Are Geniuses Born or Made? A Conversation with Dr. Joy Hirsch | Big Think.

You know, 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 quote unquote, natural creativity to get people to be more like what we think of as geniuses? Or is that just not possible? 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, we could develop ways to promote creativity. We do, actually. We're pretty good at it, but we could be better. We can teach people to take risks 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; we could be a lot better.

Mm-hmm. 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, "Chi, let's get better this creative business; let's find that creative spirit in all of us." All right, let's move forward faster. I think sometimes people think about the brain as kind of a shortcut to all these sorts of problems. You know, if we just understand the brain, then we can just go right in there and just fix things directly, whereas it's easy to forget that education itself alters the brain.

Exactly. I think that you have to think about brains in the context of our society. One of the things about genius, I think, is not just an individual gift; it's about opportunity. It's about somebody who has been given the pathway to actually make a contribution. Think of our art musicians that most of us would consider geniuses—like 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 from the opportunity; it comes with resources and sometimes with an 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. Hmm, well, because it is true that when people talk about geniuses, they are almost freakish. Exactly. And I think that that attitude really deters people from taking the risk. When Sedona led sword, the genius term is often associated with the person that really changes the way we think—it could be something that didn't exist before, that changes the course of our progress in some fundamental way. So that person, by his or her nature, stands out and is different.

And yet, all of us are different in our creative sphere, and that by incorporating the creative person into the mainstream, it might be a way to encourage more creativity in a way. You know, you've been talking a lot about the things that neuroscientists can't tell us about genius. We want easy answers, and we think, "Oh, the easy answers are on the brain." And you're kind of warning us like, "Well, we neuroscientists, we don't know all that much; the brain is a complicated thing, and it's a social thing too."

So, I mean, what do you think that neuroscientists can do to help us understand genius better? I mean, what are the kinds of studies that you think would be like the best ones to do to make us understand genius as you think of it? I think that in general, the study of individual differences is a really interesting direction to take. Differences in, say, there's some people that have extraordinary memory, and we can design experiments to look at the neural circuitry that's associated with memory strategies, and we learn something about what makes one person better at memorizing things than another.

There are differences in how well we do mathematics and how well we can put things together, and understanding the rules for those differences is important. For example, one of the things that neuroscientists have taught us recently is that the parts of the brain are also richly interconnected, and the extent to which they are connected has a great deal to do with function. So we're talking about, say, a patch of cortex over here and...