Horizon what makes a genius

Documentary Description Could you have come up with Einstein's theory of relativity? There are no comments. Be the first to post one. Posting Comment Buy Now Official Website.

Related Documentaries People who watch this documentary also look for:. The Secret Life of the Brain 21, views. Human Senses 13, views. Brain Story 17, views. Beautiful Minds: Memory Masters 12, views. How Does Your Memory Work? Secrets of the Mind 8, views. User reviews 1 Review. Top review. Terrible BBC doc made by a layman. Unfortunately the presenter is a mathematician not a psychometrician so often he directly tells us he is just guessing. He also doesn't seem able to understand even simple psychology testing, which is frankly unacceptable in such a very costly BBC doc.

This doc sounds more like a personal layman Youtube video than a scientific study. At the start there is a test where people have to tell how many dots of each color are shown on screen. When the math professor just does a bit above average on the test the conclusion is "This supports your theory that anyone can become a math professor".

Actually, that's a crazy statement. The test itself may not test math skills at all. They should have shown us how big a g loading the test has and what other traits it measures. You would need to test 30 to math professors to see any patterns here. And then replicate the study 10 times over in other settings and countries. They then look into a mouse and how one single gene influences learning.

It's not totally misleading, but it's quite wrong even so. It's an old layman fallacy about how single genes create intelligence or other traits. It's not really how intelligence works. It's thousands of genes interacting in various complicated ways. The mistake they make here is a silly one and I can't judge it harshly at all. It's misleading, but not much. It does reveal how little he actually understand about how the brain or even evolution works, of course you can't expect him to know this stuff as he has never studied it, but rather guesses and assumes.

This is where the doc finally shows us actual ideas from intelligence research If not — why not? This is what Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics, wants to explore. Marcus readily admits that he is no genius, but wants to know if geniuses are just an extreme version of himself — or whether their brains are fundamentally different.

Marcus meets some remarkable individuals — Tommy, an obsessive artist who uses his whole house as his canvas; Derek: blind, autistic, and a pianist with apparently prodigious gifts; Claire who is also blind, but whose brain has learnt to see using sound.