Introduction

The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Genius Genes and Autism is a lecture delivered by Professor Michael Fitzgerald (Ireland) at the 11th International Congress on Psychopharmacology and the 7th International Symposium on Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, held in 2019. The talk was organized by the Turkish Association for Psychopharmacology.

Video link: YouTube – The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Genius Genes and Autism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y443BeVdw-A

Summary

In this presentation, Fitzgerald advances the argument that many of history’s greatest artistic and scientific innovators—Newton, Einstein, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Yeats, Van Gogh, Lewis Carroll, Simone Weil, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Cobain, and others—exhibited traits consistent with autism spectrum conditions such as Asperger syndrome.

He distinguishes between “small c” creativity (ordinary innovation) and “Big C” creativity (genius-level originality), maintaining that the latter is abnormal by definition and most often linked to autistic cognition. He outlines how divergent thinkers (often with ADHD) and convergent thinkers (often with autism) play complementary roles in innovation, illustrated with historical cases like Los Alamos and Bletchley Park.

The lecture also explores the genetics of creativity, brain networks such as the default mode network and anterior cingulate, the overlap of autism and schizophrenia, and the high incidence of mental illness among creative geniuses. Fitzgerald argues that atypical, “non-standard” brains are essential for breakthroughs in art and science, even if they are often accompanied by social difficulties, eccentricity, and psychological suffering.

The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Genius Genes and Autism

Michael Fitzgerald – 11th International Congress on Psychopharmacology (2019)

Introduction

Thank you very much, Professor Derson, and thank you for inviting me. The slides are available if anybody wants them, and my email is there if you want to get them from that point of view. I’ll start by defining creativity, and these are some definitions: an original, meaningful, surprising, imperfect, unbalanced display of human creativity. To be creative with a big “C-A.”

There are two types of creativity. That’s big “C-A,” which is genius, and small “C-A,” very small “C-A,” which is myself and many other people. Today, the focus is on big “C.” It’s on the creativity of genius proportions, and by definition I think that is abnormal.

Creativity and Solitude

In the past thousand years, there is one person that stands out, and that’s Isaac Newton. So that gives you the frequency of creativity of genius proportions. If you take a scientific basis, you’ll read that the most creative work is done in solitude, often for a very long time. Well, in actual fact, it’s not solitude that helps them to be creative. Many of these people have autism, and the only place that they can work is alone. So being alone is very easy for some people with autism, and that allows them to focus.

If a child came to me and said they wanted to win a Nobel Prize, there’s only one question I would ask that child: do you have Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism? If they said they had Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism, I would say to that child, “It’s still not easy to win a Nobel Prize, but at least you’re starting okay and you can go ahead.” But if they didn’t have high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome, then I would say, “Well, it’s very unlikely. Maybe in literature or something you might.”

Outsider Status of Autistic Geniuses

Obviously, many of the autistic geniuses are outsiders. They often live outside their country, like James Joyce, Beckett, and Ibsen. They prefer to be in another country where they’re not interfered with and can do their brilliant literary work.

One of the problems we have with creativity today is that too much knowledge impairs creativity. If you’re all the time attending lectures, reading books, looking at your iPhone, getting more papers, you’ll never be able to do any creative work because you’re overloaded with information. Wittgenstein, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, didn’t read other philosophers because he said most of them were stupid, and he didn’t want their bad ideas interfering with his work.

Divergent and Convergent Thinking

There are two great ideas in relation to creative thinking. Today we have difficulty getting pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs. As I was walking outside, I didn’t see any new drugs advertised, and that’s because Big Pharma has almost given up on getting new drugs for mental illness. That is a terrible problem.

If I was advising Big Pharma on how to do research in this area, I would divide it into two stages. The first phase, for a year, is that you want to get people who are divergent thinkers, thinking all over the place. These are people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They often have problems with attention, concentration, following through on instructions. They don’t do their homework. They’re hyperactive. They’re impulsive.

I would suggest you get this group and put them in a room for a year. You’ll notice this group drinks too much at weekends, they’ll have some fights in pubs, etc. So they’ll be a very annoying, disruptive group. But this group will have ideas from all over the place, so they’re likely to come up with strange ideas that might have potential to become a good drug or a good compound worth developing.

When they’re finished, these are the divergent thinkers—ADHD. Now you want to get the drugs developed. Say they’ve come up with three compounds, and you want those three compounds developed. Now you switch to convergent thinkers.

The Role of Autistic Convergent Thinkers

When you interview these convergent or autistic thinkers, they fail every social skill. When they come in to you, they have no eye contact, they speak very little, there’s no emotion. But there’s one little spark on their CV. So if they get zero on every social skill, that’s very good. These are the kind of people you want. These are autistic people. You give them your problem—

You have three compounds, you want to make the drugs. So you put the researchers in a building on their own. You don’t go near them, because they get upset if you interfere with them or supervise them. You just give them the job.

Now, these are all top psychopharmacologists. They’re neuroscientists, they’re qualified to the nth degree, but their social skills are more or less zero. So you put them there for a year, give them whatever they want, and they’re more likely to develop the compound you need. These are the convergent thinkers.

Historical Precedents: Los Alamos and Bletchley Park

This was done in two places. It was done in Los Alamos. They gathered all the eccentric mathematicians and physicists in America, put them in Los Alamos, and told them: make an atomic bomb. And that’s what they did.

The other place it happened was in Bletchley, during the Second World War. They wanted to break the German code. So they got all the eccentric mathematicians in Britain, put them in one place, top secret, and told them: break the German code. Which they did. They developed computers and so on. Nobody knew they were there. Nobody knew the code had been broken. The effect of that was to reduce World War II by two years.

This eccentric group included Alan Turing, the main man there. I’ve written a paper on Alan Turing and autism. It’s a paper people seem to Google all the time—I always find people downloading it from ResearchGate and so on. He had very poor social skills. He got into trouble with the law, he became upset, and he killed himself. After shortening World War II by two years, he was probably the most important man in that war, but he was an eccentric loner operating in this area.

So those are two extreme examples of creativity.

Concluding Note of Part 1

Now, the problem in medical education is that what we want are convergent thinkers. We don’t want divergent thinkers. ADHD divergent thinkers are troublemakers. Medical schools don’t like them. They want to get rid of them. They’re rebels, they’re independent, they’re disruptive. But the problem is, when you get rid of them from medical schools, you’re also getting rid of possibly the most creative people in those schools.

Genetics vs. Training in Creativity

I believe creativity is partially genetic, but there are critics of this view. A lot of people believe that if you work intensively for 10 years you’ll become a genius. Other people say if you work 10,000 hours on anything you’ll become a genius. I regard this as complete rubbish. Nobody in this room will become Mozart if you work on music for 10,000 hours or for 10 years.

Most of the research has been done on depression and creativity, particularly in literary people—novelists, poets. All the studies have shown they have very high rates of depression, alcoholism, and so on. Even so, that work has been criticized and dismissed. Jamison, one of the people who did this work, and Andreasen in the States, did the early studies showing the link between artists, depression, and alcoholism. The criticisms were that they used small samples, made the diagnoses themselves, and didn’t have enough males. Those criticisms are used to dismiss the link between mental illness and creativity.

More recently, Carlson in Sweden has looked at thousands of patients and shown a clear link between mental illness and creativity.

Environment and Epigenetics

Of course, there are environmental factors in developing creativity. There are epigenetic factors operating as well, factors we don’t fully understand. Environment plays a role, and money is necessary too. We saw that in Italy during the Renaissance. Even now, big funding agencies are critical if you want to win a Nobel Prize. Training is necessary as well. But if you’re going to be a genius, the amount of training you need is much less than if you’re not.

As for personality, creative people are not welcome in medical schools. They don’t obey rules, they challenge their teachers, they’re independent. They have openness to experience, especially if they’re literary people. They’re risk takers, they’re often depressed, and they can be loners. They are not what we would call good candidates for general practice or family practice.

The Problem of Psychiatric Diagnosis

I’m going to say a few words about diagnosis. There is a huge problem with diagnosis. At this conference, and every conference I go to, there are lectures on depression, lectures on schizophrenia, etc. The problem with psychiatric diagnosis now is that we have a neurodevelopmental spectrum of diagnoses with onset in early childhood, and with biological and genetic findings. On this neurodevelopmental spectrum we can’t separate the diagnoses.

We have autism overlapping with schizophrenia, overlapping with ADHD, overlapping with Tourette’s, overlapping with bipolar, overlapping with learning disability. Where we are at the moment with diagnosis is about 1860. I’m not saying you should rewind your watches to 1860, but we’ve gone back before Kraepelin, before this system of separating out diagnoses into bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. That’s almost certainly wrong.

We don’t know what the correct diagnoses are, but we do know it’s transdiagnostic.

Lack of Biomarkers

Last night I was sitting beside a neuroimager, and I said: you’ll have to help us make diagnoses. It’s not me telling you what the diagnosis is. We have no biomarker in psychiatry. That is an absolute tragedy.

The last lecture here before lunch was on depression. I will not accept the diagnosis of depression unless you rule out high-functioning autism, Asperger syndrome, ADHD, and all these other conditions. The patient has to be assessed for all of these, and only if an expert rules them all out and you still come up with depression, then—and only then—I will accept the diagnosis.

That’s why no two groups of patients are ever the same in psychiatry. Every single sample is different from every other sample. If you can’t get diagnosis right, the whole house of cards collapses. That’s why we have so much non-replication. It’s not that we have non-replication, it’s that we have different samples, and everybody is looking at a different sample.

Autism and Schizophrenia Overlap

Autism and schizophrenia were supposed to be two totally different conditions. That’s complete rubbish. There is a great deal of overlap genetically and descriptively between autism and schizophrenia. They are not separate conditions.

The correct diagnosis is a neurodevelopmental spectrum. But when you get down to the subcategories—

Now, if there are any junior doctors here, I want to say: everything in the ICD-10 and everything in DSM-IV is of biblical importance. So, you tell your examiners about ICD-10 and DSM-5. Everything there is correct. Once you’re past the examinations, then you can deal with the real world—but not before examinations.

Core Features of Autism

If you take autism, then obviously they have problems with social interaction, problems with eye contact, problems reading nonverbal behavior. They’re naïve and immature, they have sensory issues, they have pragmatic language problems and other speech and language problems. They want the same routine every day, and they have narrow interests.

A lot of them will have small savant skills. Originally this was called “idiot savant” in the 19th century, now mostly it’s called “autistic savant.” These are people who, for example, can tell each person in this room the day of the week, month, and year they will retire at age 65, just from the date of birth. That’s what we call savant skills. You can get musical savants and so on. These are unusual abilities that are clearly genetic and neurobiological, and they go with autism.

Genetics and Neurobiology of Creativity

There’s no doubt about the genetics of creativity. What we understand about it is another matter. We can say there are multiple genes of small effect. I assume there are hundreds of genes involved. Any information we have only deals with a very small fraction. There is variability—different authors have given different levels of heritability—but there is no doubt about the heritability.

Some dopamine genes are particularly relevant to creativity. Dopamine and serotonergic genes are also implicated. In autism, there are very high levels of serotonin. The central dopamine neurons may be overactive in autism. The dopaminergic system and the frontal lobe regions are involved in creativity. When I was training, every psychiatric condition was blamed on the mother; now they blame the frontal lobe. That’s a joke, but the frontal lobe comes up in all discussions. Dopamine is critical to creativity, as well as sensations of pleasure, impulse control, and behaviors like gambling. People with ADHD are more likely to be gamblers.

Ada, the American military computer, was named after Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. She was a mathematician and had autism. Lucian Freud, a major painter and relative of Sigmund Freud, also had autism.

Reduced Latent Inhibition

Looking at the genetics in more detail: one mutation has been found with support, involving reduced latent inhibition. If you reduce inhibition of thoughts coming into the person’s head, the person is more creative. Reduced latent inhibition is associated with both autism and schizophrenia.

Some argue that patients with autism are not overrepresented in the creative professions, and indeed the opposite is true. I disagree. I have hundreds of examples and half a dozen books showing the opposite. Nevertheless, those critics argue that siblings show higher rates of creativity. This is especially clear in schizophrenia: patients with full-blown schizophrenia are not creative, but their relatives have been shown repeatedly to be highly creative. Their relatives may have low levels of schizotypal traits, and that’s where the creativity comes. Evolution couldn’t proceed without the relatives of schizophrenia. Unfortunately, some individuals develop full-blown schizophrenia, and they’re not creative. But their relatives are, and that’s why schizophrenia has survived over the years.

Asperger’s Legacy and its Problems

Hans Asperger once said we all need a touch of autism. But Hans Asperger, the Austrian child psychiatrist, was a de facto Nazi. He sent children to be murdered in Vienna during the war. That makes me uncomfortable using the word “Asperger’s.” But parents don’t know that history. They know the word Asperger’s syndrome, so I have to continue to use it, though only a minority of people know what Asperger himself was involved in.

Brain Imaging and Creativity

This is an imaging study. The prefrontal cortex, especially the left dorsolateral and the right ventrolateral regions, are involved in creative problem solving. An fMRI study of divergent thinking showed that the right prefrontal cortex was significantly activated when participants were asked to create stories from unrelated words. That relates more to literary creativity than to scientific creativity.

For literary creativity, you need integrated white matter tracts connecting distant brain regions, which allows for combining many different ideas.

Hyperconnectivity in Autism

I was involved in a study on creativity and autism. Brains of famous American scientists were examined by Casanova, and I did the postmortem psychiatric diagnoses. They all had autism. What was found was hyperconnectivity locally—very intense local connectivity in the brain—but very poor long-range connectivity. That’s the situation in autism.

It’s like having a central computer. In most people, the central computer integrates everything. In autism, the central computer is weak, but the local computers are very strong. That gives you brilliant mathematics and brilliant science. But in literature and novels, you need long-range connectivity and better social skills. Long-range connectivity is much better for social skills.

The Anterior Cingulate and Networks

The anterior cingulate is critical to creativity. It’s involved in salience, cognitive control, executive tasks, and ranking behaviors. Increased cortical thickness in the right cingulate and right angular gyrus is associated with improved creativity. The cingulate activates a broad range of brain networks. Divergent and artistic thinking is associated with salience networks, while scientific activity is associated with executive attention networks and semantic processing.

Frontal and subcortical networks are central to creativity. In mathematics, for example, when mathematicians listened to mathematical statements or solved problems, the regions that lit up were the intraparietal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and inferior temporal regions of the brain. The left central gyrus is also involved.

Einstein’s Brain

If we look at Einstein’s brain: as you know, the pathologist who did the postmortem on Einstein’s brain took it with him, put it in a bottle of preservative, and drove it around in his car for years. Eventually he admitted that he had kept Einstein’s brain, and people began to examine it. What they found was that the parietal cortex was 15% wider, and there were more nerve cells and glial cells than in the normal brain.

So it fits with what we are talking about. It was an atypical, unusual brain. And any of you who have a normal brain, I have bad news for you: you’ll never be Shakespeare or Isaac Newton. To reach the level of ultimate genius, you need atypicality.

The Creative Brain as Atypical

That’s artistic creativity. Much the same again: many different brain areas are involved. Creativity depends on distributed neural networks, not just one spot in the brain. Quite a lot of the brain is engaged in creativity, but there’s no clear consensus on the neural basis.

In fact, there’s hardly consensus about anything in psychiatry. What we really see in psychiatry is incredible variability, heterogeneity, and differences between people.

In autism, there is supposed to be insufficient pruning of neurons after birth, which can lead to a child with a large head. But the same can be seen in schizophrenia as well. There is no single neuronal circuit for creativity. My general view is that creativity is due to disconnected neural processes, out of the standard order, with equally erratic neurochemical processes.

A creative brain is a non-standard brain. It is a dysfunctional brain, an atypical brain. That’s Big C—genius-level creativity.

The Default Mode Network

The default mode network is very important. Brahms, the composer, said music was revealed to him in his sleep. But it’s more complicated than that. Brahms trained intensively in music, composition, and musical thinking. He was processing all that material, consciously and unconsciously. Most creativity takes place in the cognitive unconscious.

Freud said the unconscious was chaotic. That’s wrong. Most of our thinking is unconscious, and it takes place in the cognitive, adaptive unconscious. In the months leading up to Brahms’ inspiration, he had been working and thinking, feeding the problem into his unconscious. The unconscious continues working during the night. That’s why we often hear of scientific discoveries where someone woke in the middle of the night with the solution. It wasn’t magic—it was years of processing, both conscious and unconscious, with the final step happening in the cognitive unconscious.

A metaphor for creativity: think of a deep-sea diver on the seabed. He can’t see much, but there’s a tube going up to the boat on the surface. The boat is consciousness. The diver is feeding information up through the tube, but 99% of the work is happening on the seabed, out of sight.

Music and the Brain

Music affects the brain as well. For violinists, the area of the brain controlling the left hand is larger, for very good reasons.

The default mode network is central to creativity. It’s involved in divergent thinking, self-referential thinking, reasoning about emotions, mind-wandering, mental simulation, improvisation, jazz, and so on. If you’re stuck on a problem, your way out is the default mode network.

How do you activate it? By going for a walk, or going on holiday, forgetting about the problem. There’s a chance the solution will come to you when you’re away from it. It won’t come if you keep your head down and stay blocked. You have to allow the cognitive unconscious to process it and deliver the solution.

Sometimes you’re working late at night on a problem and you’re stuck. You go to bed, and in the morning the solution seems obvious. That’s because you had put the problem into your unconscious before sleeping, and it was processed during the night.

Divergent and Convergent Phases

So I see creativity as two phases. First, divergent thinking: you explore all possible solutions. Then, convergent thinking: you focus on one or two and solve it with executive function. Divergent thinking is artistic; convergent thinking is scientific.

Creativity and Mental Illness

So why are creative geniuses so susceptible to mental illness?

I have a son who is an actor. He has extreme emotions, and I know he could not be an actor without the ability to express extreme emotions, to be moody and difficult. That’s the case with many actors, opera singers, and so on. They are difficult, if not impossible, to live with. Yet people still want to live with a genius, despite the hell it involves.

They may have high reproductive success, but they are often hell to live with. Nobody was more hell than Ludwig van Beethoven. He obviously had autism. His social skills were close to zero. He was paranoid, impulsive, eccentric, obnoxious.

Beethoven: The Prototype of the Autistic Genius

One story: a waiter brought him soup that wasn’t quite the right temperature, and he threw it back in her face. That was standard behavior for him. He was a loner, had temper tantrums, and was almost impossible to live with.

He had a lonely childhood. He couldn’t handle sports. He didn’t wash himself much. Poor hygiene is actually quite common in geniuses. Michelangelo would sleep in his clothes and boots for a month without changing.

Most of these figures did poorly at school. Their school reports often said they were useless and would never amount to anything. They had no social awareness. They were hypersensitive to slights, reserved, stiff, endlessly troubled in relationships.

Beethoven had endless problems with women. The only women he could manage were married women, and even then, often not in a sexual sense. Hans Christian Andersen was similar—never married, but always attached himself to married women.

They argued with everyone. They even blurred fact and fiction. Beethoven, for instance, convinced himself at times that his brother’s wife’s child was really his own.

Litigation and Paranoia

One of the central traits of creativity is that these people have a very poor ability to separate fact from fiction. They spend endless time in the courts. Paranoid people are always going to court. Beethoven wanted to get custody of his nephew from the boy’s mother. Eventually, after about ten years in court, he did get custody. But he treated the boy so harshly that custody had to be returned to the mother.

Beethoven lived in a one-person world—his music, his composition, and himself. He was self-taught. The Ninth Symphony, in my opinion, is the greatest symphony ever—not the Fifth, as most people prefer.

Bartók: Radical Originality

If we move on to Béla Bartók, it’s much the same situation. Born in Romania, he was truly original. He experimented with bitonality before Stravinsky and Schoenberg. To be truly creative, you have to produce a new paradigm—a new type of music. Otherwise, it’s just replication, “small c” creativity.

He was a loner as a child, didn’t play with other children, couldn’t tolerate noise, and did badly in school—which seems almost necessary. He was oblivious to political developments. He made no concessions to the audience. People with autism are always searching for bedrock truths, whether in science or music. Bartók wrote for himself. He wasn’t aware of the audience. He lived in an autistic world.

Like many with autism, he was a great collector—in his case, of insects. He was a workaholic, a linguist, as many high-functioning autistic people are. He had preservation of sameness, perfectionism. Many would diagnose obsessive-compulsive disorder, but that would be incorrect. They have harsh superegos, harsh consciences, and fanatical wills.

Simone Weil: Female Example of Autistic Genius

If we look at a woman, Simone Weil—just in case you think I’m only citing male examples. She was a French writer. She died of anorexia nervosa, which often co-occurs with autism. Her brother André was one of the world’s greatest mathematicians. At age 12, she spoke many languages. Her father was a doctor, and the environment was highly academic, but she and her brother thrived in it.

She had poor social skills. She was aggressive, unempathic, argumentative. She wrote a thesis but never visited her supervisor—she worked entirely in her own autistic world. During the Second World War in Britain, she argued constantly with de Gaulle, though to be fair, de Gaulle drove everyone mad. Still, de Gaulle himself likely had high-functioning autism, which explains much about him.

Simone Weil was blunt, tactless, solitary, living in her own world. She had poor hygiene. She even worked on a farm because she believed she should work with peasants, but never washed, which the farmer found objectionable.

The Childlike Gaze

All of these figures are childlike. To be a genius, you must see the world through the eyes of a child. That was Einstein’s great secret. Adults see fragments, children see wholes. This emotional immaturity is a classic trait of genius.

Weil had piercing eyes, was cutting in speech, and later developed anorexia nervosa in London, dying from it. Many people with anorexia nervosa also have autism, usually undiagnosed.

Michelangelo: The Greatest Genius

The greatest genius ever was probably Michelangelo, with Beethoven a close second. Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance biographer, described Michelangelo as savage and even mad. He was aloof, a loner, in constant conflict with Raphael, shunned society, and struggled to express emotions verbally. Raphael once told him, “You’re a loner, like a hangman.” That was before we had the concepts of Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism.

Michelangelo was rough, tactless, and had squalid domestic habits. He had no pupils, no interest in others, only in himself. He was narcissistic—or what we now recognize as autistic traits often confused with narcissism. He slept in his clothes and boots, rarely washed, and suffered depression. Many with autism do, but psychiatrists often misdiagnose them as purely depressive.

He tended not to finish commissions. Leonardo da Vinci was even worse in that regard. Michelangelo suffered from anxiety—generalized anxiety disorder is very common in autism. He once said he hadn’t had an hour of happiness in 15 years, and he wrote about suicide at length, though never acted on it.

Lewis Carroll and the World of Childhood

Now, one of the most quoted books in the world after the Bible and Shakespeare is Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a mathematician teaching at an English university. He was also interested in the occult.

He was a loner, shy, solitary, bullied as a child because he disliked sports—like so many with autism or Asperger’s. He was a recluse but got on brilliantly with children, especially girls. He was obsessed with childhood. He did take inappropriate photographs of children, sometimes nude. He destroyed most of them before he died, but his colleagues and the children’s parents recognized it wasn’t right. His obsession with children is why he could write Alice in Wonderland. He saw the world through a child’s eyes, just as Hans Christian Andersen did.

His traits were typical: clumsiness, being bullied, dreamy, oversensitive, with few ordinary pleasures. He felt like a changeling—that folkloric idea of a real child replaced with a false one, found across Europe. In psychiatry, this is identity diffusion. He felt unreal, which is central to autism.

He was depressed, suicidal, felt different. Why didn’t he kill himself? Wittgenstein thought about suicide daily. Several of Wittgenstein’s siblings actually completed suicide. What kept Wittgenstein alive was philosophy, and people around him who cared for him.

Autistic Persistence and Overlap with ADHD

Restlessness, wandering, persistence—these are common in high-functioning autism and Asperger’s, as well as in ADHD. The overlap, or comorbidity, between autism and ADHD is enormous.

A teacher once said to a student, “Nothing good can come from you. You’re a stupid boy who will never be any good. No one will ever read what you write.” That’s a fairly standard school report for a genius. I could give you a hundred versions of it, but that would be the typical school judgment on someone exceptional.

Vincent van Gogh

If we move on now to Van Gogh: again, the same story. He probably had Asperger’s or high-functioning autism for most of his life, but I think he developed psychosis toward the end. So the final diagnosis would be high-functioning autism plus psychosis.

He was strange, unruly, self-willed. He was bored by school and learned nothing there. He was a loner, had poor social knowledge, showed contempt for people, and was alienated—classic autistic behavior. He couldn’t get on with women. Famously, he cut off his ear and gave it to a prostitute, though the exact reason is debated. He was eccentric and odd. The only people he related to were prostitutes and his brother, who supported him financially.

He sold only one or two paintings in his lifetime. He constantly complained to his brother for not selling more. He had a childlike, naïve, immature personality, narrow interests, and was driven. Many people with autism are voracious readers. He also had speech and language issues, what we’d now call pragmatic language problems. Today, he’d be referred to a pragmatic language therapist.

Isaac Newton: Ultimate Concentration

Now to the greatest figure of the past thousand years. When this was considered in the year 2000, the consensus was Isaac Newton. Some might nominate a religious leader or political figure, but Newton changed the world by developing calculus and the principles underpinning all modern science.

As a boy, he was absent-minded. He was a model-builder, a voracious reader, autodidactic. He once wrote, “I keep the subject constant before me until the first dawnings open slowly.” He would spend two or three full days and nights on a problem, not touching the food brought to him. That was monumental concentration—probably unmatched in history. Such concentration is essential for breakthroughs.

He had no pastimes, only work. He was a workaholic, rigid, routine-driven. People might call him obsessive-compulsive, but really these were autistic traits. He was meticulous, controlling, narrow in focus. He was the greatest scientist of the millennium, yet he also spent enormous time on alchemy, trying to turn base metals into gold, and on biblical numerology and mysticism. That’s the contradiction: the greatest scientist, but also immersed in pursuits we now see as nonsense.

Einstein: The Modern Genius

In the past hundred years, the consensus greatest figure was Einstein. He was slow to speak—he didn’t talk until age three or four. When asked why, he said there had been no need to. His first words were, “The soup is hot.” Children with delayed speech like this are often said to have “Einsteinian syndrome.”

Einstein had a bad temper, no interest in peers, but was fascinated by building and construction, like many with autism. He was a loner, totally focused on physics, with narrow interests. At the end of his university studies, he was rejected for academic jobs. His professors called him the worst student they had ever had and pushed him out. He ended up in a patent office. While working there, he developed the theories of relativity.

Persistence, introversion, tactlessness, hyperfocus—these were his traits. He said what drove him was to understand how God created the world, though not in a religious sense. He meant to understand it scientifically.

Unequal Distribution of Genius

Einstein remarked that “nature distributes her gifts unevenly.” That is the essence of genius. Those who believe everyone is born equal dislike talk of genius because they see it as elitist. In Japan and China, there’s a belief that anyone can achieve anything, and that failure is just laziness. But the evidence shows otherwise: gifts are distributed unevenly.

Einstein himself said, “The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.” For him, intuition and creative imagination were more important than rote learning.

Yeats: The Autistic Poet

Like other speakers, I could go on for hours—like a lecture from the Kremlin. But maybe I’ll continue for another five minutes.

William Butler Yeats: an Irish poet with a deep fascination for Byzantium. One of his most famous poems is about it. He thought Byzantium was the greatest period in world history and wished he had lived then.

Yeats had major spelling and reading difficulties, dyslexia, poor school performance. School was misery and humiliation for him, as it is for many autistic children. He disliked games, was aloof, avoided eye contact, and lacked ordinary warmth. He only began relationships with women late in life. Katherine Tynan, a fellow poet, said he was “inhuman.” He admitted he couldn’t help being inhuman. Meeting people filled him with terror.

Beckett: The Dramatist of Detachment

Samuel Beckett, the Nobel Prize–winning dramatist, was similar. When he entered a room, he would cling to the walls, terrified of conversation. Yet he became one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century. He broke new ground in literature. He once said, “I have no instincts for personal life”—a definition of autism. He could also be malicious and aggressive.

He created poems while humming tunelessly and tapping his hand, sometimes in the street. Policemen would stop him for this odd behavior. But that was how his creative process worked.

Kurt Cobain: The Tragic Modern Example

Finally, Kurt Cobain. For younger people here, I should mention him. He was diagnosed with ADHD and treated with Ritalin, but didn’t continue with it. He did have the correct diagnosis.

He came from a troubled family. When he was ten, there was a history of stabbing and suicide attempts in the extended family. His maternal grandmother had psychiatric problems. His grandfather killed himself. A great uncle shot himself.

Cobain said he had “suicide genes.” One of his first lyrics was about suicide. Whether suicide genes exist is debatable, but he did complete suicide. His father’s family came from Ireland, and his father also had autism and Asperger’s traits.

At age nine, Kurt was deeply upset when his parents separated—an environmental factor that made things worse.

Three of Kurt Cobain’s uncles had died by their own hand—two by shooting, one through alcoholism. That’s not very different from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family, where several siblings also died by suicide.

Cobain was a truant from school. He used marijuana and LSD. He had oppositional defiant disorder. His diagnosis was made prospectively, not just retrospectively. He was always on the go, accident-prone, fearless, musical.

From preschool, he had exceptional artistic skills. But he was perverse, sadistically killing animals. He became homeless, a drifter, went to prison. He was defiant, stubborn, obsessive. At age ten, he was malnourished and hospitalized—probably with a touch of anorexia, as we discussed earlier.

He started making films at fifteen. One of the first was titled Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide. He said, quite accurately: “I’m going to be a superstar musician, kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory.” That is precisely what happened.

He married Courtney Love in 1992. He didn’t invite his family to the wedding. They had a child, and social services became involved. He died by suicide at age twenty-seven.

The problem was that he switched from Ritalin to heroin. Toward the end, he bought a gun and shot himself. He also had identity diffusion, multiple selves, multiple histories. He felt diseased, sadomasochistic, a warrior out of control.

Nevertheless, the youth of the world identified with him. He remains a huge megastar worldwide.

Closing Remarks

Okay, I think we can have some questions now. Thank you very much for this mind-provoking presentation.