Why do geniuses lack common sense?

Why do geniuses lack common sense?
As the man behind the Rosetta space mission is accused by his sister of losing his car in a car park, we ask why geniuses seem to lack common sense

By Helena Kealey6:48PM GMT 14 Nov 2014

Dr Matt Taylor has accomplished one of the greatest achievements in space history as part of the team which has landed a probe on a speeding comet. The ground-breaking Rosetta space mission may help to answer important questions about the origins of life on earth. The scientist is, according to his family, “brilliant”.

And yet, despite landing a robot on a rock more than 300 million miles away from Earth, he is sometimes “useless” and lacking in “common sense”. On occasion he can’t even find his car in a car park, says his sister Maxine, 41.

Dr Taylor fits the mould of the highly intelligent and absent minded scientist; a man whose brain is too busy working on the challenges of his research to deal with the minutia of daily life. But is the myth of the “nutty professor” just another outdated stereotype?

Dr Michael Woodley of Menie, from the Free University of Brussels, believes that individuals who can be classified as geniuses have brains that are wired differently and are programmed to be unable to deal with small details.

“They’re incapable of managing normal day to day affairs,” says Dr Woodley. “History is littered with anecdotes of geniuses who fail at the most spectacularly mundane tasks. Einstein got lost on one of his sojourns in Princeton, New Jersey. He went into a shop and said, ‘Hi, I’m Einstein, can you take me home please?’ He couldn’t drive and the small things that most people take for granted were totally beyond his capabilities.”

Dr Woodley believes geniuses are “literally not hardwired to be able to learn those kind of tasks. Every time they attempt to allocate the effort into dealing with the mundanities in life they’re constitutionally resisted; their brains are not capable of processing things at that low level.”

Genius, Dr Woodley says, can be found in people with modestly high levels of psychoticism [often typified by interpersonal hostility] and very high intelligence, with IQs scores of more than 140 or 150. Furthermore they are, he says, often asexual as their brains use the space allocated to urges such as sexual desire for additional cognitive ability. “You have a trade off between what Freud would have referred to as libido and on the other hand pure abstraction: a Platonistic world of ideas,” he said.

The evolutionary reason for this may lie with the theory that geniuses have insights that advance the general population. “It’s paradoxical because you think the idea of evolution is procreation, and that might be true in a lot of cases,” he explains. “But what if the way you increase your genes is by benefitting the entire group, by giving them an innovation that allows them to grow and expand and colonise new countries?”

The lack of common sense is in keeping with the idea that a genius exists as an asset to other people, and so: “They need to be looked after,” he says. “They are vulnerable and fragile.”

Dr Taylor may or may not be a genius. He displays many of the characteristics outlined by Dr Woodley - including an interest in colonising new places (space) and unconventionality, as exhibited in a large Rosetta space mission tattoo he has on his leg. However, he is married with two children. One thing is clear however: the absent minded genius is more than just a stereotype.