Remi Cornwall wrote: > > Let's have a game of listing people:
My personal favorite genius: Isaac Newton -- Total nutjob. Suffered from severe obsessive compulsive disorder, which made a mess of his life -- he rarely went out, and was understandably not comfortable around other people due to his problems with, among other things, going through doorways. *** BUT NOTE *** OCD comes with an interesting side effect, which is the ability to "obsess" over just about anything ... in other words it provides one with the gift of amazing powers of concentration. I suspect very strongly that this had a lot to do with his ability to solve problems nobody else could, and it probably was one of the capabilities with aided him in constructing the calculus. Suppose Newton were alive today, in the first world (US, Canada, Europe). He would be diagnosed, he would be treated; he would probably be put on Prozac or one of its relatives. Based on what I know of treatment for OCD, he would *probably* be a much happier person. **BUT** his ability to sit and obsess about something for hours, days, or as long as it took to see his way through it would be destroyed. If we had had modern medicine in the time of Isaac Newton, he would probably never have developed the calculus, because he would have been "cured" of his mathematical ability along with his problems. Just my two cents....
