My name is Gemma and I am the newest member of the Laundry team, as of about 3 weeks ago in fact.  I am settling in just fine and just thought I’d add a bit to the discussion that goes in these ere parts…  So I was flicking through the TV channels last night, after an exhausting resettlement into my sister’s flat, and was drawn in by one of those random, but sometimes quite interesting documentaries on channel 5; this one was going by the title of “My Brilliant Brain” – who could resist?! 

It was basically the story of a young girl from

Hungary with a psychologist father, who was determined to use her as an experiment to test his hypothesis that genius is something that can be trained in an individual and that basically anyone, with enough determination and hard work is capable of it.

  A very tempting idea, I know.  So when his daughter happened to come across a chess board he jumped at the opportunity to begin the long, but very fruitful training period. The young girl in question (I think her English name was Sally, most young girls are called Sally, but if anyone was watching and wants to correct me on that feel free) is now a chess champion and even at the age of 6 was beating formidable figures in the chess world. But hang on a minute! (I was thinking) - isn’t the whole notion of a true genius that whatever outstanding capability they have, whether its musical like Mozart or mathematical like Einstein or whatever else, it is an ability that is naturally existing and doesn’t need any formal training, just time and space to develop independently?  Like a friend on my course at uni, who spent most of his time making beautiful music and still managed to get a first on every single piece of work, module, exam we ever did in maths and philosophy! Now that’s what I call a genius!   

What is a genius? A genius is a person of great intelligence, who shows an exceptional natural capacity of intellect in areas of art, literature, music, science and mathematics. 

Rachel has told me that she learnt that anyone can become a chess master or tennis pro as long as they put in 10,000 hours of practice – better start today then or my bones will give in before the practice makes perfect. Genius is also linked with Autism.  10% of the autistic population and 1% of the general population have savant (genius) abilities and no one knows why for sure.  We like this theory: 

Snyder (brainy man – but maybe not genius), for instance, believes that we all possess the savant’s extraordinary abilities - it is just a question of us learning how to access them. “Savants (people with exceptional abilities) have usually had some kind of brain damage; whether it’s an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head or an epileptic fit. And it’s that brain damage which creates the savant. I think that it’s possible for a perfectly normal person to have access to these abilities.” YES! 

We found one man with Genius abilities, Daniel Tammet.  He is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places.  Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”  Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (yes cousin of Sasha!) is Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at

Cambridge

University.

  The ARC team has started scanning Daniels’s brain to find out if there are modules (for number, for example, or for colour, or for texture) that are connected in a way that is different from most of us. “It’s too early to tell, but we hope it might throw some light on why we don’t all have savant abilities.” The Laundry team have genius abilities.  I am excellent at crafts – at school there was a design the classroom door competition and I won every year.  Rachel has an uncanny ability to always know where north is – she never gets lost and can find places that she has only been to once ten years ago.  Sam is a superstar DJ, when pressed to explain, apparently “superstar” means the-best-in-world-even-though-no-one-realises-it and he went to a BBC radio 4 programme called Genius, discussing genius ideas (including basketball for short people and a service station that travels at 70 miles an hour so you don’t have to stop)– does that count?  Harriet is brilliant at finding things – which is great because Rachel is brilliant at loosing them. If anyone’s has got any comments on this, or indeed is a genius, has friends or family members that they think are a genius, we’d love to hear about it here at the Laundry.   

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