The Genuis

When I was writing out my first book, Escape To Phobos, I decided it would be interesting to create a savant character in my story.. I fashioned him after my own son, who happens to have Asperger's.

Terms like prodigy, genius, and savants can be alittle confusing but prodigy describes a child and genius is used for adults, while savants are more specialized. Derived from the French verb savoir (to know) it describes individuals who possess “islands of genius” amidst otherwise average or diminished abilities.

Individuals with savant syndrome characteristically excel in one of five categories: 

1. Music (most often piano performance)
2. Art (usually drawing and painting)
3. Calendar calculating (e.g., May 4, 1632, was a Friday)
4. Mathematics (e.g., computing prime numbers), and
5. Mechanical or spatial skills (e.g., map making).

Following a "typical" genuis would be someone who is born with a high IQ and uses thier skills over thier lifetime like Evangelos Katsioulis. Katsioulis is a 42-year-old Greek genuis, physician and psychiatrist. Katsioulis uses his intelligence to study and apply himself to three different fields, philosophy, medical research technology and Psychopharmacology. Katsioulis follows what's known as the genuis's path — which is a person driven by discovery. They aim to provide immediate solutions to global problems, making life efficient and more comfortable. 

Daniel Tamment is another well known genius. Tamment is capable of astronomical calculations in the blink of an eye. He's also a gifted linguist, speaking nine languages, including one he created called Manti. But Tammet is a bit different than Katsioulis when he says he "sees" numbers in an vivid way.

The numbers are moving in my mind," he says. "Sometimes they're fast, sometimes they're slow. Sometimes they're dark. Sometimes they're bright. That emotion, that motion, that texture will be highly memorable for me." In his mind, Tammet says, each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, colour, texture and feel.

Seeing numbers in colors and shapes is a neurological phenonema called synaethesia, which is linked with genuis minds like Tamment. What happens is thier minds have a sensory reactions to math, music or words. For instance a a person might taste the words that others are speaking, see colors and shapes with numbers, or see colors with music. Basically its a neurological "cross-talk". A blending of sensations.

Another example is Melissa McCracken who is an artist and synaesthete who paints the music she sees. As heard through My Modern Met, her canvases exude the rhythmic and aural ecstasies music she listens to like John Lennon. And then there are "virtuosos" who simply "know" music like Alma Deutscher. A British music prodigy who composed her own opera when she was 10 years old.

Katsioulis, Tamment, McCracken and Deutscher were born with genuis, but some people aquire "savant syndrome" from a brain injury like Jason Padgett. Jason Padget experienced synaethesia after being hit in the head one night outside a karaoke bar. Shortly after his brain injury, Pagett began to see everything as fractals, and began to draw out his visions, and learned that what he was seeing were mathematical formulas. After the accident, he siad water looked like tangent lines and light became rays made up of lines and spirals. The images he began to corresponded to geometry and physics concepts he had never studied. Before that, Padgett was an ordinary guy, selling furniture as a living, until he was brutally attacked and hit on the head.

Acquired savants or acciental genuis accounts have happend with not only brain surgery, but with epilepsy, sub-arachnoid haemorrhage, meningitis or even progressive aphasia. Additionally, there is a growing volume of literature that explores this phenomenon in previously healthy individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease or frontal temporal dementia!

There are many theories to explain the neurophysiology of acquired savant syndrome, but most of them agree on these two explanations:

Theory A. Injury results in a reorganization of the brain and its processing hubs, allowing areas containing musical, artistic, or mathematical memory to be readily accessed.

Theory B. Injury inhibits the higher cognitive functions (e.g., language, logic, comprehension) from suppressing natural creative abilities.

Genuis, synaethesia, and aquired genuis is an interelated paradox, and a mystery. But science concludes only two unspiring explanations inside the human brain. Either that we have unlocked new abilities in the brain or enhanced existing ones. I prefer to think there is a third conclusion becuase we are facing a bewildering mystery in the eye here. Is it possible that knowlege is perhaps in a world outside the individual? Have certain geniuses hit upon ideas, visions, and thoughts of unfathomable reality? Is it an awakening? A down-pour of timeless knowledge? Indeed, aquired genuis's have tapped into knowledge, and enlightenment, without dedicated effort or education. How is knowledge hidden in the brain, if it was never learned? How is knowlege in the brain suppressed if it was never aquired to begin with?

Max Planck stated: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."

To conclude, I thought a genuis would be needed in my future, and get along quite well.. They would have to face many unknowns and push themselves to help achieve a vision of humanity finally living offworld inside a tiny Martian Colony. All in a days work for a genuis, I thought to myself. Although, Michelangelo might not have agreed with me.

“If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius.”
― Michelangelo Buonarroti