The Least Talked-About (Series)-2

I rate myself pretty high in the art of working harmless April-Fool pranks, and I find it thrilling to caution the potential victims well in advance. My plan was just to give a strong warning to Swami to get ready to be my first victim on the fateful day when I reminded him that April first is around the corner, but it lead to an astounding conversation on an extraordinary life.

“Do you know the individual who has by far played the most perfidious, but very unique, April fool prank on humanity? “

“Who is that – David Blaine or Harry Houdini or somebody?”

“No – they can only play instant antics. I am talking about somebody who tricked the whole world with his life! ”

“Life? Sorry, I think I am quite following you. Who are you talking about? ”

“Sidis. William James Sidis – his birth on the April fool’s day of 1898 marked the arrival of the greatest brain our planet has ever witnessed.

And when he departed the world in 1944, he left behind a host of shattered hopes that were knitted around his bright but bizarre childhood; a flock of farfetched prophesies that missed their marks by light-years, and all that blindingly keen limelight that had been hovering over him all along without his permission - leaving the torturous world guessing ever after. Well - if that was not the worst possible act of April-fool, then what else is?

Let us cut back to 1908 United States real quick....

A normal evening. A rather nerd-looking 10-year-old completes a list of corrections after citing some "wrong paragraphs" in the manuscript of eminent Harvard Professor Josiah Royce's book on Logic.

That's right. 10-year old correcting Harvard Professor of Logic. You heard it right!

Correcting heavy-duty books is not new to him. He had done that with E. V. Huntington's mathematics text 2 years back. After all, this boy is an author of four books in anatomy and astronomy himself - that he wrote between the his ages of four and eight!

But there is still more to this boy...

He has been reading The New York Times since he was one a half year old.

He knows systematic typewriting from his age of three. He had known enough Latin at his fourth birthday to complete reading an entire book in that language. In the same year, he learned Greek alphabet and read Homer in Greek. 

By six, he had learnt Russian, French, German, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian. He could also calculate mentally the day for any date in history. A year later, he graduated grammar school.

Last year, when he was still 9, he cleared Harvard Medical School and MIT entrance examinations!

Yes.

His name was William James Sidis! The man with an estimated IQ of around 300, the highest ever recorded.”

I could feel goose bumps all over my body when swami ended his dreamily vivid flashback, “Wow – what a prodigy!”

But then, swami went on with his words:

“One would expect him to formulate something of the magnitude of Grand Unified Theory as he grows up, correct? - Instead he delivered notoriously mediocre materials such as a transfer guide to the District of Columbia, a book on The Tribes of the United States and some works on streetcar transfers. His best contributions were limited to some least readable philosophical works. (Of course, there were occasional "hisses" of talent - such as, he is said to have theorized the existence of Black Holes, much earlier than Chandrasekhar did it). By and large, he produced little stuff of real significance.”

The prodigy and prodigal learning

“Why?” I asked.

“To understand Sidis and his failure, we should know his background. William Sidis' father, Boris Sidis, was no ordinary person himself. As a world-renowned psychologist as he was, his obvious interest laid, among other things, in the way the human intellect is shaped. It wouldn't be entirely wrong to argue that he found a potential object for his experiments in his son. It was none but he who more or less "modeled" William's  brilliant mind, but the methods he had chose to do it were unprecedented, belligerent, merciless and for most part, out-and-out cruel !

Can you think of a father relentlessly teaching a toddler in the cradle?  Well- that was precisely what William's father did. He taught his son at proverbial sea-land - and-air, left-right-and-center, while sleeping and while being awake.

Father Sidis remarked that”Education must aim at the bringing out of the genius in man". He went on to appeal the parents world-over:  "I appeal to you, fathers and mothers... to turn your attention to the education of your children, to the training of the young generation of future citizens".

His motive was obvious: his wanted his son to be a living proof of his methods of learning and teaching. Right or wrong? I don't know.

But Sidis the failure is said to have a lot to do with his parenting, as much as Sidis the prodigy.

In any case, little Sidis was nurtured extraordinarily and came up extraordinary. As I mentioned, he achieved all that incredible intellectual feats and much more as a young boy.

But one close look would expose a disaster brewing side-by-side with the obvious prospects of an astronomical genius.

A child has to get what a child deserves. Knowledge and intelligence is one thing, but there is also something called childlike tenderness, overlooking which might have backfired in Sidis' case.

Young William Sidis, quite predictably, was the cynosure of the entire early-20th - century world. We know how frenzied the public and hence the media would be, when they happen to know about such a prodigious child among them. As a biographer puts it:

          "...he lived in a goldfish bowl with the world watching his every move..."

It was exasperating and frustrating for a young genius to find all of his dear childhood was robbed off by his guardians and his space cordoned off by media - for the sole crime of being too smart, so much so that he, though subconsciously, might have conceived that super intelligence comes with super pain.

Academic Sidis
“He must have worked wonders at the school and college, right”

“There was a gap between Sidis joining Harvard and his completion of High- School, for the obvious reason that he had just blazed away in his studies, taking much lesser time than his peers. He utilized this period to learn advanced mathematics and to read Einstein.

The point to be noted here is that he used to do things best when he was working and learning from outside any established academic frame work.

Twelve-year old Sidis then proceeded to Harvard. He was admitted there as a "special student", in recognition of his brilliance.

He was too geeky to get along comfortably with his college mates. You can imagine how it would be like to be in company of a bunch of bullies making fun of you for being too young, too brilliant, too inept socially and of course, for being a Jew ( After all, it was early 20th century West).

He was a classical misfit for Harvard.

As in the case of any brilliant mind, Sidis had had a world parallel to his curriculum. He interest that time was set in a whole array of knowledge areas on can think of: Science (especially astronomy), mathematics, humanities, anatomy and even political science. Interest in the case of Sidis would mean being tremendously engrossed on each of these. Mind you, his brain was too smart to be object of analysis by mere mortals.

In any case, he was unsuccessful in Harvard for his standards, so to say; his grades were a moderately impressive "'cum laude" rather than the topmost”magna cum laude". (Well- you would better understand it if I say 'A' rather than 'A+')

These words from Sidis sum it up:

"I hated Harvard... anyone who sends his son to college is a fool -- a boy can learn more in a public library".

His next misadventure was to accept the post of a lecturer of Mathematics in Rice University. His familiar state of being browbeaten had been carried over here - with the sole change in the bullying party - this time it was the turn of his students. They had found a real chump in their introvert professor who was way too younger than them. It took almost a year before that 'torture of teaching' finally coming to an end.

And yes - he had been tightly followed by the media through these years.

For a final time, William tried to cope with the education system by enrolling in Harvard Law School. And once again, it was proven to be not his cup of tea.

So, in 1918, at the age of 20, he decided to call it a day from academia.”

Jobs a genius would like to do!

“Towards the end of his academic career, Sidis had developed a strong interest in the Leftist values and Marxian ideology. He was arrested for allegedly "inciting violence" in a May day rally that time and was in fact sentenced for an captivity of more than an year!

That incident perhaps marked the end of William Sidis, the prodigy and the birth of William Sidis, the fallen star.

The next 26 years of his life are marred by protagonism, unorthodoxy and obscurity. He expressed this in an interview:

          "I want to live the perfect life, and the only way to live the perfect life is to    live it in seclusion"."

He used to take up petty jobs such as a laboratory assistant ( which he resigned upon finding that he was working to a military plot - he still maintained some values ! ), as a Russian interpreter etc., and then went on to work for throw-away salaries in a host of labors that involved operating some machines .

His major challenges during these tenures were to hide his real identity from his employers. He made it a point to leave the job if caught.

His seclusion and eccentricity were aggravating. He died in remarkable obscurity at the age of 46”

Recipe for disaster

“Quite tragic. I don’t see a reason why this happened. Has his life been analyzed properly! ”

“Though one of the most deservedly overlooked geniuses, Sidis has been the object of many an analysis - especially one of psychogenetic. Read any literature on him, and you would find a comparatively shorter description on his life and achievements, followed by a much elaborate analysis of "What Went Wrong". I can't say this is improper, comparing the potential Sidis had with what he actually delivered to humanity.

The simple question is - how a person with such a prodigious adolescence and with an IQ that is almost twice that of even many Nobel Laureates could have such a downfall?

We have seen his father's rigorous teaching methods, and how it might have later backfired. It is this overzealous surcharging of Sidis' tender brain in his childhood is the most often discusses theories around his transition from prodigy to nothing.

There is no doubt that parents should apply extreme caution when they experiment with children. Such experiments would yield fast results, for young minds are as tractable as a programmable devise, but an unnatural nurturing can also precede an unnatural adulthood.

But there is a more interesting angle to it.

If we flip through the pages of biographies of most geniuses, especially those in the fields of Physical Sciences, philosophy and literature, we can find that they had either retained or cultivated the most powerful tool for creativity and originality, and that is nothing but a childlike curiosity !

Einstein is the most observable example of this fact. Einstein's childhood never prefigured a genius. Quite the contrary. Even at the age of 9, he was struggling to speak fluently. Around this age, Sidis would master not less than 7 languages and devise a new Esperanto-type language called Vendergood!  Einstein almost certainly had a subnormal - or as some suggest, dyslexic - childhood. So had many other masterminds like Da Vinci and Niels Bohr. The most astonishing thing is that, in addition to being the greatest physicist  of modern times, Einstein is also recognized as a prolific writer, who possessed an exceptional ability to express complex ides lucidly.

So - what do you think that made a much inferior young Einstein raced his way to a profound genius when an infinitely promising young Sidis more or less ended up in the sinister trashcan of History?

There comes the role of keeping the curiosity alive in the adult-life. A curious mind would pry into every hole and corner until it gets what it wanted. In Einstein's own words:

"I sometimes ask myself how I was the one to develop the Theory of Relativity. The reason, I think is that a normal adult never stops to think of space and time. These are the things which he had thought as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result if which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown- up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities”

Now take the case of Sidis. He might have too exhausted with the amount of information he processed during his childhood to carry the pain of being curious forward. He was said to have despised the very act of thinking in his later life - one of the reason for him taking up jobs that didn't involve any mental process whatsoever.

Genius vs. rest of the world

“Apart from a damp curiosity, what else would have made Sidis a "reluctant genius?”

“A massive genius like Sidis can only become a black sheep, and it is very unlikely to expect him to be otherwise. I agree that many significant contributors to the humanity were so very normal, but many super-brains had hugely exceptional behavioral patters that were often misinterpreted as eccentric by mainstream standards. Greatest minds chose to leave the beaten track for the simple reason that they think differently. When you try to squeeze them into established pedagogic or other social systems institutionalized by much inferior mortals, expect conflicts. It is wrong to assume that they are socially challenged, it's just that they struggle to understand why the society around them functions the way it does!

Sidis had his own ideas and set-of-standards for a society.  He literally put them down as a framework by defining life with a set of 154 rules. His ideas are termed Utopian, but who can say with surety that he was wrong and we are right? After all, all we have a set of rules that we believe would do some "common good", but there can be a zillion violations of individual interests therein.

Now, the role of media. Dumb humans who flit with superficiality would love to be watched over. You can expect a shallow model or entertainment professional to be happy to find cameras and reporters wherever he/she turns, but can't expect that from a colossal mind like Sidis. Speaking of Einstein again, part of his success lies in the fact that he came to limelight only after being delivering his masterpiece-theories.

It is said that Sidis suffered from a mental breakdown when he was eleven, and he was treated in his father's own mental asylum. Though the authenticity of this is questioned by many, it is safe to assume that he, still too young to do all that he had already done till then,  was going through a not-so-enjoyable, if not entirely traumatic, period of his life. He was bearing more than flesh and blood could. When a boundlessly extraordinary brain is succumbed to untoward learning experiments and grotesque expectations, what else you can expect other than a crushed soul?

But the real questions that should be asked are multifold:

How fair is to ask somebody to deliver for humanity? Is it not blatant violation of one's right to live? How can you expect somebody to burn out for the rest? Do parents have the right to experiment with their children at the expense of their childhood? 

The answers lie somewhere in the twilight zone of an amazing life - that of William James Sidis - the enigma! ”