The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Interview: Return of a 'beautiful mind' (New Scientist, 12/18/2004)
The film of his life won four Oscars, but Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash hardly recognizes the character on the screen
John Nash was recognized by his colleagues as a genius in 1948 when he was accepted into Princeton University's graduate program at the age of 20. A year later he found a mathematical way for hostile parties to settle arguments to mutual advantage. Known as the Nash equilibrium, his major contribution to mathematics remains as useful today - as shown by recent auctions of bandwidth to mobile phone companies - as it was in cold war politics. It gained him a Nobel Prize for economics in 1994. He now researches problems in cosmology and quantum theory.
An obvious question to kick off with: is there a connection between madness and genius?
There's certainly a connection between mental illness and "thinking out of the box". If you're going to be anything like a genius you have to think out of the box. In that sense genius is something other than perfect...
Yes, there is a connection between madness and genius, just as there is a connection between all mental illness or neurological disorders and genius.
Stress collects in the brains with disorders. The most stress will collect in the part of the brain bringing together the most divergent parts of information from the most diverse realms of processing and with the most conflict as well: emotion (the switchboard or executive survey of the body and mind). The more stress collects, the more shutdown occurs in the switchboard so that divergent realms of information are less and less likely to be processed together or calculated together instead of being serially assessed separately. So the greater the amount of stress in the brain, the faster the brain is able to assess narrow focus of subject matter and the more slowly the brain is able to assess subject matter that brings together a lot of divergent (and conflicting) subject matter.
In this sense, all disorders are a form of autism (of lesser or greater severity and of greater or lesser focus in different parts of the brain - you can be autistic in a subset of the brain without the disorder being considered as “autism”).
Genius is more a matter of focus than ability. The more mental illness you have the more likely you are to have an obsessive focus. Obsessive focus on a bad thing is a bad thing (an addiction, stalking, irrational obsession) but obsessive focus on something that is useful to society can be genius.
The shutdown of the emotional center (switchboard) leads to social impairment as well (social function converges mostly in the same part of the brain because of the very disparate kinds of information in social cues involving subtle body signals and overt conversation and irrational belief systems in society and religion that go against the signals coming from the pleasures and pains of the body, etc.). Lack of social awareness can let one continue on in a quest oblivious to the opinions of others that their work is foolish or crazy (like this theoretical writing of mine, although I'm not oblivious to such signals so this work can be emotionally draining with my being aware of how it is perceived at this time by many people). Lack of social awareness will allow a person to attempt something that is considered impossible by the community because of that person's impairment in the perception of community thought.
Usually this kind of genius is applied to a very narrow range of subject matter.
Sometimes the autistic type of intense focus is possible in a person who learns to have that kind of focus without the impairment that can go with autistic-spectrum disorders. This might be possible with a person who early in development might have had the kind of stress to be autistic but somehow pulled out of that state of disease but retained some of the skills (focus, dissociation) that were learned by necessity in the earlier diseased state. Such a person will be more likely to develop some disorder of some kind later in life.
Sometimes the mental efforts required to achieve an act of genius cause so much stress that the mental health declines just as a result of such effort (and the conflicts with the establishment required to communicate such an effort or achievement). (This kind of decline will probably also go along with some tendency towards a stressed brain that already exists in that person.)
The brain has limits. Any kind of thinking taken to a high enough degree of complexity will eventually create enough stress so that a mistake will occur. The brain needs to find shortcuts and ways to simplify complex thought in order to handle the load. The ability is never unlimited. When thinking is complex enough a mistake will occur. This is a law of the nervous system. (The implications here will explain some of the irrational theories that are floating around in physics. Until some of the interim steps are correctly simplified, the theories at the extreme will be susceptible to a mistake that feels like it is correct. That the physical world is not created with language and so uses math that is not limited in dimensions of expression, but that language is limited to a form that is two-dimensional in the expression of a series of sounds in a line of time, is reason for a number of conflicts in logic and stress to occur in trying to make sense of the world using language - language of words or language of mathematics both being restricted in the same way. For this reason it is more common for great discoveries to be thought of first in animations or pictures rather than words because non-language thought can achieve conceptual breakthroughs more easily than language thought. Most people are so bound to language in their thinking that they have no conception of non-language thought but such thought is very common among theoretical mathematicians and other autistic-type people.)
Read my essay : Factors in the brain are mathematically very much like the evolution of a mud swamp for more about this subject.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
