Genius

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

This is something I've thought about, off and on, for awhile. I think there are several variables that would need to be measured. IQ, imagination, motivation, and method of practical application; for starters. I read something about Einstein and how he spent a lot of time fishing where he wasn't so much doing that as letting his brain drift. That's where he came up with some of his theories, like time.

He was smart, he could imagine something, he was motivated to pursue it, and he could actually figure out how to apply his thoughts to everyday life.

I don't know, I think my sinus meds just kicked in. Disregard if this doesn't make sense.

[Golden Applesauce]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_psychology is the main branch of psychology that specifically addresses things like genius or other unusually skilled individuals. There's also been a lot of work in cognitive psychology studying the differences in how amateurs and the highly skilled think through various situations. You can sit down chess players of various skill levels and give them chess problems, and by cleverly choosing the kind of problems you can start to pin down what precisely it is that the genius can do better than the amateur.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Just watched THIS on youtube. Kid has assburgers, one of the shrink-dudes doing the voiceover touches on a lot of "Genius" issues in the context of them coming naturally to a lot of assburger people because of the nature of the condition but not which I think are mutually exclusive or whatever.

For the record, I think of myself as "capable of very short bursts of genius" It's a state of mind that I can't really turn on at will but I can put myself in situations where it's more likely to happen and kind of hope.