Tidbits on Genius

Were you one of the latest Nobel Prize winners? I know I wasn’t even in the running. The Nobel Prize winners were announced in October, 2008. You have to wait 50 years to find out if you’re a winner that’s how long the Nobel committee keeps their list of the ” almost winners”. Something tells me I’m not on that one either!

What sort of genius do you have to show as a child to get picked by these guys? William Shockley won the Nobel Prize in 1956, in physics, for the invention of the transistor but as a child he was dropped from a long term study of genius. The reason for this was his IQ wasn’t high enough. Luis Alvarez won a Nobel for his work on elementary particles. He was excluded from the study for the same reason as Shockley.

A man by the name of Louis Terman created the genius study in 1928 while he was at Stanford University. He pioneered at what was thought of as a genius who was defined back then for anyone that had an IQ greater than 140. Amazingly, there wasn’t one of the children that partook in the study that won a Nobel Prize.
One of the children in this study Jess Oppenheimer did go on to invent The Teleprompter and another one of the children Norris Bradbury was head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

If you’re wondering by being a genius you are automatically rich it is this is not so. It was found in a study that was given by the Ohio state university center for human resources research shows that geniuses can’t save any better as the normal citizen and in some cases worse than the average Joe. Einstein was quoted as saying he lost quite a bit of his Nobel Prize money to bad investments.

Aspergers is a form of mental health disturbance and Hans Asperger identified this which is now called Aspergers Syndrome. This is a form of Autism but Asperger believes that there is a connection between mathematical and scientific genius and Autism. He believes that anyone that is headed for success in science and arts needs a small dash of autism. He may have been onto something as Norbert Weiner who invented cybernetics was the prototype of this absent minded genius.

Bell labs found out that the best engineer workers they had were those that did not have genius but did have such things as rapport, empathy, cooperation, persuasion and possessed the ability to build consensus.
Researchers had a hoot when they pitted chimpanzee against some college students in three memories based intelligence test, surprisingly the chimps won the first test, tied in the second and won hands down in third. Enough said here.

The smartest bird ever, died last September at the age of 31.He was young in human years but not so young in Parrot years. This parrot was hailed as being the smartest bird there ever was. His name was Alex and he could identify 50 objects, seven colors and shapes and count quantities up to six. I had the privilege of seeing a show of what this parrot could do and it was absolutely unreal to watch. I told you there was no genius in me, I was impressed! Maybe this is one of the reasons I’m not on that Nobel Prize list, do you think?