Uh,
and then the more geniuses you have, the further along
society is helped by leaps and bounds. Right, Well, if
(07:22):
you think MENSA is a quantifier, then there's about three
million geniuses in the US. But I don't buy that,
right because MENSA standards, UM, they accept people who well
it's not just like you, but standardized intelligence tests. Um,
they accept people who score within the top two percent
of those. So if you just extend that with basic
(07:47):
math to percent of the population in the US is
like six million people, right, and then thirty million worldwide.
But I don't buy it anyway, because they don't even
count in the creative element. You know, Gina Davis is
in mensa that everyone always says that. Anytime you hear
about MENSA, people go, you know, Gina Davis, even I
think we had this conversation you brought up Ronny Harlan
and yeah, the the Pirate movie they made. Let's play
(08:09):
the clip, shall we? No? Okay we won't. Um, just
get back to she just spit bologny out of her mouth.
She shouldn't be eating bologny anyway. I did her a favor.
You're right, so you wanna talk about the brain is
that where we're going. Let's let's get to it. I mean,
like if if you're going to go in search your
genius with or without Leonard Nimoy, Um, you are going
(08:32):
to start looking in the brain, right. I love that
show the best. It's awesome, so super seventies. Um, so
let's go into the brain. Clearly we're gonna find our
answers here, right, Maybe no, no, but we should talk
about it. The cerebral cortex, as we all know, is
the largest and outermost part of your brain, and this
is where the higher functions like thought and reasoning happen
(08:54):
as opposed to lower functions like just basic survival that
kind of thing, right, And the basic stuff is found
in your brain stem, which is how Mike the chicken
was able to live for so long. That's right. Uh,
the cortex is cerebral cortex is divided into lobes, and
within those lobes are regions that help you handle specific tasks.
(09:15):
And uh, we do know it has a big impact
on how we think, but it's a little tricky to
study because one reason that Tracy point out, which I
thought was really valid, is to get an m R
I done, you're lying there in a tube. They can't
actively study how your brain operates on a day to
day basis, why you're functioning, which is the great failing
(09:35):
of the wonder machine. Yeah, I bet you they can
solve that one day. Oh they will definitely, And by
they I mean people other than you, me or Jerry.
It's some genius perhaps precisely. But she did point out
a cool study from cal Irvine in two thousand four
and they they did pinpoint that the volume of gray
matter in parts of the cerebral cortex has a greater
(09:56):
impact on your overall intelligence than how law your brain is.
Because we talked about that in the Einstein thing, right, Yeah,
the gray matter, h man, I know, the white matter transmits.
The gray matter is like a problem solving. I believe
in white matter is used to transmit information. But Einstein's
brain was smaller than your average bear's brain. It was.
(10:19):
Remember we talked about what happened to his brain and
um when what they finally found. The big distinction they
found in his brain that was abnormal was that his
prietal lobe was almost missing this fissure within it that
most people have. So he had a very narrow fissure
and they also wider, and so had a big prietal lobe,
(10:43):
which is responsible for century and put, but it also
handles things like mathematics. Unsurprisingly enough, so he had a
big prival lobe with a small fishure in between it,
which they theorized means or meant that his his pridal
lobe could communicate with itself more a fishly more effectively,
and a genius was born by Josh Youers. He proved
(11:06):
that Adams Adams exist. He figured out that light behaves
as a particle and a wave. He developed the theory
of relativity and the famous equation equals mc squared by six.
Where were you and by that age? I wish I
could remember, Chuck me too. You were you were? Were
you following fish around or something like that? Wire panic, Yeah, yeah,
(11:27):
I was. I think I was living in New Jersey
at the time, but I goofed around enough in Athens.
I wasn't coming up with theories of relativity, nor was
I know I was thrown a lot of darts. Some
other interesting aspects of the brain um is that it
actually develops. It goes from thicker to thinner as we age,
So it goes from undeveloped to the cerebral cortex thickening,
(11:52):
and then after adolescence or maybe during adolescence it begins
to thin, right, And what the what a study in
Nature I think two thousand and six found was that
UM kids whose brains thick and faster in youth tended
to have higher i Q s. And the reason that
this could be significant is that they we we tend
(12:14):
to find intelligence is an inherited trait or what appears
to be an inherited trait. So this is a physical
example of how uh intelligence could be inherited through organic
structure of the brain. So that's intelligence, but that's not genius.
But we can't even we But at the same time,
we can't even really describe intelligence. Like consider, let's let's
(12:37):
talk about the i Q tests, all right. The are
our big um arousal for the i Q test began
in the in the mid nineteen twenties when a psychologist
named Katherine Morris Cox published UM The Early Mental Traits
of Three Geniuses, and basically she went back from and
it was exhaustive. She used like fift sources and studied
(13:01):
the the work the traits, the UM contributions of three
hundred actually three hundred and one. Oun't know why she
called it three hundred, but three hundred one Great minds
and then basically gave them an i Q test based
on this uh and came up in. The highest rated
one was Johann Gurta, very nice thank you. Did you
(13:23):
know he had a theory of evolution like seventy five
years before Darwin? Yeah, and he came up with human chemistry.
He was a smart guy. But he cocked in at
number one, at two fifty or to ten. Sorry, not
bad at all. But as this book came out and
became you know, um, the public became aware of it,
it was like, hey, we didn't know about these i
(13:44):
Q tests. Is awesome, we can start measuring how smart
people are. Ironically, the earliest i Q tests were used
to measure mental handicaps and children. Yeah, but then they
started figuring out, hey, you can use this for gifted
kids to find the gifted kids as well, and the
Stanford psychologist U mixed with the first guy who came
(14:04):
up with the i Q test, bin At. The two
together formed the Stanford Binet IQ tests that we used today.
Have you ever had yours done I refused to I
never will. I took one at one point, but it
wasn't like the standard test. It was just some hackneyed version,
and I scored really high. That's the reason I know
that it was pretty much BS because I'm kind of smart,
(14:26):
but not anything like Uh I scored. I didn't. I
don't put any stock into it, but chuck, I guess
that kind of underscores um. A really good criticism of
i Q tests is that they may be standardized, they
may be widely accepted, but we aren't percent sure that
they measure everything. So I wouldn't even say we're sure
(14:47):
they measure everything. The measure mathematical aptitude, language abilities, um,
what else? Uh? Well, yeah, sure, along with memory and
spatial ability. Okay, but is that every Well No, in
any standardized test, the word itself kind of says it all.
It's standardized, right. No standardized tests that you give different
(15:08):
people can really tell you the same thing about all
those different people. No, I can't. And I mean the
very questions that the test test asks. Wow, these pain
themes are really getting on top of me. Uh, the
very questions that these tests ask um actually can be biased? Um?
I heard, I heard of I think an S A T.
(15:30):
I hope it wasn't an S A T question. It's
a little too easy. But um, some sort of standardized
tests asked the question which of these places would you
go to buy milk? And it was like grocery store,
convenience store, dairy or something like that. You can buy
milk at all those Josh, well you can. But I mean,
like for kids out in the sticks where there isn't
a grocery store, but there's a convenience store, that's where
(15:53):
they go to buy their milk. But they missed the
question because the answer was supposed to be grocery store.
It's a it's a pretty dumb examp ample, but it's accurate.
I mean, the very people who write the tests are
biased in some ways, and i Q tests have been
shown to skew against um certain ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Yeah, sure,
(16:14):
same say, any standardized test does so boo boo to.
That is what I say. And the other thing, too,
is is that geniuses don't, like people can generally consider genius,
don't necessarily score well in these tests anyway. No, that's true.
To throw it out the door, I say, Um, I
will say that just while we might as well give
a little information on the IQ test. The standard score
(16:38):
is a hundred with the deviation of sixteen, So the
average score of the general population will be between eighty
four and one sixteen. Right, but no one knows what
over that indicates a genius. A widely accepted number is
one forty. But somebody just made that up at some
point in time. Well, like I said, I read one.
(16:59):
And it's not to say that a really high score
doesn't mean you're a genius, like it could mean you're
a genius. The i Q test is capturing something, probably,
but it's not capturing the whole picture, I think is
the point we're trying to make right here, right, not
at all. So let's leave the i Q test in
our dust. Okay, maybe we should go with Steinberg's I'm sorry,
(17:21):
Sternberg's try arch theory. I kind of like that. Yeah,
there are some competing explanations of what components there are
to intellect, right, Yeah, Sternberg said that he thought it um.
Human intelligence includes a few things plus the try arc.
Creative intelligence, so the ability to generate new ideas, interesting ideas,
(17:43):
analytical intelligence so you can examine facts, draw conclusions that's
pretty good and practical intelligence, which means you can fit
into your environment, which like kind of yeah, But I disagree, man.
I went back and reread that a couple of times,
and you know, Racy points out that there are a
lot of critics of you know, um practical intelligences. Everybody
(18:06):
has that to a certain degree, that does that really
count to towards being a genius? I disagree. I've met
some people who well, I mean, think about it. It's
the classic example of somebody who's very book smart, but
you should never let walk down an alley by themselves
and by himself for her. So many many people like that. Sure,
and then there's you know, the super street smart um
(18:28):
ratso Rizzo, you know, who can make his way him
Jersey Midnight cowboy here exactly, who who can make his
way in the world, but you know, would probably do
horribly on an IQ test. The very fact that there
there are those different um polar extremes means to me
that there's something to that that is an aspect of intellect, right,
(18:51):
And you remember I mentioned g earlier. I didn't want
to leave people hanging there. But the i Q test
they have come up with a unit and they call
that unit for intelligence g right, and that's actually i
Q tests are under a larger umbrella of what's called psychometrics,
which is basically the study of an attempt of the
measurement of intelligence. Right yeah. Um. Back in the seventies,
(19:15):
there is a statistician named Carl your skog you're a
skog weird, um, and he figured out that you. He
figured out a way to measure intelligence that basically lead
to the appearance of three different kinds of intelligence. While
we're on theories of intelligence, right, okay, he came up
(19:35):
with um fluid intelligence, right, yes, okay, And this is
basically coming up with new ideas on your own to
solve problems. Crystallized intelligence is UM understanding already established techniques
of problem solving and being able to identify which technique
will best work to solve a particular problem. And then
(19:58):
there's visual spatial reasoning, which is UM kind of an
aptitude at creating mental images in your head to solve problems.
It's very important part of mathematics. Actually, So we have
your Scogg's ideas, we've got um, what's your guy's name, Sternberg's.
Let's talk about Howard Gardner, and he has the feel
(20:21):
good we're all geniuses kind of theory, right, Yeah, multiple intelligence.
He thinks there's seven types linguistic, logical, mathematic, musical, bodily, kinetic,
I'm sorry, kinesthetic, spatial, which is always in there, uh intrapersonal,
and interpersonal. But that's, like you said, it's a little
too uh broad, is what a lot of critics say.
(20:44):
There's always a critic of each of these. It seems
like one person comes out with something and people say, well,
I think that sounds good, and then another part of
the camp says, no, I don't agree at all. Isn't
that the way with everything they chook? Pretty much like
mountain dew code read is the greatest drink ever. No,
it's not gular, Mountain Dews way better. Good point um.
And then I guess another hallmark of intelligence, something that
(21:07):
can be measured, is geniuses aptitude toward social awkwardness. Yeah,
there's a lot of them. Are generally known as quirky,
odd characters makeup friends John Nash did. Yeah, absolutely. Einstein
was sort of a wacky guy. Yeah, he liked to
stick his tongue out, he was zany. Yeah, that people
(21:28):
always pointed that picture. So you look how crazy he was.
Got anyone else? Well, let's talk about studying that. Yes, Josh,
a Purdue uh study perdue you saw four and twenty
three students gifted students and suggested that they were more
susceptible to being bullied. So they're little mammy panbies, I
(21:49):
guess a little bit. Also, there was a study UM
out of was it Stanford That it was a twenty
year study actually UM that ended in ninety that actually
gave UM children aptitude tests and personal adjustment tests and
found that there was a negative correlation between i Q
(22:10):
and social adjustment. Right, So basically it's it's quantifying what
we all already know that if you're a smart kid,
you're going to eat mud several times in your life. Yes,
I never ate mud. That's why my IQ score was
bs uh. Well, one thing that they geniuses have in common,
I think we can all agree on that you need
(22:30):
to have to be a genius and not just smart.
This creative intelligence and high waisted pants. Creative intelligence and
high waisted pants. This is where it all comes together
to me, right, Yeah, I mean when we talked about
this earlier, like you can't. It's not good enough to
just be smart. Then you're just a really intelligent person.
That leap between intelligence and genius is bridged by creative prowess. Yeah,
(22:55):
that's how you break new ground. Right, Why did you
point it me? Because promise was a horrible I like that,
thanks man. The thing is, though, Josher's is that, uh,
this is another thing that you can't quantify and study necessarily,
So once again it's hard to kind of pinpoint creativity
and imagination. Although they researchers do think that creative people
(23:16):
have less latent inhibition, and I completely agree with that, right. Yeah,
we've talked about that with the Thinking cap episodes where
schizophrenics have low latent inhibition and they take this extra
stimuli and their brain constructs solution hallucinations out of it.
The idea was that creative geniuses, who who have low
latent inhibition take this additional stimuli and use it in
(23:39):
novel creative ways. Yeah, that's one way of looking at it.
There's also um a quantifiable method or a couple of
them to determine how much um creativity a genius has
lent to the world. Right, It isn't that article you
that time article you sent me. I thought that was
kind of lame. Explain but that this is the level
(24:02):
that we're at to try to survey a genius. Right, Yeah,
what is was this the guy who wrote the book
Simmons Simonton. Yeah, he yeh, Dave dean Keith almost said,
David Keith, what a great actor. Dean Keith. Simonton wrote
a book called a Genius one on one Creators, Leaders, Prodigies,
and he came up with a little notion that add
(24:24):
up the number of times someone has been in a publication,
has been cited in a professional publication in the field,
or the number of times their composer's work maybe has
been performed or recorded. And I just think that's stupid.
I think the I think there's one that's worse, and
that's counting encyclopedia references. That's awful, because I think you
(24:47):
can be a genius who was undiscovered. You may have
like written a thousand great compositions of music that you
never show the world. No, then the same things just
holding menial jobs. It's that's virtually the same thing as
holding that stuff in your head. You have to share
it with the world. To be a genius or else
(25:09):
you're just some smart schmoke. I don't know if I
agree with that. Well, but I don't know if I
do either. I think you can still be a genius
in and of yourself. You can be a genius in
a vacuum, but not considered a genius by the populace
who wants to own you, right, you know, I guess
that's a difference. The difference I see in the the
guy who wrote, or gal maybe who wrote uh several
(25:31):
great compositions and that were never discovered, and the guy
who just got the menial jobs is he didn't seem
to have any creative genius going on. Yeah, he learn
he was book learning, book learning. Um. Although if you
are trying to come up with a measure of you know,
creative genius, then counting Encyclopedia entries does work. I mean,
(25:53):
it's a way to go, right, Malcolm Gladwell should talk
about him. No, he is of the belief that, along
with Galton I think you're talking about with eugenics, that
practice is really what leads to genius, hard work and
practice and practice and practice, which I don't know about
that either. What do you think I told you I'm
(26:16):
not talking about Gladwell. Oh really all right? Moving on then?
Uh and there was well, fine, forget glad Well. Let's
talk about Ericsson Andrews Erickson as a rival. They call
him a friendly rival, which I thought was kind of
funny of the Simonson guy I was talking about their
their um conflicts end in tickle fights, right, It kind
(26:37):
of reminded me of the good Will hunting like Robin
Williams and that other guy. Right, there were friendly rivals.
But he is popular for the tenure rule, which has
been around for a long time. But that's a notion
that it takes ten years or ten thousand hours of
dedicated practice to master a complex endeavor, and Gladwell is
a believer in that. So chuck um. There's a guy
(26:58):
named David Gallantson too, who's kind of come up with
and at least a qualification of creative genius, Right he didn't, Well,
doesn't that kind of underscore like where the field of
genius or intelligence research is right now that we we've
just pooh pooed absolutely every sec it's all over the place. Yeah,
(27:21):
but yeah, say what he says, because I want to
prove that he says that there's actually now he says
there's three kinds. Originally said there's there's two types of innovators.
There's conceptual innovators who think in bold, dramatic steps, which
Einstein would fall into. And do you know that among
very smart people, he's considered kind of a flash in
the pan. Yeah, think about it. He did everything that
(27:43):
he was going to do by age six. After that
he just went around canoeing with Walter math Ou as
Walter math Ou same thing. Um. But then there's experimental
innovators and they learned through trial and error over This
would be the Thomas Edison's of the genius world um.
And then everybody started shouting at David Gallerson. Then he
(28:05):
said shut up, shut up, and went back to the
drawing board and came up with the idea that genius
can also be expressed in a continuum over time, throughout
a long lifetime of great contribution and work. That's my
problem with it. What everybody shouted at him. And he
went back and was like can you go? He was like, well,
you can either get everything done really early, or you
(28:25):
can produce all your great work later in life. And
they were like, but what about people do it all
their life. He went, well, yeah, you can do that too.
It's like so lame. So should we just list out
some some geniuses throughout history that people generally consider genius
and didn't like this list either, But we don't like
anything about this one doing George Washington's number forty five,
and here's number one. It starts at number two, and
(28:46):
if one's Einstein, I'm gonna literally eat this list. One
was Einstein. I didn't copy pastel of them. We have
geniuses like Tesla's three, um Da Vinci number two, Isaac Newton,
number four, Hawking of course, Michelangelo, Archimedes, Josh is eating
his list. Warren Buffett is on there. Not bad. Sure
(29:10):
they had to round it out and make it as
approachable that all the readers they could Aristotle, Picasso, Neils
Or Jefferson, Plato, Churchill, Benjamin Franklin. I think I'd agree
with that one. Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, Michael Faraday, Chuck Darwin,
Renee de Descartes or is it desplaine deplane des plane,
(29:33):
Gary Cass casper Off and I think Bobby Fisher was
on their both chess champions. I don't know, they're they're
considered geniuses. It's all subjective that it is completely subjective.
I think we're gonna end this with this observation. Genius
is like pornography. It's impossible to fully define, but we
know when we see it, right, Chuck, who who was that? Uh?
(29:56):
Suitor Bruce Suitor, Bruce Jenner. If you want to learn
more about genius, I think there's more than just this article.
There's a bunch of good genius articles on the site
at how stuffworks dot com. And there's also a bunch
of articles on the people that we've mentioned, because we're
doing a whole new series on painters. Right, yeah, we
are at Cosso and Van Gogh. You can type it
(30:19):
in the handy search bar. Of course, since I said that,
it means it's time for listener and mail Chuck first
before we do anything. Before anything, yes, let's uh, we
get we should probably plug our new Facebook page. We
were on Facebook for a while. This is nothing new
to us, but we streamlined our stuff. We had a
(30:42):
fan page and a regular page and it was also strange,
so we consolidated and we're actually active on Facebook now.
Yes we are, um, so, yes we are. We have
a our brand new Facebook page is stuff you should know.
Just type that into the handy search part Facebook or
I think it's Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know.
(31:04):
Maybe I'm not positive. Fine, And also, buddy, we're tweeting.
You are tweeting, tweeted twice. Yeah, and your tweeting, I know,
I feel like a modern child. All right. If you
want to follow us on Twitter, we have our Twitter
name as s y s K podcast right, yeah, so
that would be at and the how they do it. Yeah,
(31:25):
look at you guys, y ESK podcast and we'll be
saying funny things as well as uh sending out links
to cool stuff. And you know we're active now, that
is true. So check us out, will you yes on
on the show? Yes? All right, Josh, listener mail. For
goodness sakes, listener mail, I'm gonna read a couple of
quickies here from a young boy named Sam and from
(31:47):
a trucker name and net. And it took us to task.
Oh no, over what I will read it first? And
that says u Hi chucking Josh. I am a oh
for the road truck driver and love your podcast over
the road. That's what she says. I would love for
you guys to come along with me into the twenty
(32:08):
one century. Regarding truck drivers, I've been driving for almost
thirteen years, and guess what, I'm a woman. In fact,
I have two sons. Y'all's age when you talk about
truck drivers is in the McDonald's podcast. You always talk
about big, burly guys. Well, I may be big and
probably more surly than Burley, but I'm definitely not a guy.
Don't forget us, lady drivers, love love love the show,
(32:31):
so and how could we forget? I mean large Marge
was a huge factor. Yeah, J's big adventure and that
was a net. That was a net, and I told
her that I would read this as our penance a net.
I'm making the blow your horn signed for the tractor trailer.
So if you're hearing this right now to your horn, awesome.
I hope she didn't just cause an accident. This is
(32:51):
from Sam, and Sam is just another a cute little kid,
and I like these. I saw that that's a caps. Yeah, Hi,
Chuck and Josh. I'm Sam blank be because I'm using
your last name substitute. I'm eleven years old. You guys
helped me get through many boring tasks like dog poop
pick up my least favorite chore. I think it's mine too.
Actually that in the cat box I just stopped as
(33:12):
an adult, I don't pick up. You just don't go
into the yard. I just watch where I'm walking in
the yard. Okay. I think the funniest podcast was the
Twinkie podcast. You guys make me laugh in my bed
when I listen. Also in the supermarket, so he listens
when he goes to sleep and when he's grocery shopping,
or I guess when his mom's grocery shopping, or dad
(33:34):
or two dad's. I don't know. Kids today are pretty independent. Yeah,
you're right. I think you guys are the funniest people
in the world. I have a few suggestions, like what
dues cat Got your Tongue mean? And other phrases means
improper English? I do. Also, Riot Control really cracked me up.
(33:55):
Does an eleven year old kid know what riot control is?
And legos? So he wants to know about I Got
your Tongue? Legos and riot control and trading cards and football?
So could you please please read my shout out on
the air, And here's my shout out, and this is
an all caps. I told you mom, I would get
my email read on air. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
(34:17):
So that's from Sam w And he said, I thought
Josh looked like Chuck and Chuck looked like Josh, but
that changed when I saw your pictures on the site. Yeah,
we get that a lot. Yeah, we're well, not that
I look like you and you look like me, but
that we look like different people. Okay, that's always a case.
With the voice. I'm much uglier than you would think.
That is not true. You are a lovely, handsome man.
Thank you all right? Well, thanks Sam, keep on shopping
(34:40):
and the net keep on trucking. If you have an
interesting email that you want to roll the dice and
see if we'll read it on the air. Cost you
nothing in this digital age, you can send us an
electronic mail. Just address it to stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com. M For more on this and
(35:02):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the how stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from House Stuff Works dot com. Ahoy, and welcome to
the love boat. I'm Julie, your cruise director, with me
as always as Isaac, your bartender. How are you doing?
(00:23):
I just did the little double gun the double guns
looking good. You're a genius. Thank you for coming up
with that. Thank you. You're a genius to chuck, thank you.
Do you want to know how we can callague to
each other geniuses without cracking up? I'm cracking up on
the inside, but sure, because we have no idea what
constitutes a genius, do we? Right? We like to throw
(00:46):
the word around, as you were pointing out earlier. Oh,
he's a genius, or he's a socialist, story's a fascist,
he's a genius. You should see the bathroom he designed.
He's genius. You know. Yeah, it definitely is a word
that gets to run a lot. But the way that
we use the word genius now, actually uh is kind
(01:07):
of a throwback to its original meaning in the Greco
Roman era, the word genius when everyone was wrestling. Yeah,
like you could be a genius at wrestling. Really? What
it what it? What it described was somebody's um natural
enthusiasm inclination towards certain activities, not just your your abilities,
(01:30):
but you know how revved up you were, so so
somebody who was pretty good at bathroom design would have
been considered a genius at bathroom designs. Like the word vintage,
people always thinks vintage just means old, But I think
vintage specifically means like characterized by that person's best work,
like a tailor, their best five pairs of pants they made.
(01:53):
I think so I might just learned that just now
I might be wrong thanks to you. Are we picking
up Jerry's laugh? Because we're in a yeah, two ft
by two ft space right now? This room is not genius. No,
it stinks of volatile organic compounds. We should say what.
They actually moved us for one day into an even
smaller office like the sign Felds. Remember when Castanza they
(02:15):
kept moving him around because they didn't like him, and
he were eventually going to end up in a storage
closet like he did. Yeah, I think we've arrived there.
I'm sure it's lovely. It's just not for podcasting. Well,
I'm a little lightheaded. So if this, if this goes oddly,
that's why it's the paints and the airplane glue. That's
airplane glue. Is genius, it is. Yeah, we were talking
(02:37):
about genius for some reason. Where are we? Yeah? Because
this is about genius. Okay, Oh so yeah, I was
saying the original idea of genius was enthusiasm, throwing yourself
into something where you were into right. Um. And then
thanks to a guy named Francis Galton, who he was
(02:58):
a pretty smart guy himself, but he had a long
history of just kind of missing the big picture with
his ideas, he came up with eugenics. Sure, he was
the first one to start attributing um genius to intellect.
He kind of narrowed it a little more, and eventually
this led to our idea of genius being quantifiable e g.
(03:23):
Through i Q tests or g which we'll get to. Nice. Nice, Yeah, Yeah,
I don't. I'll just go ahead and say I don't
know how quantifiable it is. Well, it's not. And there's
actually two pretty big reasons why quantifying genius is virtually
impossible at least with our current understanding of the mind.
(03:43):
And they are they are uh Well, the first one
is pretty obvious. Genius is a very subjective thing. Um.
Some people think it's like an i Q higher than
one forty or one seventy five I've heard, which you know,
that's just a smart quantifying, quantify quantifier And I'm clearly
(04:06):
no genius. And the other thing is, like you said,
it's a it's a big picture thing. In science and
medical inquiries, that kind of thing is all about the detail.
So it's really hard to like analyze and study. It's
like studying intercessory prayer. How do you study that? How
do you quantify happiness or prayer or genius? You know? Um,
(04:27):
our colleague Tracy V. Wilson, I like how she put it. Yeah,
she did a good job just kind of getting rid
of the crud that's often associated with genius. And and
just if you have like crazy hair and a big
mustache and you know math, you're a genius, do you
get rid of all that? And uh, for the for
the purposes of this podcast, will adopt her description, right,
(04:49):
which was that a genius is an extraordinarily intelligent person
who breaks new ground with discoveries, inventions, or works of art. Right,
Because you can't just be a really smart person, you
have to do something with it to truly be a genius.
That's what makes a genius. It's not just intelligence, it's
intelligence with creative energy. Well, the creative part is huge,
(05:11):
and we'll get to that, but it's um She goes
on to say, and I agree that they usually will
change the way we look at the world, or at
least the way people in whatever field they're in look
at their field. They make a difference or difference makers.
Have you ever heard of a guy named William James
sidis Now, he reportedly had the highest um i Q
(05:32):
in history. I'm higher than ask Maryland of Parade. As
a matter of fact, yes, asked Maryland says, hers is
two thirty. She claims the highest ever measured. This guy
supposedly was to fifty. Yeah. Um, let me let me
keep you more than a q a at the end
of Parade magazine. Sadly, no really, Okay, So let me
let me give you a little background on sittence. Okay, uh.
(05:54):
He was eighteen months old when he started reading the
New York Times. Okay, so far so uh. At two
he taught himself Latin. Three, he taught himself Greek. Uh.
He could speak more than forty languages by the time
he was an adult. Uh. He graduated kum laude at
sixteen from Harvard and became the youngest professor ever in
(06:17):
the history of Rice University. I imagine he was like
seventeen or something. Who's a young guy, and then within
I think about a year at Rice, he dropped his
position and spent the rest of his life working like
menial jobs. He went from job to job just doing
normal labor. So he's not a genius though he would
(06:39):
not qualify as a genius by this definition. You have
a two ft Q. You're clearly a prodigy. You're an
incredibly brilliant person. But if you don't contribute to humanity,
what are you worth? You're like a Buddhist monk who
goes and spends your life meditating in a cave. We
curse you, sorry, but but that's that's the point. And
(07:00):
geniuses are incredibly valuable in society. I don't remember what
podcast it was in what we were talking about, um
mauthis and the idea that the more the larger the
world population, the more incidents of the births of geniuses happens. Right, Uh,
and then the more geniuses you have, the further along
society is helped by leaps and bounds. Right, Well, if
(07:22):
you think MENSA is a quantifier, then there's about three
million geniuses in the US. But I don't buy that,
right because MENSA standards, UM, they accept people who well
it's not just like you, but standardized intelligence tests. Um,
they accept people who score within the top two percent
of those. So if you just extend that with basic
(07:47):
math to percent of the population in the US is
like six million people, right, and then thirty million worldwide.
But I don't buy it anyway, because they don't even
count in the creative element. You know, Gina Davis is
in mensa that everyone always says that. Anytime you hear
about MENSA, people go, you know, Gina Davis, even I
think we had this conversation you brought up Ronny Harlan
and yeah, the the Pirate movie they made. Let's play
(08:09):
the clip, shall we? No? Okay we won't. Um, just
get back to she just spit bologny out of her mouth.
She shouldn't be eating bologny anyway. I did her a favor.
You're right, so you wanna talk about the brain is
that where we're going. Let's let's get to it. I mean,
like if if you're going to go in search your
genius with or without Leonard Nimoy, Um, you are going
(08:32):
to start looking in the brain, right. I love that
show the best. It's awesome, so super seventies. Um, so
let's go into the brain. Clearly we're gonna find our
answers here, right, Maybe no, no, but we should talk
about it. The cerebral cortex, as we all know, is
the largest and outermost part of your brain, and this
is where the higher functions like thought and reasoning happen
(08:54):
as opposed to lower functions like just basic survival that
kind of thing, right, And the basic stuff is found
in your brain stem, which is how Mike the chicken
was able to live for so long. That's right. Uh,
the cortex is cerebral cortex is divided into lobes, and
within those lobes are regions that help you handle specific tasks.
(09:15):
And uh, we do know it has a big impact
on how we think, but it's a little tricky to
study because one reason that Tracy point out, which I
thought was really valid, is to get an m R
I done, you're lying there in a tube. They can't
actively study how your brain operates on a day to
day basis, why you're functioning, which is the great failing
(09:35):
of the wonder machine. Yeah, I bet you they can
solve that one day. Oh they will definitely, And by
they I mean people other than you, me or Jerry.
It's some genius perhaps precisely. But she did point out
a cool study from cal Irvine in two thousand four
and they they did pinpoint that the volume of gray
matter in parts of the cerebral cortex has a greater
(09:56):
impact on your overall intelligence than how law your brain is.
Because we talked about that in the Einstein thing, right, Yeah,
the gray matter, h man, I know, the white matter transmits.
The gray matter is like a problem solving. I believe
in white matter is used to transmit information. But Einstein's
brain was smaller than your average bear's brain. It was.
(10:19):
Remember we talked about what happened to his brain and
um when what they finally found. The big distinction they
found in his brain that was abnormal was that his
prietal lobe was almost missing this fissure within it that
most people have. So he had a very narrow fissure
and they also wider, and so had a big prietal lobe,
(10:43):
which is responsible for century and put, but it also
handles things like mathematics. Unsurprisingly enough, so he had a
big prival lobe with a small fishure in between it,
which they theorized means or meant that his his pridal
lobe could communicate with itself more a fishly more effectively,
and a genius was born by Josh Youers. He proved
(11:06):
that Adams Adams exist. He figured out that light behaves
as a particle and a wave. He developed the theory
of relativity and the famous equation equals mc squared by six.
Where were you and by that age? I wish I
could remember, Chuck me too. You were you were? Were
you following fish around or something like that? Wire panic, Yeah, yeah,
(11:27):
I was. I think I was living in New Jersey
at the time, but I goofed around enough in Athens.
I wasn't coming up with theories of relativity, nor was
I know I was thrown a lot of darts. Some
other interesting aspects of the brain um is that it
actually develops. It goes from thicker to thinner as we age,
So it goes from undeveloped to the cerebral cortex thickening,
(11:52):
and then after adolescence or maybe during adolescence it begins
to thin, right, And what the what a study in
Nature I think two thousand and six found was that
UM kids whose brains thick and faster in youth tended
to have higher i Q s. And the reason that
this could be significant is that they we we tend
(12:14):
to find intelligence is an inherited trait or what appears
to be an inherited trait. So this is a physical
example of how uh intelligence could be inherited through organic
structure of the brain. So that's intelligence, but that's not genius.
But we can't even we But at the same time,
we can't even really describe intelligence. Like consider, let's let's
(12:37):
talk about the i Q tests, all right. The are
our big um arousal for the i Q test began
in the in the mid nineteen twenties when a psychologist
named Katherine Morris Cox published UM The Early Mental Traits
of Three Geniuses, and basically she went back from and
it was exhaustive. She used like fift sources and studied
(13:01):
the the work the traits, the UM contributions of three
hundred actually three hundred and one. Oun't know why she
called it three hundred, but three hundred one Great minds
and then basically gave them an i Q test based
on this uh and came up in. The highest rated
one was Johann Gurta, very nice thank you. Did you
(13:23):
know he had a theory of evolution like seventy five
years before Darwin? Yeah, and he came up with human chemistry.
He was a smart guy. But he cocked in at
number one, at two fifty or to ten. Sorry, not
bad at all. But as this book came out and
became you know, um, the public became aware of it,
it was like, hey, we didn't know about these i
(13:44):
Q tests. Is awesome, we can start measuring how smart
people are. Ironically, the earliest i Q tests were used
to measure mental handicaps and children. Yeah, but then they
started figuring out, hey, you can use this for gifted
kids to find the gifted kids as well, and the
Stanford psychologist U mixed with the first guy who came
(14:04):
up with the i Q test, bin At. The two
together formed the Stanford Binet IQ tests that we used today.
Have you ever had yours done I refused to I
never will. I took one at one point, but it
wasn't like the standard test. It was just some hackneyed version,
and I scored really high. That's the reason I know
that it was pretty much BS because I'm kind of smart,
(14:26):
but not anything like Uh I scored. I didn't. I
don't put any stock into it, but chuck, I guess
that kind of underscores um. A really good criticism of
i Q tests is that they may be standardized, they
may be widely accepted, but we aren't percent sure that
they measure everything. So I wouldn't even say we're sure
(14:47):
they measure everything. The measure mathematical aptitude, language abilities, um,
what else? Uh? Well, yeah, sure, along with memory and
spatial ability. Okay, but is that every Well No, in
any standardized test, the word itself kind of says it all.
It's standardized, right. No standardized tests that you give different
(15:08):
people can really tell you the same thing about all
those different people. No, I can't. And I mean the
very questions that the test test asks. Wow, these pain
themes are really getting on top of me. Uh, the
very questions that these tests ask um actually can be biased? Um?
I heard, I heard of I think an S A T.
(15:30):
I hope it wasn't an S A T question. It's
a little too easy. But um, some sort of standardized
tests asked the question which of these places would you
go to buy milk? And it was like grocery store,
convenience store, dairy or something like that. You can buy
milk at all those Josh, well you can. But I mean,
like for kids out in the sticks where there isn't
a grocery store, but there's a convenience store, that's where
(15:53):
they go to buy their milk. But they missed the
question because the answer was supposed to be grocery store.
It's a it's a pretty dumb examp ample, but it's accurate.
I mean, the very people who write the tests are
biased in some ways, and i Q tests have been
shown to skew against um certain ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Yeah, sure,
(16:14):
same say, any standardized test does so boo boo to.
That is what I say. And the other thing, too,
is is that geniuses don't, like people can generally consider genius,
don't necessarily score well in these tests anyway. No, that's true.
To throw it out the door, I say, Um, I
will say that just while we might as well give
a little information on the IQ test. The standard score
(16:38):
is a hundred with the deviation of sixteen, So the
average score of the general population will be between eighty
four and one sixteen. Right, but no one knows what
over that indicates a genius. A widely accepted number is
one forty. But somebody just made that up at some
point in time. Well, like I said, I read one.
(16:59):
And it's not to say that a really high score
doesn't mean you're a genius, like it could mean you're
a genius. The i Q test is capturing something, probably,
but it's not capturing the whole picture, I think is
the point we're trying to make right here, right, not
at all. So let's leave the i Q test in
our dust. Okay, maybe we should go with Steinberg's I'm sorry,
(17:21):
Sternberg's try arch theory. I kind of like that. Yeah,
there are some competing explanations of what components there are
to intellect, right, Yeah, Sternberg said that he thought it um.
Human intelligence includes a few things plus the try arc.
Creative intelligence, so the ability to generate new ideas, interesting ideas,
(17:43):
analytical intelligence so you can examine facts, draw conclusions that's
pretty good and practical intelligence, which means you can fit
into your environment, which like kind of yeah, But I disagree, man.
I went back and reread that a couple of times,
and you know, Racy points out that there are a
lot of critics of you know, um practical intelligences. Everybody
(18:06):
has that to a certain degree, that does that really
count to towards being a genius? I disagree. I've met
some people who well, I mean, think about it. It's
the classic example of somebody who's very book smart, but
you should never let walk down an alley by themselves
and by himself for her. So many many people like that. Sure,
and then there's you know, the super street smart um
(18:28):
ratso Rizzo, you know, who can make his way him
Jersey Midnight cowboy here exactly, who who can make his
way in the world, but you know, would probably do
horribly on an IQ test. The very fact that there
there are those different um polar extremes means to me
that there's something to that that is an aspect of intellect, right,
(18:51):
And you remember I mentioned g earlier. I didn't want
to leave people hanging there. But the i Q test
they have come up with a unit and they call
that unit for intelligence g right, and that's actually i
Q tests are under a larger umbrella of what's called psychometrics,
which is basically the study of an attempt of the
measurement of intelligence. Right yeah. Um. Back in the seventies,
(19:15):
there is a statistician named Carl your skog you're a
skog weird, um, and he figured out that you. He
figured out a way to measure intelligence that basically lead
to the appearance of three different kinds of intelligence. While
we're on theories of intelligence, right, okay, he came up
(19:35):
with um fluid intelligence, right, yes, okay, And this is
basically coming up with new ideas on your own to
solve problems. Crystallized intelligence is UM understanding already established techniques
of problem solving and being able to identify which technique
will best work to solve a particular problem. And then
(19:58):
there's visual spatial reasoning, which is UM kind of an
aptitude at creating mental images in your head to solve problems.
It's very important part of mathematics. Actually, So we have
your Scogg's ideas, we've got um, what's your guy's name, Sternberg's.
Let's talk about Howard Gardner, and he has the feel
(20:21):
good we're all geniuses kind of theory, right, Yeah, multiple intelligence.
He thinks there's seven types linguistic, logical, mathematic, musical, bodily, kinetic,
I'm sorry, kinesthetic, spatial, which is always in there, uh intrapersonal,
and interpersonal. But that's, like you said, it's a little
too uh broad, is what a lot of critics say.
(20:44):
There's always a critic of each of these. It seems
like one person comes out with something and people say, well,
I think that sounds good, and then another part of
the camp says, no, I don't agree at all. Isn't
that the way with everything they chook? Pretty much like
mountain dew code read is the greatest drink ever. No,
it's not gular, Mountain Dews way better. Good point um.
And then I guess another hallmark of intelligence, something that
(21:07):
can be measured, is geniuses aptitude toward social awkwardness. Yeah,
there's a lot of them. Are generally known as quirky,
odd characters makeup friends John Nash did. Yeah, absolutely. Einstein
was sort of a wacky guy. Yeah, he liked to
stick his tongue out, he was zany. Yeah, that people
(21:28):
always pointed that picture. So you look how crazy he was.
Got anyone else? Well, let's talk about studying that. Yes, Josh,
a Purdue uh study perdue you saw four and twenty
three students gifted students and suggested that they were more
susceptible to being bullied. So they're little mammy panbies, I
(21:49):
guess a little bit. Also, there was a study UM
out of was it Stanford That it was a twenty
year study actually UM that ended in ninety that actually
gave UM children aptitude tests and personal adjustment tests and
found that there was a negative correlation between i Q
(22:10):
and social adjustment. Right, So basically it's it's quantifying what
we all already know that if you're a smart kid,
you're going to eat mud several times in your life. Yes,
I never ate mud. That's why my IQ score was
bs uh. Well, one thing that they geniuses have in common,
I think we can all agree on that you need
(22:30):
to have to be a genius and not just smart.
This creative intelligence and high waisted pants. Creative intelligence and
high waisted pants. This is where it all comes together
to me, right, Yeah, I mean when we talked about
this earlier, like you can't. It's not good enough to
just be smart. Then you're just a really intelligent person.
That leap between intelligence and genius is bridged by creative prowess. Yeah,
(22:55):
that's how you break new ground. Right, Why did you
point it me? Because promise was a horrible I like that,
thanks man. The thing is, though, Josher's is that, uh,
this is another thing that you can't quantify and study necessarily,
So once again it's hard to kind of pinpoint creativity
and imagination. Although they researchers do think that creative people
(23:16):
have less latent inhibition, and I completely agree with that, right. Yeah,
we've talked about that with the Thinking cap episodes where
schizophrenics have low latent inhibition and they take this extra
stimuli and their brain constructs solution hallucinations out of it.
The idea was that creative geniuses, who who have low
latent inhibition take this additional stimuli and use it in
(23:39):
novel creative ways. Yeah, that's one way of looking at it.
There's also um a quantifiable method or a couple of
them to determine how much um creativity a genius has
lent to the world. Right, It isn't that article you
that time article you sent me. I thought that was
kind of lame. Explain but that this is the level
(24:02):
that we're at to try to survey a genius. Right, Yeah,
what is was this the guy who wrote the book
Simmons Simonton. Yeah, he yeh, Dave dean Keith almost said,
David Keith, what a great actor. Dean Keith. Simonton wrote
a book called a Genius one on one Creators, Leaders, Prodigies,
and he came up with a little notion that add
(24:24):
up the number of times someone has been in a publication,
has been cited in a professional publication in the field,
or the number of times their composer's work maybe has
been performed or recorded. And I just think that's stupid.
I think the I think there's one that's worse, and
that's counting encyclopedia references. That's awful, because I think you
(24:47):
can be a genius who was undiscovered. You may have
like written a thousand great compositions of music that you
never show the world. No, then the same things just
holding menial jobs. It's that's virtually the same thing as
holding that stuff in your head. You have to share
it with the world. To be a genius or else
(25:09):
you're just some smart schmoke. I don't know if I
agree with that. Well, but I don't know if I
do either. I think you can still be a genius
in and of yourself. You can be a genius in
a vacuum, but not considered a genius by the populace
who wants to own you, right, you know, I guess
that's a difference. The difference I see in the the
guy who wrote, or gal maybe who wrote uh several
(25:31):
great compositions and that were never discovered, and the guy
who just got the menial jobs is he didn't seem
to have any creative genius going on. Yeah, he learn
he was book learning, book learning. Um. Although if you
are trying to come up with a measure of you know,
creative genius, then counting Encyclopedia entries does work. I mean,
(25:53):
it's a way to go, right, Malcolm Gladwell should talk
about him. No, he is of the belief that, along
with Galton I think you're talking about with eugenics, that
practice is really what leads to genius, hard work and
practice and practice and practice, which I don't know about
that either. What do you think I told you I'm
(26:16):
not talking about Gladwell. Oh really all right? Moving on then?
Uh and there was well, fine, forget glad Well. Let's
talk about Ericsson Andrews Erickson as a rival. They call
him a friendly rival, which I thought was kind of
funny of the Simonson guy I was talking about their
their um conflicts end in tickle fights, right, It kind
(26:37):
of reminded me of the good Will hunting like Robin
Williams and that other guy. Right, there were friendly rivals.
But he is popular for the tenure rule, which has
been around for a long time. But that's a notion
that it takes ten years or ten thousand hours of
dedicated practice to master a complex endeavor, and Gladwell is
a believer in that. So chuck um. There's a guy
(26:58):
named David Gallantson too, who's kind of come up with
and at least a qualification of creative genius, Right he didn't, Well,
doesn't that kind of underscore like where the field of
genius or intelligence research is right now that we we've
just pooh pooed absolutely every sec it's all over the place. Yeah,
(27:21):
but yeah, say what he says, because I want to
prove that he says that there's actually now he says
there's three kinds. Originally said there's there's two types of innovators.
There's conceptual innovators who think in bold, dramatic steps, which
Einstein would fall into. And do you know that among
very smart people, he's considered kind of a flash in
the pan. Yeah, think about it. He did everything that
(27:43):
he was going to do by age six. After that
he just went around canoeing with Walter math Ou as
Walter math Ou same thing. Um. But then there's experimental
innovators and they learned through trial and error over This
would be the Thomas Edison's of the genius world um.
And then everybody started shouting at David Gallerson. Then he
(28:05):
said shut up, shut up, and went back to the
drawing board and came up with the idea that genius
can also be expressed in a continuum over time, throughout
a long lifetime of great contribution and work. That's my
problem with it. What everybody shouted at him. And he
went back and was like can you go? He was like, well,
you can either get everything done really early, or you
(28:25):
can produce all your great work later in life. And
they were like, but what about people do it all
their life. He went, well, yeah, you can do that too.
It's like so lame. So should we just list out
some some geniuses throughout history that people generally consider genius
and didn't like this list either, But we don't like
anything about this one doing George Washington's number forty five,
and here's number one. It starts at number two, and
(28:46):
if one's Einstein, I'm gonna literally eat this list. One
was Einstein. I didn't copy pastel of them. We have
geniuses like Tesla's three, um Da Vinci number two, Isaac Newton,
number four, Hawking of course, Michelangelo, Archimedes, Josh is eating
his list. Warren Buffett is on there. Not bad. Sure
(29:10):
they had to round it out and make it as
approachable that all the readers they could Aristotle, Picasso, Neils
Or Jefferson, Plato, Churchill, Benjamin Franklin. I think I'd agree
with that one. Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, Michael Faraday, Chuck Darwin,
Renee de Descartes or is it desplaine deplane des plane,
(29:33):
Gary Cass casper Off and I think Bobby Fisher was
on their both chess champions. I don't know, they're they're
considered geniuses. It's all subjective that it is completely subjective.
I think we're gonna end this with this observation. Genius
is like pornography. It's impossible to fully define, but we
know when we see it, right, Chuck, who who was that? Uh?
(29:56):
Suitor Bruce Suitor, Bruce Jenner. If you want to learn
more about genius, I think there's more than just this article.
There's a bunch of good genius articles on the site
at how stuffworks dot com. And there's also a bunch
of articles on the people that we've mentioned, because we're
doing a whole new series on painters. Right, yeah, we
are at Cosso and Van Gogh. You can type it
(30:19):
in the handy search bar. Of course, since I said that,
it means it's time for listener and mail Chuck first
before we do anything. Before anything, yes, let's uh, we
get we should probably plug our new Facebook page. We
were on Facebook for a while. This is nothing new
to us, but we streamlined our stuff. We had a
(30:42):
fan page and a regular page and it was also strange,
so we consolidated and we're actually active on Facebook now.
Yes we are, um, so, yes we are. We have
a our brand new Facebook page is stuff you should know.
Just type that into the handy search part Facebook or
I think it's Facebook dot com slash stuff you should know.
(31:04):
Maybe I'm not positive. Fine, And also, buddy, we're tweeting.
You are tweeting, tweeted twice. Yeah, and your tweeting, I know,
I feel like a modern child. All right. If you
want to follow us on Twitter, we have our Twitter
name as s y s K podcast right, yeah, so
that would be at and the how they do it. Yeah,
(31:25):
look at you guys, y ESK podcast and we'll be
saying funny things as well as uh sending out links
to cool stuff. And you know we're active now, that
is true. So check us out, will you yes on
on the show? Yes? All right, Josh, listener mail. For
goodness sakes, listener mail, I'm gonna read a couple of
quickies here from a young boy named Sam and from
(31:47):
a trucker name and net. And it took us to task.
Oh no, over what I will read it first? And
that says u Hi chucking Josh. I am a oh
for the road truck driver and love your podcast over
the road. That's what she says. I would love for
you guys to come along with me into the twenty
(32:08):
one century. Regarding truck drivers, I've been driving for almost
thirteen years, and guess what, I'm a woman. In fact,
I have two sons. Y'all's age when you talk about
truck drivers is in the McDonald's podcast. You always talk
about big, burly guys. Well, I may be big and
probably more surly than Burley, but I'm definitely not a guy.
Don't forget us, lady drivers, love love love the show,
(32:31):
so and how could we forget? I mean large Marge
was a huge factor. Yeah, J's big adventure and that
was a net. That was a net, and I told
her that I would read this as our penance a net.
I'm making the blow your horn signed for the tractor trailer.
So if you're hearing this right now to your horn, awesome.
I hope she didn't just cause an accident. This is
(32:51):
from Sam, and Sam is just another a cute little kid,
and I like these. I saw that that's a caps. Yeah, Hi,
Chuck and Josh. I'm Sam blank be because I'm using
your last name substitute. I'm eleven years old. You guys
helped me get through many boring tasks like dog poop
pick up my least favorite chore. I think it's mine too.
Actually that in the cat box I just stopped as
(33:12):
an adult, I don't pick up. You just don't go
into the yard. I just watch where I'm walking in
the yard. Okay. I think the funniest podcast was the
Twinkie podcast. You guys make me laugh in my bed
when I listen. Also in the supermarket, so he listens
when he goes to sleep and when he's grocery shopping,
or I guess when his mom's grocery shopping, or dad
(33:34):
or two dad's. I don't know. Kids today are pretty independent. Yeah,
you're right. I think you guys are the funniest people
in the world. I have a few suggestions, like what
dues cat Got your Tongue mean? And other phrases means
improper English? I do. Also, Riot Control really cracked me up.
(33:55):
Does an eleven year old kid know what riot control is?
And legos? So he wants to know about I Got
your Tongue? Legos and riot control and trading cards and football?
So could you please please read my shout out on
the air, And here's my shout out, and this is
an all caps. I told you mom, I would get
my email read on air. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
(34:17):
So that's from Sam w And he said, I thought
Josh looked like Chuck and Chuck looked like Josh, but
that changed when I saw your pictures on the site. Yeah,
we get that a lot. Yeah, we're well, not that
I look like you and you look like me, but
that we look like different people. Okay, that's always a case.
With the voice. I'm much uglier than you would think.
That is not true. You are a lovely, handsome man.
Thank you all right? Well, thanks Sam, keep on shopping
(34:40):
and the net keep on trucking. If you have an
interesting email that you want to roll the dice and
see if we'll read it on the air. Cost you
nothing in this digital age, you can send us an
electronic mail. Just address it to stuff podcast at how
stuff works dot com. M For more on this and
(35:02):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on
the how stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
are you
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.