Genius is a Continuum, with Dr. Joy Hirsch | Big Think.

Genius is a Continuum, with Dr. Joy Hirsch
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Can you find "genius" in the brain? In this interview with The New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer as part of Big Think's partnership with 92Y's Seven Days of Genius series, neuroscientist Joy Hirsch explains her thoughts on genius being a physical continuation of humanity's pioneering spirit.

This is the latest installment in an exclusive, week-long video series of today’s brightest minds exploring the theory of genius. Exclusive videos will be posted daily on    / bigthink   throughout 92nd Street Y’s second annual 7 Days of Genius Festival: Venture into the Extraordinary, running March 1 to March 8, 2015.
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DR. JOY HIRSCH:

Joy Hirsch, Professor of Psychiatry and of Neurobiology, has established and directs the Research in the Brain Function Laboratory at Yale University. According to its website, Research in the Brain Function Laboratory has "made fundamental contributions to understanding the neural processes for cognitive control that enable flexible goal directed behaviors including the resolution of conflict".

Dr. Hirsch joined Yale from Columbia and, before that, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Weill College of Medicine at Cornell University where she founded the fMRI laboratory and pioneered the introduction of brain-mapping procedures for neurosurgical planning. Using fMRI, her laboratory made fundamental contributions to the understanding of sensation and perception, language and the cognitive processes, and brain regions that are modified by specific drugs. These initial studies were built upon research done by Dr. Hirsch as a professor at Yale University School of Medicine, where she focused on the cortical mechanisms directly involved in human visual processing, serving as a foundation to connect the advantages of fMRI to ongoing and new research directions at Columbia University.

Hirsch is also a curator of The Brain: The Inside Story on view at the American Museum of Natural History.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Carl Zimmer: It’s always interesting to talk to a neuroscientist about genius. I mean we use the word genius all the time. We can call Picasso a genius or Einstein a genius or your five-year- old a genius if he’s particularly good at his arithmetic. But for a neuroscientist, you know, you must be thinking about this in terms of the brain and what’s going on in the brain of a genius. So I’m curious like for you what does the word genius mean?


Joy Hirsch: Genius calls to mind the questions of individual differences. As a neuroscientist, we always think of the brain as being the source of our characteristics, our personality, our talents. And genius is on the scale of talents, that relationship between the neurocircuitry of the brain and how the brain is organized it works. And how we actually behave and what talents we have is really the essence of neuroscience.


Carl Zimmer: So it’s kind of about the diversity of the wiring you’re saying? I mean that you have different kinds of wiring that lead to different levels of talent in different areas?


Joy Hirsch: Well it’s an interesting question. We really don’t know what it is about our brains that makes your brain different than my brain. The truth of the matter is most of our brains are pretty similar and the subtle differences in anatomy and structure of the brain oftentimes result in very big differences in who we are, how we think, and what our talents are. So it gets very complicated very fast. And the best answer is we really don’t know.


Carl Zimmer: But do we have any hunches maybe? Like I mean could it be — well I’m just thinking like could it be a question say of, you know, a thicker layer of neurons here or a stronger connection between two regions there. I mean do we have a sense of what might be underlying like these sort of extreme cases? Like what we should be even looking for?


Joy Hirsch: It’s clear that there’s not a simple answer to that question that the brain with the thick cortical layer isn’t necessarily the brain that is the most talented brain. And I think that it’s worth going back and thinking about a little bit what is genius because it means different things to different people and perhaps even in different times in our life.

Carl Zimmer: Sure.


Joy Hirsch: When I think of genius I think of the creative person, the person who changes the way we think. The person that has an impact ....

To read the transcript, please go to https://bigthink.com/videos/genius-as...