I was thinking about genius again after writing the last article on the subject when I realized that people typically love to do what they are great at doing. In fact, I don’t think I know of a single person who doesn’t. 

Is this so significant? I don’t know but it speaks to our evolutionary psychology, no? I mean, we’ve all heard of debilitating pain, even a common flu can put one down on the couch as well as make you miss that day of work and it’s pay, right? But debilitating pleasure? No. It doesn’t exist* and rightly so. For if there were anything that caused “debilitating pleasure” we would surely never leave our caves to explore anything at all. Pain is exquisite. Pleasure is relative. 

One day a person “over-the-sky” stumped Me with a question. He asked, “Why do we have five senses?  Why not just stop at four or even three? And what is it that “knows” that we need five?” That one stopped Me. I  didn’t know the answer. I know a scant bit about teleology but not as a biologist or physicist would. It reminded Me of the “Which came first, The chicken or the egg?” And if you couldn’t answer the question, then the answer must lie in an Intelligent Creator. God. But that was before Francis Crick and J. Craig Ventor did their work. Today we know that snakes preceded them both and birds, including chickens, have evolved down the line from the snakes which also lay eggs. 

(As an aside, I once went on a feverish research to discover where the hell the chicken came from. It couldn’t fly. Couldn’t run. Couldn’t scratch. Couldn’t prey on anything. Was white. Had a large breast. It drove Me nuts. Where do those things come from?! Turns out that the chickens you see today are bred the way they are from an ancestor. That ancestor looks similar but had claws, could fly I believe, and was larger.) 

Evolutions says, “You need to have children. You need to procreate.” And so we have pleasure having sex. It’s a big drive and one of our prinicipal ones. Evolutions says, “You must avoid injury. You must avoid pain.” And so pain is felt, in myriad forms, quite keenly. People flee countries with nothing but the clothing on their back to avoid pain. 

Now then, when you meet somone who can play piano well enough to play for Carnegie Hall of some famed venue at the age of 16, he can do so because he loves to do it. One of My observations when studying geniuses when I was a younger man is that they would or could typically work you under the table. Sure, you spend 8 hours a day at math but he’s spending 12 when he’s in his prime. And he’s enjoying himself. The time flies by. Over the course of 10 years it adds up to many additional years of experience spent at a vocation that the less talented often don’t do. Part of the reason may reside in the fact that experientially it just isn’t as pleasureable an exercise. 

Many gifted people would do what they do for free, they love it so much. Often you will hear remarks like, “We didn’t know that there was any money in this. We just did it because we loved it.” That was a remark by a couple of art prodigies, I believe, who were drawing comics for a living. 

There is one other aspect I should mention to this phenomena of being gifted and that is that not all gifted people are gifted at the same thing. And furthermore, their neurology and physiology are often wired such that a biologist can see evidence of talent in both the brain and the body. 

Do you love to go running? The average runner has 15% larger thighs than non-runners and that is without any working out on either side. I suspect if you were to look under the hood of a math prodigy you would find a thicker network of neurons and synapses and dendrites. In fact, if you have Asperger’s Syndrome and it doesn’t disable you, then you would have a higher IQ as a result but Asperger’s creates a higher degree of electrical signals between cells thus a possible confirmation of what I posit. 

So without anyone telling you to, you one day decided to start running outside. You took a class in math at school and did fairly well. As you got older you did increasingly better. Or, maybe like the comic artists you were head and shoulders better than the best draftsman at high school and that was without any formal study in it. In fact, your freinds thought you should draw professionally. Or, maybe you can really sing. Like Mariah Carey you have a 8 octave range and you love to exercise it. Never do you meet anyone who says, “Yeah I play Carnegie Hall at just 16 but you know I hate playing the piano.” 

There are nerves somewhere around our talents. Neves that send pleasure signals to our brain. It’s just that if there is, I’ve never heard them referenced before. Maybe they are in the brain, watching. I have no idea. Where are they? I’m not complaining at all. I’m grateful that sex is pleasurable and that dying is painful so we flee like a mofo at the first sign of real harm. It’s just that I think it’s a curious phenomena. 

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