Perception and Genius

If I were to ask you how many things you could have perceived yesterday but didn’t, how would you go about answering that question?  In my view, you can’t.  I certainly can’t tell you, and by definition you did not perceive what you did not perceive, so you can’t either.  But can we both agree it was significantly more than what you did perceive?  If you don’t think so, let me widen the parameters a bit:

What could you have realized about an enemy or friend or associate or family member that you didn’t?

What innovation at work could have occurred to you but didn’t?

What color was the sky, exactly, when you drove home, and how much satisfaction could you have realized as a result?

What spontaneous, positive emotions were possible for you, but unrecognized?  How can you know?

What you can do, is try to do better.

General Relativity did not come about just as a result of Einstein’s IQ.  There are people, even today, who are his superior in that regard.  He himself attributed his fecundity to imagination and persistence.

I would submit that the first imaginative act necessary for paradigmatic thinking is the idea that the paradigm may be wrong.  I do not think Einstein was fully original–others, too, knew or suspected that Newtonian mechanics were not quite right–but he was certainly not surrounded by admirers when doing his most seminal work at the opening of the 20th century.  He worked in a patent office and smoked cheap cigars with a small group of like-minded, but nowhere near as bright men.

Talent, the ability to imagine that what you know is wrong, and persistence: in my view, this is the full list of traits necessary for what is called genius.