Smart, weird personalities, mutations, temporal lobe epilepsy, etc.

My comment from here, https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/more-theory/:






I wonder if in some cases very bright people are responding to rewards of the weird modern world, being more capable of adjusting to novelty (if that Kanazawa theory is right, I don’t know if it is), and therefore looking weird to normal people, e.g. Asperger-like behavior.




Another angle–I’ve heard of cases where people had some brain damage that lead them to having some odd changes that were useful–a sudden ability to play music, or a facility with math. Not common so don’t go hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. I forget if the cause was some kind of dis-inhibition of some other brain system or some compensation or what. Maybe mutations do that sometimes.




It’s a bit like temporal lobe epilepsy–you wouldn’t want it and in most cases it doesn’t seem to help people, but possibly Dostoevsky had it, and he made great contributions. I can’t recall if someone suggested Philip K Dick had it as well, but he fits the bill as far as I know.




There’s this fun paper, “FRONTOTEMPORAL AND DOPAMINERGIC CONTROL OF IDEA GENERATION AND CREATIVE DRIVE” that looks at disease of parts of the brain that produce different creative/intellectual behaviors, so maybe mutations affecting particular parts of the brain would work in line with the model proposed in that paper.
I don't recall where I read Dostoevsky may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, but possibly that is from the book, "The Midnight Disease"--which I didn't think to mention in the original comment. The link to the paper mentioned:  “FRONTOTEMPORAL AND DOPAMINERGIC CONTROL OF IDEA GENERATION AND CREATIVE DRIVE”

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