Many sorts of insanity are (in my observation) caused by lowered cognitive inhibition. The mind is constantly bombarded with information, too much information, so it blocks out all but what is considered important. The lower the cognitive inhibition, the less filtered the information. This is the cause for the association between genius and madness. A man taking in too much information will begin to associate in ways others would not, or else disassociate the information as his brainpower is directed to the absorption of information rather than its processing. Every transition between ideas is a leap in logic, even point A to point B has space between. There is, in a conversation, a set norm for how vast the leaps ought to be. The man with lowered cognitive inhibition will be unintelligible to a normal person, firstly because he will be making leaps greater than most people can follow, secondly because he may be responding to a stimulus others have ignored, and thirdly because he will be associating information in combinations most people would never think to. He would launch into a conversation as though they are already in one, because they have already played thought it in their head. This is mania. Mania burns out. It is like over-heating a computer. The mind is not meant to sustain that rate of thought for that long. This leads to depression. The mind shuts down in recuperation, thoughts slow to a fraction of a normal person thoughts. The fortunate man is one who is a genius and finds himself manic. A well trained runner may be able to sustain a heart rate so high and for so long that a normal man’s heart would give out. In the same way, a genius may be able to handle mania, he may be able to run his mind so fast and so hard as would break another man’s mind, and keep the pace up for a lifetime simply because his brain is a well-trained and well-functioning unit.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 07:13:15 +0000
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