One Utah

Years ago, my sister was working at a hotel in Park City during a conference of Oncologists and Cancer Researchers. As she told it at the time, doctor after doctor, researcher after researcher, would walk up to the door labelled “Pull” and begin pushing. Some of them would grab the handles, shake the door repeatedly before looking and seeing the sign “Pull” and then pull the door open. One woman in particular repeated this every time she came to the door. My sister was able to talk with this woman - she apparently had multiple PhD’s, was charming, intelligent but literally incapable of functioning in the real world. She could describe the structure of the human cell perfectly, but remember that a door was “Pull” not “Push”? Not so much.

I think almost everyone I know has met at least one person like this - someone who is scary smart but incapable of managing their day to day lives, someone who can barely drive a car without hurting themselves, who can’t tie their shoes but who can program supercomputers. The cliche of the dysfunctional genius gets a lot of play in pop culture. He or she (usually a he, but not always) is sometimes the lovable college professor who does odd things. The movie Stargate portrayed him as the Dr. Daniel Jackson character - brilliant, eccentric, socially inept. By contrast, we probably don’t notice the people around us who are unbelievably brilliant but who function so smoothly in society they don’t stand out. I had dinner Thursday night with one of these people - she’s brilliant, insightful, well-read, well rounded. She is someone who is by any standard of our society successful. Unless you talked to her, you wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t see that she’s brilliant because she simply functions on a day to day basis so effectively.

I’m reading Steven Johnson’s book

Mind Wide Open

- in which he describes the process of finding out what is really going on inside our brains. He explores the way in which our brains are modular - different parts of the brain do different things, including some parts of the brain that seem to coordinate the efforts of the various bits and pieces. To put it another way, your brain isn’t a single thing so much as it is a system of interconnecting parts that work together, a different part taking primary responsibility for different functions - for instance, speech, sight, hearing, motor control, reading, recording and storing memories (actually handled by several parts of the brain for evolutionary reasons) and so on. The brain is a very literal sense a system as properly understood in systems theory.

Johnson makes the point that some brains (i.e. cancer researchers) seem to have highly developed and effective processing in very limited parts of the brain - supermodules if you will. Composers, for instance, have highly developed portions of the brain that manage not just appreciating music, but hearing it in their heads and translating it into the real world. The brain of a composer composing is working very differently than the brain of someone like me who loves music but can’t write it. That same composer, however, probably shouldn’t be allowed to manage his money or do her taxes. By contrast to that composer, Johnson describes how his brain (and probably my very bright friend’s brain) doesn’t so much have a math supermodule, but rather has a really effective coordinator module.

The coordinator module works to make sure that the brain of Steven Johnson and my friend Jen work really effectively at a broad spectrum of tasks - they aren’t specialists, they are something just as important - they’re damned good generalists. Johnson’s metaphor is the distinction between a world class soloist and an orchestra that sounds good as a whole.

Reading Johnson’s book I thought back to my sister’s story about the oncologists and the researchers. Most of them were probably super module types which is why they could find cutting edge medical approaches to diagnosing, treating and possibly preventing cancer, but couldn’t work doors in hotels.

This entry was posted Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under People Are Nuts, Society, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.