High Cognitive Minds

There are times when I find it impossible to write. More accurately, it's almost impossible to think in an organized, coherent way.  Either there are too many ideas swirling around in my mind, competing for attention, or I'm mentally burned out and can barely think at all. And I wonder whether there's a sense in which mental burnout is real and not just a more or less meaningless figure of speech? I wish I understood what's going on in there.

Intellectually gifted people get used to being told "you think too much," and maybe that's part of the problem. We not only think a lot, we also tend to think about thinking, which sometimes leads nowhere useful and burns up energy that could better be used in other endeavors. Is my mind running away with itself because I have Attention Deficit Disorder or is that just one of the penalties of having an unusually active brain? Have I dropped into a temporary mental limbo because my brain is exhausted from so much hard work, or am I depressed? Am I totally engrossed with my current project because that's a pre-requisite for creativity or because I'm a geek, and if I'm a geek is it because I'm a person with Asperger's? Where does one draw the line in determining what's a disability and what is merely a trait that needs to be understood and managed?

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Here are a few excerpts from an excellent article about Leonardo da Vinci, by Michael Bywater. The pedestal that we place certain people on leads us to think that they have qualities that we lack. The truth is that some of these qualities are common in the intellectually gifted, to one extent or another. Even if we have not have developed them, even if we have failed to recognize their existence, they are there, dormant and waiting. Few people have the capacity to reach Leonardo's heights of creativity, but we can probably accomplish far more than we give ourselves credit for.

"Few artists exert such a hold on the public cultural imagination; the man from Vinci remains in a class of his own. And it is we, of course, who put him there. Why?

"One reason is that he was different. To us, he seems an artist who uniquely straddled the worlds of individual creativity and rational science. He detected similarities and metonyms in the physical world, depicted them and worked upon them with forensic skill. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis: Leonardo was a master of the visual dialectic. His work does not just offer us a world-view, nor (whatever Dan Brown's readers may believe) create clever puzzles for the illuminati. It engages us in argument in the clear, rational light of day - and his conclusions are written upon the modern world."

"In one of Leonardo's more charming observations, he notes the similarity between tresses of hair and flowing water, and draws both to show us. If we then read Ovid, we see Arethusa's tresses enveloped in the stream. It seems to us that Ovid is seeing, impossibly, through Leonardo's eyes. Leonardo influences not just the future, but the past. True, it is our personal construction of the past; but is there any other sort?

"All art, all texts, can have this effect, but Leonardo is more potent than most because of his "genius". This characteristic has been described as the ability to see similarities where mere talent sees only differences - a defining characteristic of Leonardo's work. Arguably, judging by his notebooks, his art was the by-product of his observation of the world, rather than the world being a repository of potential art. His curiosity forces him not only to notice the similarity between water and hair but to look for the reason."

"Leonardo's defining achievement was not his art, but his rare ability to look closely at the world and see it as it is. Most of us cannot."

www.newstatesman.com/Ideas/200609180034