The Genius Checklist
Nine Paradoxical Tips on How You Can Become a Creative Genius
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
What it takes to be a genius: nine essential and contradictory ingredients.
What does it take to be a genius? A high score on an IQ test? Brilliant physicist Richard Feynman's IQ was too low for membership in Mensa. Suffering from varying degrees of mental illness? Creativity is often considered a marker of mental health. Be a child prodigy like Mozart, or a later bloomer like Beethoven? Die tragically young, like Keats, or live to a ripe old age like Goethe? In The Genius Checklist, Dean Keith Simonton examines the key factors in creative genius and finds that they are more than a little contradictory.
Simonton, who has studied creativity and genius for more than four decades, draws on both scientific research and stories from the lives of famous creative geniuses that range from Isaac Newton to Vincent van Gogh to Virginia Woolf. He explains the origin of IQ tests and the art of estimating the IQ of long-dead historical figures (John Stuart Mill: 200; Charles Darwin: 160). He compares IQ scores with achieved eminence as measures of genius, and he draws a distinction between artistic and scientific genius. He rules out birth order as a determining factor (in the James family alone, three geniuses at three different birth-order positions: William James, firs-tborn; Henry James, second born; Alice James, born fifth and last); considers Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule; and describes how the “lone” genius gets enmeshed in social networks.
Genius, Simonton explains, operates in ways so subtle that they seem contradictory. Genius is born and made, the domain of child prodigies and their elders. Simonton's checklist gives us a new, integrative way to understand geniuses—and perhaps even to nurture your own genius!
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Simonton (Origins of Genius), a psychology professor emeritus at U.C. Davis, uses a tongue-in-cheek how-to format to provide readers with a surprisingly swift and wry overview of the occasionally contradictory factors that can foster creative genius. (One chapter is titled "Be the Oldest Kid in Your Family/Make Sure You're Born Last.") The arguments are balanced between historical anecdotes, featuring famed and obscure figures alike (respectively including Marie Curie and ill-fated child prodigy William James Sidis), and psychological case studies. Simonton's enthusiasm for the topic is evident as he traces the field of genius research from its origins in the controversial work of Francis Galton to the pivotal development of standardized IQ tests. Well-deployed humor ("Hence the optimal advice is to prepare yourself for failure with the aspiration that a success or two will finally come your way. That's not a very encouraging suggestion, to be sure, but certainly the most realistic") will help make the more complex, academically oriented passages digestible to a broad audience. Though the book may not provide its readers with a clear path to attaining genius, it will certainly leave them with a better appreciation of the multitude of factors that underlie high levels of achievement.
