In the April Elle, a genius is a hairstylist who typically charges $300 a haircut, suggests shampooing every other day and Bumble and Bumble Surf Spray. A genius could also be a celebrity with a new movie coming out who also attended Stanford...for one year. Or genius is simply clothing inspired by graphic representations of the work place—-like pie charts, the stock exchange and line graphs! In this installment of cover lies, discover other intellectually stimulating things you'll find in this lady mag.

Speaking at the 2009 Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference, Gilbert said we put too much pressure on artists and other creative people by holding them responsible for their own inspiration:

Allowing somebody ... to believe that he or she is ... the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, internal mystery is just like a smidge of too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche [...] It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all of these unnatural expectations about performance. I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

Instead, she advocates a return to a pre-Renaissance attitude in which creativity was believed to come from the outside, from "a magical divine entity" or "mystical fairy juice." Artists would feel better, she says, if they accepted that their creative impulses didn't come from them, but were instead "on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life, which you pass along when you're finished to somebody else."

Focusing too much on one's own greatness or lack thereof can drive anybody off their rocker, but this "mythical fairy juice" smacks of New Age faux-religiosity to us. If you believe in God, then divine inspiration makes sense — but if all you've got is "some unimaginable source," is this vague spirituality really all that helpful? Leaving the spiritual question aside, the biggest problem for most artists/writers/creative people in general isn't crushing societal expectations — it's money. Give me reliable health insurance and I'll believe in whatever fairy juice you want.

TED: Eat, Pray, Love Author on How We Kill Geniuses [Wired]

Inhumane behavior often comes from having damage to prefrontal cortex, leading to bad self-control and moral reasoning. But brain damage is not a mechanism for becoming a genius. Basically there is no reason for the two to be correlated.

Maybe you need counterexamples?

Darwin: Devoted family man, not known to be a perv. Went out of his way to give joint credit to Wallace for the theory of natural selection. An asshole wouldn't do that.

Einstein: big pacifist. Worried like hell about war. Generally thought to not be an asshole. However, he was said to cat around a bit in his youth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

Benjamin Franklin: definitely not an asshole. Came up with bifocals, showed that lightning was made of electricity, and thought of the ideas of positive and negative charge. Liked to cat around. Not a known perv, unless you somehow count the fur hat he wore when visiting France.

One of the problems is that it's easier to remember stories about geniuses who were assholes or freaks. Pablo Picasso (despite the song), Vincent Van Gogh, Isaac Newton. Maybe the myth comes from the fact that geniuses sometimes think that they don't have to follow other people's rules. Kind of like the very rich and very powerful.

Oh yes, ha ha, except! That nihilistic asshole you put up with until you realized he wasn't even actually smarter than you: neither rich nor powerful. Carry on!