The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis: In search of genius? Don’t look in East Anglia
Helen Lewis’s Genius myth (Jonathan Cape £ 22, 352pp)
What does it mean to be a genius? Requires more than extraordinary achievements or a high IQ.
Helen Lewis, who is a genius, argues in his live book that the label is about the society that gives themselves about themselves.
For example, Tim Berners-Lee is very self-affecting to play the role-but the world-wide web invention supports all the achievements of today’s technology brother ‘geniuses’.
The concept of genius developed. During the Roman period, you can be handled by a poetic muse or ‘Furor Poeticus’. In Renaissance, the idea of ’great men’ was kept; Romantics developed the Genius notion as a strange ball living in blood coughing Garret while creating rising genius works.
These days, our geniuses move fast and breaking something; Still almost always men. If even every society has their own categorization, is there a concept?
Lewis has particularly fun that explains the lengths that some go to break the question. In 1904, scientist Havelock Ellis found a list of more than 1,000 British geniuses.
People in East Anglia ‘have no ability to think abstract thinking’, the southwestern England ‘are sailors rather than academics’. Dublin has never produced 15 even and poor Sligo.
Later, psychologist Catharine Cox Miles began a project to predict the intelligence of past geniuses and filled an IQ based on the length of their entrances in a biographical dictionary.
This was a bad news for Cervantes and Copernicus, which was only given an IQ of 105; Meanwhile, Goethe scored 210 points. Shakespeare did not qualify.
Normal for Norfolk: Scientist Havelock Ellis, found a list of more than 1000 British geniuses. None on the list was from East Angliia
In the 1990s, psychologist Hans Eysenck decided that there was enough data for the ‘rough portrait’. He must have a Jewish history, born in February and lose a parent until the age of ten. He should die at 30 or 90, ‘but in no account in 60. Gut must be.
Lewis is a guide that is so well read for intelligence that at any point where you wish to be more brave. However, it is understanding about the loneliness of those who are very smart.
In the 1980s, a name was requested for its members from High IQ societies. The most appropriate term they had was ‘stranger’.
