GENIUS

GENIUS is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavour that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for the future, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside competitors’ capabilities. Genius is associated with intellectual ability and creative productivity. Genius can also refer to people characterized by genius, and/or polymaths who excel across many subjects.

Walter Isaacson, biographer of many well-known geniuses, explains that although high intelligence may be a prerequisite, a genius’s most common trait may be the extraordinary ability to apply creativity and imaginative thinking to almost any situation. Talent is a prerequisite.

Psychologists and other scholars of genius believe that a minimum IQ (approximately 125) is necessary for genius. However, IQ alone is insufficient and must be combined with personality characteristics such as drive and persistence, plus the essential opportunities for talent development. A multiplicative model of genius consists of high ability, high productivity, and high creativity.

Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would typically have to be taught by another person. Originality is essential. This genius has a talent for producing ideas that are described as non-imitative.

A genius is someone in whom intellect predominates over “will” much more than within the average person. This allows the genius to create artistic or academic works that are objects of pure, disinterested contemplation, the chief criterion of the aesthetic experience. Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see – “an original power of thinking”.

Christopher Langan
The television quiz show, One vs 100, features a permanent gallery of 100 ordinary people who serve as the “mob”. Each week, they match wits with a special guest with a million dollars at stake. Chris Langan was the special guest in the fifth episode of the 2008 season. Few were as superbly qualified to answer more questions correctly. With an average IQ of 100, Einstein was 150, and Chris was 195. Over the past decade, Chris had achieved a strange kind of fame. He had become the public face of genius in American life, a celebrity outlier. He gets invited on news shows and profiled in magazines, and he has been the subject of a documentary, all because of a brain that appears to defy description.

The television show 20/20 gave Chris an IQ test. His IQ was too high to measure accurately, so he took an IQ test designed for people too smart for ordinary tests. He got all the questions right except one.

He was speaking at 6 months. At three, he taught himself to read comics and at five, he questioned his grandfather about the existence of God (he remembers being disappointed with the answer he got). In school, he could walk into a test in a foreign language, skim the textbook for 3 minutes and ace the test. In his early teenage years, he read widely in theoretical physics. He got a perfect score on his SAT. At 15, he could match Jimi Hendrix on a guitar. Half the time, he didn’t attend school but just showed up for tests.

Back on the set of 1 vs. 100, he answered every question without a pause as if it were trivial and abruptly stopped at $250,000, exiting at the top as geniuses, we like to think, invariably do.

Chris Langan’s mother had four sons, each with a different father. Chris was the eldest. The fathers were absent and very dysfunctional. He won a scholarship to a college but lost it as his mother failed to fill out a parent’s financial statement for its renewal. When he returned to university, he couldn’t arrange an afternoon class that he could get to and dropped out. He floundered and worked as a bouncer in a bar most of his life. He had no concept of the culture and particulars of the institutions.

Every experience he had had ended in frustration. He knew he needed to navigate the world better, but didn’t know how. Chris Langan never had help along the way. It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one–not rock stars, professional athletes, software billionaires, or even geniuses–ever makes it alone.

Lewis Terman
A young professor of psychology at Stanford, his specialty was intelligence testing. He created the Stanford-Binet, the standard IQ test taken by millions worldwide. He found that Henry Cowell, raised in poverty and chaos, didn’t get along with other children and had been unschooled since the age of seven. He worked as a janitor at a one-room school near Stanford. He would sneak away from his job and play the school piano throughout the day. Terman tested Henry Cowell – his IQ was above 140, and Terman began looking for others like him.

He found a girl who knew the alphabet at 19 months, and another reading Dickens and Shakespeare at 4. A young man had been kicked out of law school for reciting long passages of legal opinion from memory.

Terman Longitudinal Study
In 1921, Terman sent a team of fieldworkers out into California’s elementary schools. Teachers were asked to name the brightest children in their classes. They were given an intelligence test. The ones who scored in the top 10% were given a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 were given a third IQ test. And from that, Terman selected the best and the brightest. Of 250,000 elementary students, 1,470 had an IQ above 140, with a range of 200. The group became the “Termites” and was the subject of one of history’s most famous psychological studies.

For the rest of his life, Terman tracked, measured, tested and analyzed educational level, marriages, illnesses, and psychological health. He wrote letters of recommendation and doled out a stream of advice and counsel. All was recorded in thick red volumes entitled Genetic Studies of Genius. As they grew older, updates and achievements were chronicled.

Termites in adulthood
Eventually, the records of 730 Termites were examined. The top 150 (20%) were the true success stories – lawyers, doctors, engineers and academics. 90% graduated from college, and there were 98 graduates. The middle 60% were doing satisfactorily. The bottom 150 had done the least with their superior mental ability. They were the postal workers, bookkeepers, or men lying on their couches at home without any jobs. 1/3 were college dropouts; 25% only had a high school diploma. And all 150 in this group had been dubbed a genius at some point. Only 8 had graduate degrees.

Some had published books and run for public office, but few were nationally known figures, and none were Nobel Prize winners. They tended to earn good incomes, but not that good. The majority had careers considered ordinary, and a surprising number were failures. Two students who became Nobel Laureates were missed – their IQs were not high enough.

It was shown that if Terman had put together a randomly selected group of children and dispensed with IQs, he would have ended up with a group almost as impressive as the carefully selected group of geniuses.

The meaning of genius was changed forever. Intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

GENIUS
Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity. The genius should be the purest and most distilled outlier. But you need to understand what a real outlier is.

Raven’s Progressive Matrices is one of the most widely used intelligence tests. It requires no language skills or a specific body of acquired language. It’s a measure of abstract reasoning skills. A typical Raven’s test consists of 48 items, each one harder. The ones at the end are tough. People like Chris Langen are brilliant because they have a mind that can figure out puzzles like this.
 
How does a person’s performance on an IQ test like the Raven’s translate into real-life success? An IQ below 70 is considered mentally disabled, just above 100 is necessary to handle college, and 115 is required for a competitive graduate program. The higher your score, the more education you’ll get, the more money you’ll make and the longer you’ll live.

However, the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once 120 is reached, additional IQ points don’t translate into any measurable real-world advantage. IQ thresholds are less critical for success than are personality and character. A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel prize as one whose IQ is 180.

IQ is a lot like height in basketball. You need to be at least six feet one to play professional basketball. And being taller is better, but only up to a certain point. Being 6’8” is slightly better than being 6’6” (Michael Jordan’s height). A basketball player must only be tall enough, which is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a threshold. Einstein’s 150 and Chris Langan’s 195 are smart enough, not 30% smarter.

The idea that intelligence has a threshold goes against intuition. The same goes for the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. There was not a preponderance of Ivy League schools; one only had to go to a school that was good enough. Harvard’s students may score an average of 10-15 points higher on their entrance exams, but that doesn’t help. Elite schools should give up their complex admissions process and hold a lottery for everyone above a threshold. How well a graduate does in the real world shows that minority students are just as successful as white students – the quality is high, as they are all above the threshold – they are smart enough.

IQ tests are convergence tests (they ask you to sort through a list of possibilities and converge on the correct answer). But genius is better measured by divergence tests that require you to use imagination and take your mind in several directions. There is no single correct answer. They measure the number and uniqueness of your responses and reflect creativity. Being successful is about a lot more than IQ; the intellectual scale means little. It involves a type of fertile mind.

In the end, only one thing mattered: family background. The As overwhelmingly came from the middle and upper classes. Their homes were filled with books. Half the fathers had a college degree. The Cs were from the other side of the tracks: a third had a parent who had dropped out of school before the 8th grade.  

Today, many of Terman’s ideas remain central to our thinking about success. Schools have programmes for the “gifted.” Elite universities require intelligence tests, and high-tech companies measure cognitive abilities. They are all convinced that those at the highest IQ scale have the most significant potential. We feel awe. Geniuses are the ultimate outliers. This has produced an era of meritocracy, populated by people without the necessary social skills to be the best at their jobs.

Robert Oppenheimer
He was considered a genius as a child, so he went to Harvard and Cambridge for a doctorate in physics. He struggled with depression. His interest was theoretical physics, but he was enrolled in experimental physics. He tried to poison his tutor but was only put on probation. His treatment could not have been more different than Langan’s.

He finally used charm to head the Manhattan Project. He possessed the savvy to get what he wanted from the world. He had practical intelligence – what to say to whom, when, and how to say it for maximum effect. It is procedural: it is about learning how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical, that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. Moreover, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the analytical ability measured by IQ. Having general intelligence doesn’t imply the presence of practical intelligence or vice versa. Robert Oppenheimer had lots of both.

Analytical intelligence comes in part from your genes. Chris Langan started talking at 6 months and taught himself to read at 3. He was born smart; IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability.

But social savvy is knowledge – a set of skills that have to be learned – the attitudes and skills learned from our families. When many families are examined, there are only two parenting philosophies, and they are divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time.

This intensive scheduling is almost absent from the lives of poor children. Play wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other neighbourhood kids. Their parents considered what a child did to be separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. A girl’s interest in singing isn’t viewed as a signal to help her develop it into a formal talent. She frames her child’s skills as character traits—singing is what makes her “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as cute and as a way for Katie to “get attention.” Poor parents are intimidated, react passively and stay in the background. The strategy is “accomplishment of natural growth”.

Middle-class parents talk things through, reasoning with their children. The children are expected to talk back, negotiate, and question authority. Parents challenge the teachers and intervene on their behalf. This parenting style is called concerted cultivation—fostering and assessing a child’s talents, opinions, and skills. They develop a sense of entitlement, which is taught as an attitude suited to succeeding in the modern world.

ASPERGER’S and GENIUS
The Asperger’s brain is uniquely suited to developing genius. One could even go so far as to accept the corollary—genius is only possible in an Asperger’s brain. Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk were/are geniuses and all have Asperger’s syndrome. Society is starting to understand the significant positive impact great Asperger’s ancestors have left behind toward an enlightened and improved society and world.

A distinctive cluster of aptitudes, skills, attitudes, and abilities is part of autistic intelligence. They can see things and events around them from a new point of view. This ability can lead to exceptional achievements which others may never attain. They have specialist knowledge in a particular area, good visual and spatial memory, are methodical and organized, can understand abstract concepts, and have problem-solving/logical reasoning.

Some people with Asperger’s are visual thinkers; others are math/pattern, verbal/linguistic, or music thinkers, but all think in specifics. The Asperger’s mind wants to figure out how things work and enjoys and focuses on details, while the normal mind is more skilled at assembling whole concepts from more information. The absence of a functioning anterior cingulate gyrus locks the autistic brain in focus.

People with autism and other cognitive differences make contributions to society that so-called normal people are incapable of making. Rather than being considered a normal child trapped within an “autistic shell,” waiting to be rescued, Asperger’s is “a way of being” that colours every experience, sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter, every aspect of existence.

THE WORLD WITHOUT ASPERGER’S PEOPLE
The world needs Asperger’s people. After all, the social people who sat around the campfire talking were probably not the makers of the first stone spear. It is also likely that most social people did not create the great culture of our civilization, such as literature, art, engineering, music, science, and mathematics. In the social terrain, streamlined concentration becomes awkward and unwieldy.

If the genes that cause autism were eliminated, there might be a terrible price to pay. Efforts to eradicate autism from the gene pool could put humankind’s future at risk by purging the same qualities that have advanced culture, science, and technological innovation for millennia. People with bits of these traits are more creative or possibly geniuses. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.

Most cases of autism are not rooted in rare de novo mutations but in ancient genes that are shared widely in the general population while being concentrated more in certain families than others. Whatever autism is, it is not a unique product of modern civilization. It is a strange gift from our deep past, passed down through millions of years of evolution.

This is a list of famous people known or strongly suspected of having Asperger’s syndrome. It reads like a “who’s who” of anyone who has contributed significantly to science or the arts. Where would society be if none of these people lived?
Mathematicians, Physicists, Chemists, Biologists: Sir Isaac Newton, Henry Cavendish, Charles Darwin, Nikola Tesla, Marie-Curie, Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Barbara McClintock. Alan Turing, Carl Sagan.
Inventors and Businessmen: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Temple Grandin, Steve Jobs. Bill Gates, Elon Musk.
Authors: Emily Dickinson, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Isaac Asimov.
Children’s authors: Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll.
Artists: Michelangelo, Andy Warhol, Vincent Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky
Actors, and Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Hopkins, Dan Akroyd, Jerry Seinfeld, Daryl Hannah, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Michael Palin, Robin Williams.
Musicians, Composers. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ludwig Van Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Glenn Gould, Courtney Love, Susan Boyle, Michael Jackson, Ladyhawke, Adam Young, Bela Bartok, John Denver, Bob Dylan, James Taylor.
Others: Bobby Fischer, Greta Thurnberg.

References:
1. “Outliers – the Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell. “The Trouble with Genius Part 1 and 2”. Little, Brown & Company. New York.

WHAT DOES ‘GENIUS’ REALLY MEAN?
Humans have long tried to understand a quicksilver quality that defies explanation.

“When Paul Morphy plays seven games of chess at once and blindfold, when young Colburn gives impromptu solution to a mathematical problem involving fifty-six figures, we are struck with hopeless wonder,” J. Brownlee Brown wrote in 1864.

His Atlantic article had a simple headline: “Genius.” Only seven years after the founding of this magazine, its writers were already addressing one of the greatest questions of the 19th century: How should we define genius, that everyday word we use to denote the extraordinary?

Brown’s two geniuses are largely forgotten today. Morphy was a chess wizard from New Orleans who grew tired of the game and gave up playing seriously at just 22. He reportedly died in his bath at age 47. Zerah Colburn’s story is even more tragic: As a child, he wasn’t thought to be particularly gifted until his father overheard him repeating multiplication tables after only a few weeks’ schooling. The little boy from Vermont was then dragged around Europe as a “mental calculator,” ruling on whether large numbers were primes or not, and sent to an expensive school thanks to the patronage of an earl. But like many child prodigies, his adult life was a comparative disappointment. He died of tuberculosis at 34.

While researching my new book, The Genius Myth, I spent a lot of time exploring how we tell stories of exceptional achievement, and what the changing definition of genius reveals about the history of Western thought. The word itself comes from Latin, where it was used to mean a person’s spirit—the inner essence that gave them their unique characteristics. “Every man, says the oracle, has his daemon, whom he is bound to obey; those who implicitly follow that guidance are the prophetic souls, the favorites of the gods,” Frederic Henry Hodge wrote in The Atlantic in 1868. “It is this involuntary, incalculable force that constitutes what we call genius.”

Well into the 20th century, The Atlantic used this older definition, writing about people who possessed a genius, rather than those who were one. Individuals whom this magazine has described as being or having a genius include Richard Strauss, Leo Tolstoy, George Gershwin, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, and Edith Wharton, that last accolade having been delivered by Gore Vidal. Oh, plus the 23-year-old hockey player Bobby Orr, the children’s cartoon Rugrats, and the shopping channel QVC.

This proclamation makes for great copy, because it is deeply subjective. Christopher Hitchens was prepared to call the poet Ezra Pound a genius, but not the acclaimed mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers, whose work he dismissed as “dismal pulp.” (I know whose work I would rather read.) In 1902, a female writer for this magazine airily declared that there were no great women writers to compare with Juvenal, Euripides, and Milton. “George Eliot had a vein of excellent humor, but she never shares it with her heroes,” argued Ellen Duvall, adding that Jane Austen’s male heroes were “as solemn as Minerva’s owl.”

The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Something similar is true of geniuses. An earlier age would have attributed Paul Morphy and Zerah Colburn’s gifts to divine providence, but in the more secular 19th-century America, another explanation was needed. “We seek in vain for the secret of this mastery,” wrote Brown of his subjects. “It is private,—as deeply hidden from those who have as from those who have it not.”

For the genius-hunters, one encouraging source for exceptional talent was inheritance. At the time Brown was writing about Morphy and Colburn, academics throughout the Western world were wrestling with the theory of evolution by natural selection, proposed by Charles Darwin only six years earlier. The study of what would later be called genetics promised new methods of understanding genius, that quicksilver quality that seemed so resistant to explanation.

The first edition of Hereditary Genius, by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, was published in America in 1870. Galton’s work aimed to classify all men into lettered bands, depending on their mental faculties and lifetime achievements. The Atlantic reviewed Hereditary Genius that year, noting that the difference between the men in the upper part of Galton’s highest band and those in his lowest band “represents the difference between Shakespeare and the most degraded idiot mentioned in medical literature.” This was a coldly rational view of genius—more scientific in appearance, but also less humane.

Galton went on to coin the term eugenics. His unpublished utopian novel, The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere, imagined a world where people were allowed to marry only after extensive tests of their fitness to reproduce, and where those who failed were shipped off to labor colonies. Thanks to the popularity of eugenics at the time, what started as an attempt to identify geniuses eventually led the U.S. Supreme Court to justify the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” in Buck v. Bell in 1927. Thousands of Americans were subsequently denied the right to have children—an idea that also took hold in Nazi Germany, where an estimated 400,000 people were sterilized under the Hitler regime in the name of “racial hygiene.”

From the start, Galton’s ideas about genius were presented in explicitly racial terms: He believed that Europeans were intellectually superior to Africans, and that ancient Athenians were superior to both. The Atlantic, a proudly abolitionist magazine, ran an article that contested this bigotry. In 1893, Havelock Ellis argued that many in the contemporary canon of geniuses had mixed ancestry, from what he called the “negro blood” that was “easy to trace in the face of Alexandre Dumas, in certain respects, to the Iroquois blood in Flaubert.” The popular novelist Olive Schreiner’s heritage was “German, English, and Jewish,” Ellis observed, while Thomas Hardy believed his paternal great-grandmother to have been Irish. (Neither Jews nor Irish people would have been considered white, according to popular beliefs of the time.)

Today, most modern geneticists acknowledge that intelligence is partially heritable—it can be passed down by parents—but that does not account for the making of a genius. “We can no more produce a whole race of Newtons and Shakespeares than we can produce perpetual motion,” the anonymous author of the Hereditary Genius review wrote in 1870. A “genius” can pass on some of their genes, but not their personality—nor the social conditions in which their success happened.

That matters. While talking about my book, I’ve found that acknowledging the role of luck in success makes some people nervous. They think that any discussion of broader historical forces is a covert attempt to debunk or downplay the importance of individual talent or hard work. But even 19th-century Atlantic writers could see the importance of good timing. “A given genius may come either too early or too late,” William James wrote in 1880. “Cromwell and Napoleon need their revolutions, Grant his civil war. An Ajax gets no fame in the day of telescopic-sighted rifles.”

As we get closer to the present, a note of sarcasm creeps into the word’s usage: In the 2000s, the writer Megan McArdle used the recurrent headline “Sheer Genius” for columns on businesses making terrible errors. But she was far from the first Atlantic writer to use the word sardonically. One of my favorite essays on genius from the archives is a satirical squib from 1900, which masquerades as an ad for a Genius Discovery Company. “This country needs more geniuses,” the anonymous author wrote. “Everybody knows it. Everybody admits it. Everybody laments it.” The article urged any reader who wondered whether they might be a genius to write in, enclosing a five-dollar fee, “and we will tell you the truth by return mail.”

Having studied the flawed and fickle way that we award the label genius, let me say this—that’s as good a method as any other.

By Helen Lewis
August 14, 2025 The Atlantic