What makes a genius? Certainly not going on a creativity course and learning to "think outside the box". According to an exhibition devoted to Nobel laureates, genius is the product of grinding practice, heroic self-absorption and the ability to recover from mistakes
It is the one. Win the Nobel Prize - for peace, physics, chemistry, economic sciences, physiology or medicine, or literature - and nobody is going to say "it was rigged", or "it doesn't count", or "so, you sold out". The worst they might say (particularly of the literature prize) is: "Who?"
The Nobel lacks the taint of corporate money and branding - no mobile telephones, or whatever it is that the Man Group actually does (Booker did groceries; you don't get less exalted than that). Curiously, the taint of industrial death has leaked away; Alfred Nobel said that he dreamed of inventing a "substance or a machine of such terrible destruction that it would make war for ever impossible" and, with dynamite, he did pretty well for his times. Pretty well in terms of explosions, that is, but pretty badly in terms of people blown up.
Yet time has entirely cleansed the Nobel. No whiff of nitroglycerine remains, and the Nobel Museum is celebrating a century of distinction with an exhibition (running at the British Library from 7 December until March next year) that takes a slightly more introspective line through its laureates. What, it asks, leads to genius? How and where does it thrive? How can we nurture and promote it?
Good questions, and questions with money in them, too: google "genius", or anything related to it, and a slew of advertisements pops up, most of them leading to rather greasy websites offering miracle gimmicks to turn you or your child into a genius, an innovator, a "creative thinker". In the mercantile society, not being a genius is the mark of a slacker, someone who has yet to go that extra mile (or extra dollar) in self-improvement. Creativity and brilliance, it appears, are our universal birthright, and to suggest that most of us are much of a muchness and pretty dull dogs into the bargain is a monstrous heresy against the God of Can-Do.
Such fatuity doesn't stop the questions being worth answering, however, and the Nobel Museum will be inviting some celebrated names at least to consider, if not to answer, it. Nobody would want to miss, for example, George Steiner's views on the question of genius. On the other hand, Dame Anita Roddick's involvement seems slightly inexplicable: she is, after all, a businesswoman who did very nicely out of selling "ethical" splods and jollops made out of "natural" things like bananas, the crucial point being that nothing (except perhaps the bananas) suffered. It's a perfectly honourable way to make a living but it is hard to see what insight it gives into genius - unless it's that, in her own sphere, Roddick displayed some of what we might assume are the characteristics of genius: the ability to yoke disparate concepts (cosmetics and ethics, in her case) and thereby come up with a good idea, and the determination to keep going.
Over recent years, there has been some evidence to suggest that the single unifying factor among "geniuses" is not inherent talent, not an egregious profundity of understanding, but, above all, the ability to practise. Watch any musical virtuoso at work and the evidence stares you in the face: he or she executes, with apparently insolent ease, passages which should by all accounts be at best intolerably difficult, at worst completely impossible. This is seldom to do with superhuman abilities (though in the case of Paganini, for example, the huge hands and hypermobility typical of Marfan's syndrome gave him a technical advantage over a human being of standard configuration). Nor does it seem connected to the woollier aspects of nurture: the hyperconfidence of genius cannot be transmitted by an adoring mother alone, otherwise the young men of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the smaller Greek islands would have cornered genius long ago. No: simple, repetitive, grinding practice would seem to be the key.
We can - and the enlarge-your-brain websites do - flannel endlessly about exercising the "little grey cells", but, once again, there is little evidence that doing those abominable Sudoku puzzles or having Mozart force-fed in utero translates into great intellectual or artistic achievement. Businesses, too, spend a fortune on more or less fatuous courses teaching them to "brainstorm" or "think outside the box", but there is scant proof that corporate outside-the-box brainstorm victims come up with anything other than run-of-the-mill, firmly-inside-the-box ideas as a result.
So is it impossible to foster genius? Can we find a way to train future Nobel prizewinners, or at least raise the bar? One of the problems is that there simply are not enough geniuses to feed a statistically valid study, but, from anecdotal evidence, there are a few pointers that almost all attested geniuses have in common - whether they be Max Born, the Dalai Lama, Marie Curie or George Bernard Shaw, all Nobel laureates.
The first seems to be the early discovery of an abiding passion, whether music, physics, geology or molecular biology. The second appears to be (and, from the handful of geniuses I have encountered) a degree of self-absorption that can neither be learned nor faked; you either have it or you don't. The third factor seems to follow on from the second: the ability to recover from mistakes. Most of us feel humiliated when we foul up. As Homer Simpson observed: "Well, son, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The moral is: never try." We laugh at Homer because he articulates the truth of most of our lives. We either fail and give up, turning elsewhere, or we never even try, for fear of failing, and spend our lives believing we could have been a contender, while the truth is that, if we could have been a contender, we would have been a contender.
For the genius, secure in his or her self-absorption, failure is of no account: it leaves the inner self unscathed. Most of us would respond to a terrible public failure with a sense of shame: utterly diminished, we would creep away and hide. The genius simply assumes the public is wrong. What else would one expect, after all? If they were right, they wouldn't be the public.
But there is another element that seems vital. Certain places, the Nobel Museum points out, have given rise to more than their reasonable share of Nobel laureates: Tokyo, Vienna, Paris and Cambridge. Cambridge University has produced more Nobel prizes than any other institution: 81 affiliates of the university since 1904, with physics, chemistry and medicine leading the field. Of those 81, 31 have come from Trinity College, which might therefore be seen as the Great Omphalos of Nobelism. And so a study of Cambridge in general, and Trinity in particular, might arguably provide some indications of the conditions under which a certain sort of genius can thrive.
We can guess at a few. The "collegiality", much loathed by the current government and its recent predecessors, which encourages social and intellectual security. The money: enough to provide a comfortable living for its members in their day-to-day lives (having experienced it, I can attest that collegiate life is, for those of a certain cast of mind, the nearest thing to heaven on earth) but not enough either to be-come intrusive or to eliminate the need for that improvisation which is the mother of inspiration as much as necessity is the mother of invention. The mixture of the competitive and the co-operative. The perpetual awareness (though nobody dare admit it now, which is odd, given that commercial businesses boast about their version all the time, with less reason) of being part of an elite. And, of course, the absence of commercial pressures, which again - along with false "measurements" of equally false "targets" - loom increasingly large and ugly.
It would be going too far to suggest that the ill-thought-out model of "Darwinist competition" pervading business (Darwinism is based on establishing a niche, not about monopolist expansionism, and speciation is a result, not a desideratum) is the institutional enemy of the genius. But certainly it is hard to hear yet another CEO choosing "My Way" for his theme song when the corporate ethos might best be summed up with the line "I did it their way". However, if we value genius (or innovation, or creativity; whatever we call it, it's still a decision we have to make), we might wonder whether the prevailing orthodoxy of business-for-profit is the only valid model for all forms of human endeavour from opera to doctoring. Alfred Nobel may have made his pile from big bangs, but he had the vision to realise that other species of achievement thrive in other niche environments, and valued them accordingly.
"Beautiful Minds: capture the spirit of Nobel achievement" is at the British Library, London NW1 (020 7412 7332), from 7 December to 15 March 2006
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