In our Time  Programme 74
Nature of Genius

Melvyn Bragg : Hello, "When true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that dunces are all in confederacy against him", so said Jonathan Swift, many people's choice for a genius himself. But what does that word really mean? Are geniuses born or made? And what are the circumstances necessary for the great leaps of consciousness that inspire the developments of science and art? Is it the old 99% perspiration  and 1% inspiration, or something the other way around. 

With me to discuss the quality of genius and the nature of inspiration is Arthur I Miller,  Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London and author of "Insights of Genius", also with us is Juliet Mitchell, psychoanalyst and author of "Madmen and Medusas", and Michael Howe, Professor of Psychology at Exeter University, and author of "Genius Explained". 

Arthur Miller, Albert Einstein said of his discovery of Relativity, quote, "There's no logical path to these laws, but only intuition, supported by the sympathetic  understanding of experience. " What do you think he meant by intuition there? Is that another word, as it were, for genius?

Arthur Miller : Well, intuition is a much-used, much misused term I should say, by intuition, one means,  and Einstein indeed discussed this point, that intuition is the sum total of past experiences. It seems as if great discoveries burst forth from his head just like that in an "a-ha" experience, but that's not the case. It's the case of a great deal of thought, a great deal of work that went into erm...his thought beforehand, a great deal of conscious work. 

Melvyn Bragg : But a lot of people do a great deal of conscious work and a lot of people do a great deal of conscious thought, but they don't discover what Einstein discovered. 

Arthur Miller : That's right, you can work as a physicist, you can work 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, and still not produce works like Einstein did, similarly for artists, similarly for musicians, I'm thinking of Picasso and Mozart, in sports the cases are manifold, you can play football 7 days a week, but not be a Pele. There is something that is inborn in these people, there's no doubt about it. Just as there can be physical freaks like the elephant man, for example, there's no reason why you should consider it to be amoral or unethical for their to be mental freaks. It is a fact that no matter what race or creed you are, we're not all born equal mentally. 

Melvyn Bragg : When Einstein said that intuition is not logical, does he mean more that it's counter to common sense?

Arthur Miller : Well, the word...the term "common sense" is often...is also often misused and misunderstood. By  "common sense" one means the common sense of heavier objects fall faster than light ones, for example, and indeed they do, but it took Galileo for example, after several thousand years from Aristotle to abstract to worlds in which there are vacuums in which all objects fall at the same acceleration, regardless of how much they weigh, and our common sense is then redefined by means of Galileo and Newtonian science, is redefined again through discoveries of Einstein and Relativity that space and time are relative, and then redefined again with discoveries in quantum theory, that atomic entities can be wave and particle simultaneously, something that's unimaginable, at first counter intuitive and later on becomes intuitive. Science is a way of continually redefining the notion of intuitivity. 

Melvyn Bragg :  So when you look at science, before I come to the others, you see that's a useful map from which to read, and get a bearing on the nature - if it exists at all - of genius, because of these...er first of all because of the counter-intuitive nature, so it it is almost entire...it is entirely to do with imagination, it's against common sense. Louis Wolpert's written very emphatically about that. 

Arthur Miller :  I entirely disagree with my colleague Lois, but.....

Melvyn Bragg :  Well, as he isn't here to disagree with you, we'd better it on one side there. But partly because we can look at theories that have come strongly forward. Michael Howe, where do you think these intuitions come from, that Professor Miller has been discussing. 

Michael Howe :  I think they come from all kinds of places, any kind of experience. I think what sometimes happened, is that ideas, as it were pop into someone's mind, and they seem, as it were, to come out of the blue from nowhere, but as Arthur said, they never come except in people who are tremendously well-prepared, who've been mulling over these things for a long, long time. 

I think I disagree with Arthur in saying that the fact that geniuses are special means that they are born with something special. Certainly they are very different, but I think to some extent it's possible that one can, out of a result of all one's experiences, end up being remarkably different from anyone else.  But to assume that must have been there from the beginning is possibly wrong. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Why d'you.....? Why do you demur at the idea that people can have uniqueness in their minds , when they have uniqueness in their fingerprints?

Michael Howe :  Oh they certainly can have uniqueness in their minds, but not all that uniqueness in a sense,  has to be a starting point. Yes people are born different, but I don't think that means they have to be born different in ways that in any sense sort of guarantees or provides a blue print that somehow at the time of birth you can select he will be a genius, she won't be a genius , and so on and so forth. 

I think what happens after birth is tremendously complicated and tremendously unpredictable, and I rather doubt we'll ever be in the state of affairs where you can look at someone's pattern of genetic materials and say, "Yes there's the genius in the future, and there's the non-genius". 

Melvyn Bragg :  But could you not track it back there? We're trying to get at the idea of genius, and you're very heavily inclined to say,  "Look, " as it were, "this is to do with the life you lead, this is to do with life experience, the things you build up" . To summarise extremely briefly that wonderful phrase of Newton's, how did he arrive at the theory of gravity, "by thinking on it continually", but if we are unique, if each person is unique, and if a lot of person get near the ideas, as we see quite clearly in science, but don't actually click on, isn't it the genetic uniqueness that might make that infinitesimal difference, that means that you get or you don't get, is that not a component is all I'm asking?

Michael Howe :  I think it's in the range of things that are possible, but I would say not necessarily true. I think.....I think one can account for these differences in alternative ways. I don't think for example you can draw any clear dividing line between say geniuses and non-geniuses.  I mean if you're trying to rank the worlds greatest soccer players, there isn't some point at which you can say "Yes these are the really exceptional genius one's and these are the ordinary ones", there's more of a  gradation, and I think.....

Melvyn Bragg :  Yeah but I can say Pele's a genius and you're not!

Michael Howe :  Yes you can, but I mean....

Melvyn Bragg :  On...in soccer. 

Michael Howe :  But if you rank everyone, where do you put Beckham?  Where d'you put someone else. I don't think they fall into sort of natural neat categories. 

Melvyn Bragg : No , but that's why science is quite a good map, because people do arrive at things in science. Newton "arrived" at his theory, Darwin "arrived"...so that's a better map than football . We've heard quite enough about football to day anyway!  It's a better map than football. Juliet Mitchell where do you stand? 

We seem to be getting towards and intuition versus experience, almost the old thing,  perspiration/ inspiration argument. Can you give us your resume of your position on that?

Juliet Mitchell :  Well I would agree with Arthur that intuition is accumulated experience . But as he was talking,  I was thinking about...it's had slightly interesting history in the last 30 years. About 30 years ago it wasn't the good word it is now, it was rather applied to women,  not to men, you know "Oh women are intuitive, they're really good with children" etc "because they've got....", and then if you pressed it, perhaps it was because they'd got experience, but really it was something to do with feminine soul or feminine character. It's become a good term, relatively recently, it used to be opposed to intellect, which men had , as it were. Now it's seen to be part of the scientific enterprise, part of the creative dimension, the imaginative dimension , in particular science I think and of genius. So I'm interested in that shift, because certainly it....the...the adaptation or the adoption perhaps I should say of intuition for genius has not gone along with the adoption of finding an awful lot of women geniuses, of course there are some, but it has remained predominantly a term used of...you say it's ethnically diverse, it's not really very ethnically diverse, nor is it very gender diverse, it's still slightly the monopoly of a white Western population, and historically to...

Melvyn Bragg : But it's a white Western population that's left us a lot of evidence, so...it's useful to look at that...

Juliet Mitchell :  It is. 

Melvyn Bragg :  I mean I agree it's partial, and I agree it doesn't apply multi-ethnically, it doesn't apply globally, it does apply across genders as much as it should, but it is a bag of evidence, and we can put our hands into that bag and get things out. Now what do you get out? You for instance...would you say Freud was a genius....I know you're...you've made enormous studies of Freud....

Juliet Mitchell :  Well I would. 

Melvyn Bragg : ....and if so, can you tell us why you think specifically that you've come to the conclusion that he's a genius?

Juliet Mitchell : Okay, I could...I can do that, I want to say though that I'm slightly going against what I think is important here, because what I think is....

Melvyn Bragg : Well I don't want you to do that....

Juliet Mitchell : Okay, okay!

Melvyn Bragg : ....I really don't, I'm not encouraging you to go...

Juliet Mitchell : So, what I think is....

Melvyn Bragg : ...what you think is important, please say, because we'd all like to know!

Juliet Mitchell :  I think we have an historically specific idea of a genius which does come from the last 2-300 years, from....your quotation of Swift is about, sort of on the cusp of deciding a genius is to do with the individual. Before that, I think we can look back retrospectively and of course see Galileo and St Augustine or whoever it might be as a genius, but I think the concept was slightly different before that. Even the term was different. I mean it...genius in Shakespeare's time meant much more..the particular quality of something...like the genius of the place, or his genius was rebuked as Mark Anthony's was Caesar, you know there's something special about you, which wasn't exactly the same quality of imaginative persistence beyond what in Arthur's words "common sensical" to see something anew. I think genius is seeing something anew, that you....

Melvyn Bragg : And being the only person to do it at the time?

Juliet Mitchell : Yes, at the time. I mean I just happened to turn on the programme on Humboldt last night and I was fascinated how he was eclipsed by Darwin, but in fact had seen something very new, which really has led to the sort of ecological studies we do now, but it was about plant geography etc, but it...so genius can get eclipsed by another genius that comes later, and becomes the dominant para...his becomes the dominant paradigm. So I mean there are many hidden geniuses I suspect. So it is somebody who sees something special and different uniquely at that time. 

Melvyn Bragg : Do you think we can see that in - to come back to the innateness - we'll move on to other arguments later in this discussion but, just to round this up, do you think that this can be spotted in early childhood?

Arthur Miller : Well, we have cases and counter-cases, Einstein for example was a total cipher when he was in the patent office, he was a middle level civil servant, struggling through a very difficult marriage, living in cramped quarters in Berne,  Switzerland, and suddenly in...only in his late 20s did he become accepted  as a genius, and he sat...as we recall, he sat in the patent office from 1902 to 1909, four years past - Special Relativity. Looking at Mozart on the other hand, Mozart was...there's no doubt about it, I mean Professor Howe, I must say this that I totally disagree with you, that Mozart,  you have to at least say he was a prodigy to have performed, to have composed the symphonies he did in 1764 and 1765 when he was 8 and 9 years old, which had new forms of chromatic variations,  of changes of mood within sets, that was something totally new, this was done by an 8 or 9 year old child, and then I mean, well, there are signs that this person may well be...may well produce great pieces of work which he did. 

Melvyn Bragg : Michael Howe, how do you evaluate those two..let's...those two examples, those two bits of evidence that Arthur Miller's given you?

Michael Howe : Mozart certainly was a prodigy, but I think you could really make a case that Einstein was a prodigy. He didn't do the kinds of things that were on display in the way that Mozart did. There wasn't anything that the outside world could see. But if you look at what Einstein was reading, I believe he was reading Kant when he was 12, and that kind of thing, he probably was very remarkable indeed.  But then on the other hand you can easily point to young people who appear to have been totally unremarkable until well into sort of adolescence, like Darwin for example. Darwin seemed to be a very ordinary child, he very gradually got interested in Natural History, he became a little bit more systematic,  a little bit more deliberate about it, and somewhere around the age of 20-21, one or two people started thinking of Darwin as actually being quite bright, although his family didn't have that perception until very late on. Eventually he did wonderful things, and then people said "Well maybe he bright after all", but there was never any early signs of it. 

Melvyn Bragg : So what do you draw from this though? I mean we seem to be....there are two lots of evidence here, very neatly put, there's been one completely contradicting...on the whole we have some people that we might...to whom - if we're going to use the word "genius" at all - we'll apply the word genius to them, who had reasonably ordinary normal childhoods, if anybody has that, and on the whole we have people who are geniuses who had extraordinary, quite remarkable childhoods, is there....can you draw anything from that? Or are you just....do you shrug your shoulders and say "This is an open-ended discussion and it's nice to go on the journey, but there's no end"?

Michael Howe : No indeed, I think that's the whole crux of the problem. I mean I don't think there are any specific defining qualities of genius, qualities of the person. One can talk about qualities of what they produce, their achievement, we can say they're more original, they're more creative, they're more clever than whatever, and I think when we call people genius, as I say in my book, what we're really doing we're not actually describing the person on the basis of anything we know about their measurable qualities, we are acknowledging, we are in a sense almost rewarding or providing an accolade, because we see this as a person who has done something, we think it is remarkable, it is creative, it is original or whatever, and we then find ourselves calling that person a genius. 

Melvyn Bragg :  What's your psychological take on the idea of...the correlation between a childhood and genius, from the way you come at it, Juliet Mitchell?

Juliet Mitchell : Well,  I think I want to say it's because we conceive of people having childhoods that we also conceive of individuals being geniuses. In other words it's not what type of childhood you have so much , as the fact that we are so concerned with nurturing the child, that we can then...

Melvyn Bragg :  As a species you mean?

Juliet Mitchell :  As a..spe....as..as..as, well as, no as a particular Western group, in a sense at a time in history.  If you think about say the Middle Ages, you think about people really being apprentices, and even Mozart in some sense is on that cusp between apprentice in the 18th century, between apprenticeship and and the individual childhood, I mean you're learning something taught by  the person who is the master builder or the master craftsman of whatever it might be. It's when we get childhood being so developmentally important, I think that we get allied with that the growth of this individual concept of genius. I mean genius has to involve achievement,  it can't just be prodigy, I mean prodigy is something that's stopped short of genius. Genius has to be achievement. Now under sort of cultures of apprenticeship, we might take Chinese science or something like that, it's much more an apprenticeship model, Chinese art, more particularly in fact, you won't get so much the individual genius, as a group of people who produce extraordinary work, or a line of people who produce extraordinary work, Chinese artists at a certain period and things. But in the West, in the last 400 years, we've had this terrific emphasis on the child, and the individual child, and therefore we tend to think, "Well, what particular childhood has produced this person who has become a genius and achieved something?", and I think it's just childhood itself, we can't really say that's it's a particular way in which somebody was brought up or not brought up, or particular hardships, or particular gifts er..strengths that they were given in their childhood. It's the fact that we give so much attention to childhood that I think has led to this concept, and indeed in a sense the creation almost of the individual genius, rather than the line of gen...of people who are incredibly accomplished. 

Melvyn Bragg :   Before we move on, away from the innate and intuitive, one more piece of evidence is this...the study of Einstein's brain in Canada, Sandra Whittlestone, an American neuroscientist found it had unusual characteristics, the parietal lobes which are concerned with mathematical ability for instance, were bigger than normal, and a deep groove that normally runs across the lobe was smooth, she thought that meant that Einstein's brain was predisposed to be good at mathematical concepts. Now is this...does this lead to the notion that well he was born with a brain like that? Or you have a different idea Michael Howe, but what's your first take on that Arthur Miller?

Arthur Miller : Well, lots of mathematicians probably have brains like that, I don't think it proves anything, maybe the groove was smooth because a lot of good ideas passed through, I don't know, but erm....

Melvyn Bragg : So you think it's a meaningless assumption?

Arthur Miller :  I think it's a meaningless assumption, it's the same sort of assumption that if you work hard you produce great pieces of work, which simply is not true. 

Melvyn Bragg :  So the shape of the brain, the distinction of the brain compared with her control group which was very distinguished, very distinctive from her control group, this is of no importance in this discussion?

Arthur Miller :  Well, it's one more...well I call it one more tile in a mosaic that is creativity and genius, it maybe mean something, but it's not the whole story. 

Michael Howe : No, I think it is significant, but I think that one is talking about how Einstein's brain ended up, and I think we have to be a bit careful not to assume that it must have in a sense, started life in that way, and there is all kinds of evidence suggesting you can get massive structural changes in bone...brain structure as a result of experience. I don't know enough about brains to know whether that could have been the case in the Einstein instance or not, but it certainly is possible with all kinds of changes. 

Juliet Mitchell : I think you see, he could have had that brain as a child, let's hypothesise that he did, but he could not have....he could easily not have ended up the genius he definitely was. I mean people with severe pathologies often are brilliant mathematicians, but they're not geniuses, they're just incredibly good at maths, but can't communicate in other ways, and they're every isolated and autistic people, and things, so...

Melvyn Bragg :  It's interesting that you just, quite straightforwardly and emphatically say "Einstein is the genius that he was"....

Juliet Mitchell : Yes. 

Melvyn Bragg :  You would...you will encounter, I'm sure you have encountered, scientists who would deny that one man, one person, one man or woman right, one person, can be responsible enough or intellectually capable enough to have done the big thing, the big one thing that changes the nature of science, be a Newton, be a Galileo, these people are the result of groups and movements going on, and if they hadn't done it, a 100 years later somebody else would have done it. What do you say to that notion that if they hadn't done it a few years later somebody else would have done it? Which is quite prevalent in the history of science at the moment. 

Juliet Mitchell :  It might well be true, I can't say that's not true, because Einstein did do it, if you see what I mean, I mean I think there's often....I mean Freud, you asked me about Freud earlier, I mean he said that the thing that was given to him, was to understand that dreams had a meaning, and that that was the great stroke of luck, as he say it, that he had, was to have that particular insight, and that he would never do anything  as good as that, hadn't done it before, and wouldn't do it afterwards. That was his moment of real insight, and I think that's where I'm placing genius if you like, somebody has some real insight, that changes the way we see things...

Melvyn Bragg :  And you think that....?

Juliet Mitchell :  ...and I think there are individuals, sorry, I think there are individuals....

Arthur Miller : Yes it's a very interesting case that you mentioned there Juliet, concerning Einstein and Poincaré for example. Here are two geniuses, beyond doubt, faced with the same empirical data, yet they ...and they formulated the same mathematical theory for those data, yet Einstein interpreted the mathematical theory as a theory of Relativity, and Poincaré as a theory of the electron, and Poincaré missed the boat, and made the difference there was an insight was an intuition in a very complex meaning of that word, in which Einstein brought in the concept of visual imagery, of thought experiments,  that's what made the difference, that's what broke the symmetry there. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Mmm. Do you think that individuals can make this....a difference to the extent that they can be called geniuses? That had they not done that, that would not have happened. We can see it in art more interestingly than science as it were, because we can say had Shakespeare not existed we would not have had Shakespeare. Now we wouldn't have known we'd not have had Shakespeare, but we wouldn't have...he alone could do that, although of course he was living at a time when he was faced with... he was educated...well we know all that, but still there was him, doing that, er... do you think that applies...do you think there's a distinction between art and science in that respect?

Michael Howe :  Yes because art by it's nature is more variable and there isn't a right answer, there isn't a distinctive answer. In science I think it's more a matter if X hadn't been along, someone else would have had a similar pattern of ideas, maybe 20 years later, maybe 50 years later. 

But I do think we have to remember that none of these people are in a sense, striking out entirely on their own, they're not absolutely, totally original, and to use a phrase which you've used, the idea of "giant's shoulders". All people who make major creative achievements, and to the best of my knowledge are very well prepared by knowing exactly what everyone has done before. They collect the information assiduously, and even the kinds of people who seem at first to be sort of working as sort of isolated geniuses, and example being for example, the Wright brothers, they...the sort of myth is that they were beavering away, they were these bicycle mechanics and suddenly they sort of hit upon the invention of powered flight.  But if you look at the actual details of what was happening, they went to enormous pains to make themselves very well informed about what everyone else was doing, and it was only as a result of that, that they were certainly making a big contribution on their own, but they didn't do it all alone as it were. 

Melvyn Bragg : You brought in the idea of dreams, Juliet Mitchell, can we talk now about  inspiration in a way? And dreams do ...have played a part in that....well it has been recorded anyway,  Coleridge's opium dream with "Kublai Khan", and the other week on In Our Time, we  were discussing the periodic table, and Medeleyev's dream about the periodic table and so on and so forth. What relationship do you bring between those two?

Juliet Mitchell : I'm going to have to tie that up with something I wanted to say in relation to the others, which is that, I think we're leaving out a very important component of what I think Arthur and I are certainly content to call "something of genius" in some people, and that is the ability to persist with looking at mistakes. Mistakes are terribly important in the work of a genius, that they recognise that something is not right with what they've thought, not just with what other people have thought, but what they've thought, and they persist with mistakes, and they treasure their mistakes, and work with those, so it's not just this nice inspiration and intuition, it's actually something...a dogged persistence with looking at the mistakes, going on with the....you know, through the mistake as it were, to the other side of the mistake, and I think inspiration in a way does come into that, and dreaming comes into that, because dreaming as I see it, as psychoanalysts see it, is really only another from of thinking, it's another way we think, it's a way that's not accessible to conscious thinking, it's an unconscious form of thought, of...where in a sense we sort of churn over what we've been thinking in the day or last month or even last year, but represent it to ourselves somehow in a different form, and because it is presented in a different form, when we then come to look at it and think about what we've dreamt about, we see something else in a different pattern, in a different shape. So dreams really give us a different way of looking at the same world. They're a different way of thinking the same thoughts, but they are...it is only a way of thinking, an unusual way of thinking, that's exactly what the genius needs, as it were, is that unusual way of thinking, so dreaming's extremely important for our geniuses, so to speak, because it's there that they can see there's another pattern to whatever it is they're looking at. There's another way of thinking about it, it's an alternative mode. 

Arthur Miller : If I may continue on that?

Melvyn Bragg :  Absolutely, briefly because that was very well explained, and we've got lots of other points to cover, but yeah, yes, please do. 

Arthur Miller :  Yes there is an interesting model of thought of problem solving, which is actually rooted in Poincaré of conscious thought, unconscious thought, illumination, hopefully that is, and then verification, and part of unconscious thought is dreaming, it's being...it's preparing the mind by hard work on a problem, and then some how or another things come together, there in parallel, yet interacting lines of thought, and very much in the William James sense of streams of thought occur.  One has the great thought...Einstein's two great thought experiments for example, thought experiments by Bohr and Heisenberg. The genius is somebody who is able to bring together  fields that are apparently disparate, and somehow or another, through a great deal of preparation of course, the thought crystallises, out of that. 

Michael Howe :  Can I just add, I mean the ideas of sort of Daniel Dennet the philosopher, sort of have a big bearing of course on what you're saying, and he has the idea of what one is aware of or conscious of at a time as being rather, a sort of rather....rather like a narrow beam of light, but one's mind or one's brain is doing a lot of work at any one time, but what one can be conscious of, in a sense, is only a small sample of it, and sometimes there will be in a sense, a shift in the direction of the beam, so that we suddenly sort of become aware of something else that our minds have been working on, and the impression to us is like an idea coming out of nowhere or possibly even coming out of a dream. 

That's not because our minds haven't been doing it, but because we are shifting consciousness in a way that is not totally under our control, and some people I think are sort of rather fluent at doing that.  Their minds will go from one thing to another, and they have this illusion or this impression that somehow this idea suddenly came to them, but it never happens of course, unless someone...one person is very well prepared and has been thinking and mulling over a problem and so on and so forth, and when ever you get these stories of people having ideas that come to them in dreams or very sudden intuitions, they always tend to be people who have been working very hard and ruminating and thinking about things. The theory of Evolution would never have come to me for example, it only came to Einstein, er Relativity. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Can I go, Professor Miller, to Immanuel Kant, would you say that he in some way defined or began to define the way we now think of genius, and if so could you explain why?

Arthur Miller : Well I think he began...he defined certain methods which have led to great scientific discoveries, I don't think his definition of genius is something that is....that was far reaching at any rate. The point I'm trying to make here is Kant's discussion of visual thinking. There were two kinds of visual thinking, there is  visual thinking using visual images that we've abstracted from phenomena that we've actually witnessed in the world in which we move, those are called "visualisations" and then there's another kind of visual imagery called "visualisability" which is the readily graspable in the visualisation, it's the intrinsic properties of objects that exist, whether we see, that is to say...or make measurements on those objects or not. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Could you give a couple of examples there?

Arthur Miller : Yeah, I think the best example...one of the good examples one can give of this is if you sprinkle iron filings on a piece of paper and then hold it above a bar magnet they will immediately snap into lines, what are called "magnetic lines of force", that's...that is a visualisability, that is a crude measure of the magnet, whether you make measurements on it or not. Then what one does it to abstract from that visualisability to magnetic lines of force which permeate all of space, which is what Michael Faraday did, and that is a visualisation. What happened in Quantum Physics is that this hierarchy, that is to say, a visualisation being higher than a visualisability had to be flipped around, because what you want to do in Quantum Physics is to....the great breakthrough made by Bohr and Heisenberg was to find the way to construct...to generate visual images of entities that are beyond your sense perceptions, because they're both particle and wave at the same time. 

Melvyn Bragg :  So then....

Arthur Miller :  That I think is the great contribution that Kant made, as Einstein put it, "Every scientist has his own convenient Kant", and that is the way that scientists interpreted Kant. 

Michael Howe : One of the reasons that I'm less than happy with Kant's idea that geniuses are very separate, very special, almost a separate breed, not just special in what they can do, but sort of inherently special, is that I think this in a sense, cuts us off sometimes from learning from geniuses. I do think that there's a huge amount that we can learn from the experience of geniuses, and the insights of geniuses, and yes geniuses are very different in what they achieve, but I think in the way they go about what they achieve, they are not so very different, and there's an awful lot of what they do that has relevance for ordinary people, and the more we learn about how geniuses do what they do, the more we can learn to do things ourselves, which obviously aren't so wonderful as what they do, but nevertheless maybe worthwhile.  

Juliet Mitchell : I think....sorry....

Arthur Miller :  Well...

Melvyn Bragg :  Sorry, Juliet Mitchell...?

Juliet Mitchell : I think I want to sort of not exactly take issue, but to ask some questions about this visualisation and visibility, because I think it does privilege seeing, in your work generally, privilege is seeing in a way that I'm not sure I quite agree with. I think I want to privilege perhaps something we haven't discussed yet, which is modes of identification with the object one is looking at, and I'm thinking for example of the description that the scientist Barbara McClintock, the geneticist gave of how she worked. Now she did, as Arthur would say, she looked and she looked, I mean she looked down a microscope at her maize grains and maize cells and looked at the structure of those cells for God knows how many years, I mean but she looked down a microscope, but every so often she would go outside the lab, sit on a piece of grass, close her eyes and to me that's what she was doing, was sort of Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquillity", she was having a time from which her intense active excited looking down a microscope, had to be sort of absorbed, and during that process of absorption, of assimilation as she sat with her eyes closed, she got in among her own - this is her own sort of paraphrase of her own description - she got in among the maize cells, to see the genetic patterns, and sort of became one, and thought, "Well, what would I do, if I were that maize...that germ cell in that maize, in what way would I go?",  and it's this ability I think to have a very particular controlled - I'm not using it in a sloppy sense - but controlled form of identification of the object that you're looking at, that seems to me to be absolutely crucial ability, and to break boundaries, which again takes us back to our.....to inspiration and dreams, that what you do in that, is you break your human boundaries, and become identified with something other than yourself. 

Melvyn Bragg : Would you like to respond to that?

Arthur Miller : Yes, the point I'm making with respect to Kantian notions of visual imagery is the great importance of visual imagery in scientific discovery, particularly in the German cultural milieu, in which most of the great discoveries were made in the 20th century, well the first third of the 20th century let's say. It jumps right out of the scientific papers, the terms...the German terms unschauen, and unshauleipfkreit (sp??) leap right out. People are worried about how to represent nature visually. Now you're quite right in what you said about imagining what it would be like to be in various situations, and indeed one of Einstein's great thought experiments, in fact the experiment....the thought experiment with which he begins the Relativity paper, are the experiences of two observers, one riding on a wire loop, and the other riding on a magnet, they're in relative motion, and he discusses how they interpret the process of how the...of how an electrical current is generated in the wire loop, and Einstein - the very first sentence in the Relativity paper -Einstein notes that contemporaneous electromagnetic theory leads to asymmetries that do not occur in nature. It's an aesthetic judgement that he's making, and he wants to relate the experiences of these two observers, and show a way that one can get rid of this particular asymmetry, which is a redundancy in explanation, and let me just make a short comment - that geniuses are able - in art and science - are able to make great advances by discovering new aesthetics. Picasso did it with cubism, Einstein did it in Relativity. They discover new forms of aesthetics and show that their are, so to speak, laws of nature, behind them,  or new ways to see- in quotes "see" appearances....reality behind appearances. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Can I go to the last lap of this programme to talk about a commonly held view, that genius is akin to madness, and that these things have something in common? And you've written Juliet Mitchell about the great anxiety,  (indistinct ) seeds creativity, and you've written about Freud's paper on Dostoievsky, in that direction, but can you just briefly tell us about the relationship you see between anxiety, stroke, into, perhaps one might use the word madness, and singular creativity that we're beginning to call genius?

Juliet Mitchell : Yes I think it does have to do with this question of boundaries. I mean we see the world in bounded terms, we have to in order to go on, and genius is going to cross and change those boundaries, we can call it as Arthur has just done "a new aesthetic" that results from it, because you're making new shapes, new boundaries, but that is also what happens in madness. You go through previously conceived boundaries, and it's very frightening. Madness is very very frightening until  you're right in it and no longer because that's where you are, so to speak, I mean you're just mad. But the edge of breaking through a boundary is one in which you feel extreme anxiety, and I think that any creative person, from just creativity right the way through to genius, I think there's a lot of creativity in everybody as it were, but at the those moments before somebody's is about to do some sort of creative act of some sort, and it can be anyone doing this, there's usually a high degree of anxiety, which has to be got through if the creativity is to come out the other side of it. 

Melvyn Bragg :  But how does this.....?

Juliet Mitchell : It's because of the breaking of boundaries. 

Melvyn Bragg :   Sorry yeah, but how does this particularly - to stick to our last here - how is this particularly distinguished in the case of genius? Because you've generalised it, and I quite agree with,  everybody's...dum de dum , but we're talking about genius here, so what is the specific nature of it in regard of this conv....in respect of this conversation?

Juliet Mitchell :  Perhaps it's the ability to tolerate feeling absolutely awful for longer periods of time! 

Melvyn Bragg :  Well lot's of people tolerate that.  

Juliet Mitchell :  Well I think.....yes okay, I don't think it's....yes, that's ...that's quite true. I think it's perhaps then to use that in a different way, to use that anxiety, so that it actually does against.....allow you to see a new pattern, that you, in that anxiety, rather as in dreams, you see a new way of thinking,  because your anxiety, in itself is like a type....a real anxiety, if you've ever had absolute real anxiety, it is like feeling mad, and to actually see that in that you see things differently, and I think that's what the genius can then pick up on. 

Melvyn Bragg :  One of the things that happens in terms of intense anxiety, that I've had, and I think that I've read about is that actually you see things more narrowly. You often...your vision becomes tunnel vision, and there's a withdrawal, and a concentration, rather than an expansion and elaboration, but that might be a particular, and  I'm certainly no genius, but I think that's....I still haven't got to the point there, but Michael Howe what about you?

Michael Howe : I think in doing creative things people tend to move far from what is safe and secure, they go out on a limb, they do things which are very solitary, and also often the fact that they're doing things with remarkable intensity. Quite a number of geniuses.....Bertrand Russell is one who said "I was working so hard and so intensely at something that I literally made myself ill", and there's a nice description of Isaac Newton by a contemporary who says, "When he was working, he studied so hard that were it not for the fact that occasionally he'd have to give himself a rest to attend to the sort of practical aspects of his experiments, if it wasn't for that he would have sort of killed himself by study",  and I think that sheer intensity and tension, combined with being very much on one's own, away from anything safe and secure, I think there are circumstances in that which are obviously circumstances not dissimilar to one's in which people have all sorts of mental difficulties. 

Melvyn Bragg : Yes a sort of rather trivial thought comes at my mind then (indistinct), and that is to say, that one of the reasons why people at Newton's time had to work so hard is because they had to do all the computing themselves! (Everyone sniggers) And if they had machines working for them as we have, just like....and so on and so forth, maybe that hard work would not have been necessary, so is that hard work part of genius, or was it just part of the slog to get there on account of they didn't have computers. 

Michael Howe : I think people do find ways of making things hard for them and in a sense, people who like challenges seem to go for what's difficult. 

Melvyn Bragg : Yes. 

Arthur Miller : Well, anxiety means something is going wrong, and it seems to be the case that....

Melvyn Bragg :  Does it?

Arthur Miller :  Yeah, I mean....

Melvyn Bragg : Why? I mean anxiety...

Arthur Miller :  It means you're stuck, and that was...... 

Melvyn Bragg :  No, but that doesn't necessarily, I....

Arthur Miller :  ...well, I'm talking about the case of, for example Picasso, and Einstein, and also many cases of Poincaré as well. There are generally two campaigns in a piece of creative work. The initial campaign and then you get stuck, and then comes the breakthrough, and what happens with.....

Melvyn Bragg :  But if you have enough breakthroughs, you could actually say to yourself, "Gosh I'm really anxious, I'm in a terrible state, I can't.....I must be onto something". 

Juliet Mitchell : Can I put it....? I think it's...... and emptying out of the ego. 

Melvyn Bragg : You know? So it could be very positive in that sense. 

Arthur Miller :   Let's talk about an actual example, in the....

Juliet Mitchell :  Can I put it a different way?

Melvyn Bragg :  No, No let.....finish...and then...

Juliet Mitchell :  Sorry. 

Arthur Miller :  In Picasso's sense he began (indistinct) d'Avignon  in March 1907, and towards the end of May, he was stuck he did not know how to proceed, and a key piece of information came to him,  that was available to others as well, but he took advantage of it. Similarly with Einstein, Einstein was stuck also on the Relativity paper. We know that, and we know he had conversations with a good friend which snapped everything into place. Poincaré in his first great discovery of so-called Fuchsian functions proceeded also along those lines, yes. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Juliet Mitchell. 

Juliet Mitchell :  I think that anxiety has to do with the emptying out of the ego. That one feels anxious because one doesn't feel one is there, and one is completely overwhelmed by something, so the ego has gone, and that is in a sense, essential for creative work, of any sort, that we mustn't have too much ego if we're really going to see things anew, which is what creativity is. So I think that state of anxiety is a loss of our old ego, an absence of that in order to have a creative work in its place. 

Arthur Miller :  Can you give examples?

Juliet Mitchell :  Er...Dostoievsky, as Melvyn has mentioned, and it's an easy one to do, epileptic fits, gambled all his possessions away, every time just before he had to start writing, that he had a fit, in which he didn't exist, he was like dead, he was sort of miming almost his murdered father, and so he was gone into death, and then he gambled away everything that he and his wife possessed, and had, and then he could write. 

Melvyn Bragg :   Oddly enough I have heard it argued that epileptic fits are very close to creative acts, I heard the other day. I can't remember who....it was in a conversation...I can't remember who said it but it was argued very well, I didn't agree with it....argued very well. Michael Howe. 

Michael Howe : I think there's also this interesting concept of flow, which the psychologist (indistinct) Hardy puts forward, and what he's essentially saying is that one becomes in a state where one is lost in the problem, and one is sort of totally involved in it, to the extent that the usual self awareness, ego states and that kind of thing seem to disappear, and that of course in some ways is rewarding  and does seem to be necessary, and seems to be a big element in what's going on when a person really, as it were, "gets going" in their creative activities. 

Melvyn Bragg :  Do you think that this abnegation of the self finally, is a condition or do you think that's just condition in one sort of person, and it might not apply in the other?

Arthur Miller : From historical case studies, it seems to be important that...to go...to fall back into one's self, for the creative act to actually occur. You're by yourself, you're "intolerably alone" as Picasso put it.  

Melvyn Bragg :   Well, thank you very much. Thanks very much to Professor Miller, and to Juliet Mitchell and to Professor Howe and thank you very much for listening.