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Old 06-26-2009, 11:05 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by statdoc View Post
Tangentially...why is it that so many artists are flakes or freaks? It must be something really different about their brains.
Good point. Extreme genius of any sort, whether artistic or scientific, is quite often accompanied by 'mental disturbances'. Folks that come to mind are John Nash, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his Game Theory, and who was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film 'A Beautiful Mind'. He had classic schizophrenia. Also, Einstein was quite eccentric. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for his Polymerase Chain Reaction (cloning of a DNA sequence) was a heavy LSD user and credited LSD's "mind-opening" effects with his PCR discovery.

And multiple books and TV specials have been written about Howard Hughes, the aviator and industrialist (and movie producer) and his descent into serious mental illness.

The human brain is just fascinating in that sense. It seems like any sort of radical brilliance (whether scientific or artistic) is counter-balanced by serious deficits in other regions, manifesting as OCD, schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. Or at the very least, these folks blow us away with their genius in one area, while displaying profoundly bizarre judgement and behaviour in other areas. I guess Michael Jackson was no exception. So you're definitely onto something Statdoc....
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