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-------------------------------------------------------------------- As part of Big Think's partnership with 92Y's Seven Days of Genius series, New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer asks Heather Berlin about the research that illuminates our understanding of genius. There's a societal conflation between madness and genius that Berlin says is unnecessary, yet there is truth in that highly successful, creative people may benefit from the byproducts of disorders like OCD. She also recalls what she learned from viewing Einstein's brain. 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 throughout 92nd Street Y’s second annual 7 Days of Genius Festival: Venture into the Extraordinary, running March 1 to March 8, 2015 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HEATHER BERLIN: Dr. Berlin conducts research to better understand the neural basis of impulsivity, compulsivity, and emotion with the goal of more targeted treatment. She employs neuroimaging and neuropsychological and psychopharmacological testing of brain lesion and compulsive, impulsive, and personality disorder patients. She is also interested in the neural basis of consciousness and dynamic unconscious processes. Dr. Berlin has conducted clinical research at hospitals in both the US and UK including Bellevue Hospital and the Institute of Psychiatry in London. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: Carl Zimmer: It seems like when we talk about genius there is a sort of that creative capacity that we all have to some degree. But then there is the question of degree. So I mean do you think neuroscience is giving us some answers as to why some people have it and some people don’t? Heather Berlin: Well I think neuroscience and genetics as well. So recently there has been studies looking at like musical talent and it shows that there is actually a really large genetic component involved. And so I think when we see these people who are at the way, you know, top ends of – like three standard deviations out from the norm you’re looking at a combination between somebody who’s born with a particular predisposition to have a talent plus the practice. So for you maybe you can practice from now until tomorrow and you’ll only get to be so good as a concert pianist. But if you were doing that plus you had a genetic predisposition you might get to these really far extremes and people might call you genius. But it’s a combination of the two. I once went around the world and met these people called super humans who were like extraordinary in a particular domain. Carl Zimmer: Like what? Heather Berlin: Like, for example, a person with an extraordinary memory or who can withstand an enormous amount of pain. And there are all sorts of these things that are way outside the norm. A man who could hold his breath under water for 22 minutes which is actually amazing. And when you look at it and we did experiments on them it’s a combination of having a different physiology like so for instance the man who could hold his breath under water had a larger lung capacity. But then he practiced and learned meditation, learned how to slow his body’s metabolism and did all these other things that led him to hit this extreme. And it’s the same thing with cognitive capacity. So even IQ, right. It’s a measure of different cognitive aspects, you know, reasoning and verbal abilities. But with practice you can get to be the best within your biological constraints. Carl Zimmer: You know, you hear about genius being associated with some of these disorders like schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, these things. I mean do you think that they’re interrelated or do you think at the very least we could learn something about genius from looking at people who are dealing with these disorders? Heather Berlin: So yeah. I mean there’s a lot of controversy in this area because it’s not necessary to have some sort of, you know, psychopathology in order to be a genius. And a lot of people conflate these two ideas. Like the mad genius. And it happens that yeah, there are a lot of people who are very talented who also happen to have a mental disorder. A lot of the mental disorders are initially things that are adaptive. Like even OCD, you know, it’s good to sort of have structure and have certain rituals but when it gets to be extreme then it becomes problematic. So these are things that we all have that are adaptive .... To read the transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/videos/heather-berlin-on-genius-and-disorder