How normal kills genius

I just watched an excellent documentary on Channel 4 about Alan Turing (Britain’s Greatest Code-breaker). Who? I hear you ask. Having studied mathematics for a few years in college I had, of course, come across Turing, but I’d guess he’s not as well known as Einstein, for example, or Steve Jobs. Yet I ‘m sure that everyone out there is benefiting from Turing’s creative genius.

Turing (1912-1954) invented computers. And artificial intelligence. Ok, so he didn’t make a PC, or anything that you would recognize as a computer. And he didn’t build a walking talking thinking android. What he did do was conceive, in a radical move, of a machine that could perform any mathematical computation that could be represented by an algorithm. This paved the way to what we know today as a computer.

We also have cause to be grateful to Turing for his work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. You’ve heard of that place, haven’t you? And the Enigma machine? If not, suffice it to say that Turing’s prowess in code-breaking saved a lot of lives when he made it possible for British Intelligence to decipher German commands to their naval units.

Have you ever seen Blade Runner ? I always believed that this movie was based on the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, but what I hadn’t realized was that the test for androidism was based on the Turing Test, a test developed to distinguish a hypothetical artificial intelligence from human intelligence. And you know those annoying little captchas that pop up and you have to try and decipher a few strange looking letters when you are on the Internet? According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing), those are a reverse form of the Turing test to show that you are a human and not a computer.

But what has all this got to do with “How normal kills genius?” Well, unfortunately for humankind, Turing was not normal. He might have got away with just being a bit eccentric, but he was also homosexual. At that time, this was not only regarded as being abnormal, it was also a criminal offence. When a chain of circumstances led to him being charged, he chose organotherapy, or chemical castration, rather than go to prison. There is much evidence that genius is related to a very delicate chemical balance in the brain, so pumping him full of hormones had a very negative impact on his creativity. He never recovered, and committed suicide, quite probably when he realized what he had lost.

He also did some seminal work on morphogenic fields, that he never got to take any further. Who knows what else we are missing out on?

Manic depression is also strongly implicated with genius and creativity (you can read more about this in The Voice that Thunders by Alan Garner [http://tinyurl.com/7jhgb5l ]), and many writers have chosen to live with it (or die) rather than take the highly effective lithium and become “normal.”

John Nash (made famous in A Beautiful Mind) brought us game theory, a radical new theory that underlies modern economics and for which he got a Nobel Prize. He suffered from delusional schizophrenia, and efforts were made to make him “normal.”

I wonder what Leonardo da Vinci would have been treated for if he were alive today. Another radical mind, if ever there was one. At the very least they would have got him for writing backwards, I suppose. But it is interesting to think how much humanity may have missed out on over the centuries by trying to make people who stand out and think differently conform to the norm.