Are Geniuses Born or Made?
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Is there a way to bring out the genius within all of us? In this interview with The New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer as part of Big Think’s partnership with 92Y’s Seven Days of Genius series, neuroscientist Joy Hirsch explores the connections in our brain that make us different and whether people like Einstein are born geniuses or develop from blank slates.
This is the latest installment in an exclusive, week-long video series of today’s brightest minds exploring the theory of genius. Exclusive videos will be posted daily on youtube.com/bigthink throughout 92nd Street Y’s second annual 7 Days of Genius Festival: Venture into the Extraordinary, running March 1 to March 8, 2015.
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JOY HIRSCH:
Joy Hirsch, Professor of Psychiatry and of Neurobiology, has established and directs the Research in the Brain Function Laboratory at Yale University. According to its website, Research in the Brain Function Laboratory has “made fundamental contributions to understanding the neural processes for cognitive control that enable flexible goal directed behaviors including the resolution of conflict”.
Dr. Hirsch joined Yale from Columbia and, before that, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Weill College of Medicine at Cornell University where she founded the fMRI laboratory and pioneered the introduction of brain-mapping procedures for neurosurgical planning. Using fMRI, her laboratory made fundamental contributions to the understanding of sensation and perception, language and the cognitive processes, and brain regions that are modified by specific drugs. These initial studies were built upon research done by Dr. Hirsch as a professor at Yale University School of Medicine, where she focused on the cortical mechanisms directly involved in human visual processing, serving as a foundation to connect the advantages of fMRI to ongoing and new research directions at Columbia University.
Hirsch is also a curator of The Brain: The Inside Story on view at the American Museum of Natural History.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Carl Zimmer: We’re learning ways to perturb the brain and I’m just wondering do you think someday that people will be sort of enhancing kind of “natural” creativity to get people to be more like what we think of as geniuses or is that just not possible?
Joy Hirsch: I love the idea of the vision that there’s a way to bring out the genius in all of us. And I wish that there was a way that in our educational system that we could develop ways to promote creativity. We do actually. We’re pretty good at it, but we could be better. That we could teach people to take risk in education. We could value more the person that takes the path that is not the common path. I think we as a society are pretty good at that, but we could be a lot better. And I think that that’s one of the values of studying or thinking about genius. It’s a way for us to think about, “Gee, let’s get better at this creative business. Let’s find that creative spirit in all of us. Let’s move forward faster.”
Carl Zimmer: I think sometimes people think about the brain as kind of a shortcut to all these sorts of problems, you know. If we could just understand the brain, then we can just go right in there and just fix things directly whereas it is easy to forget that, you know, education itself alters the brain.
Joy Hirsch: Exactly. I think that we have to think about brains in the context of our society. One of the things about genius, I think, it’s not just an individual or just a brain. It’s about opportunity. It’s about somebody who is given the pathway to actually make a contribution. Think of our musicians that most of us would consider geniuses — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart. These are people that were put in positions that allowed them to be creative. The creative spirit comes with many things other than just a brain I think. It comes with opportunity. It comes with resources. It comes with attitude. Again I like the idea of not thinking of it as something that targets an individual and separates them, but something that joins us together as a quality that belongs to all of us.
Carl Zimmer: Well because it is true that when people talk about geniuses they are other. They’re almost freakish…
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