Ebook: The Wiley Handbook of Genius

"...Yet something is strikingly missing in all of the above titles: the word "handbook." Indeed, a _Handbook of Genius_ has never been published, at least not in any of the principal languages of science. This omission can be verified by conducting yet another Google search, which now elicits nothing - no edited volume containing authoritative chapters covering key aspects of the phenomenon. What makes this absence even more astonishing is the obvious abundance of handbooks concerning closely related topics, such as creativity, leadership, talent, and giftedness. As an example, four different creativity handbooks were published between 1989 and 2010, or about two per decade. Any "handbook of genius" thus remains conspicuously absent from the bookshelves.
Consequently, when Andrew Peart at Wiley Blackwell asked me to consider editing just such a handbook, I jumped at the chance. Opportunity does not knock that often. Because I had already written chapters for previous Wiley Blackwell handbooks, I had prior experience working with them. More importantly, this new project seemed an ideal way to culminate my own research by bringing it together with the best work conducted by my contemporaries. Furthermore, the fact that such a handbook was long overdue was proven by how easy it was to recruit expert contributors. The first-pass acceptance rate for my invitations was nearly perfect! The outcome is this volume containing substantially more than two dozen chapters. These chapters have been organized into seven parts.
Part I deals with the various *perspectives* on genius. After a treatment of the role of genius in history - both as a discipline and as a phenomenon - the next four chapters discuss the main scientific methods for studying genius, namely, psychobiography, face-to-face interview, psychometric measurement, and historiometric analysis. Because I wrote the last chapter, I decided to use it as a transition linking the first four chapters with virtually all of the chapters that follow. It may be noted that one major mainstream method is missing, namely laboratory experiments. For reasons too obvious to mention, it is extremely rare for world-acclaimed geniuses to volunteer to serve as experimental participants in some professor's lab!
Part II turns to the individual *processes* that underlie the works of geniuses. The mind-brain sciences have experienced a substantial growth in recent years, so it may not surprise anyone that the first chapter is devoted to the neuroscience of genius. The next two chapters concentrate on specific examples of creative genius in order to decipher the cognitive and related processes underlying their contributions. This part closes with a chapter that raises a fascinating question: If computer programs can simulate the musical creativity of recognized geniuses, such as J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Scott Joplin, does this indicate that genius is far more ordinary than people imagine? Readers probably do not need to be reminded that it was not long ago that a computer chess program beat Gary Kasparov, an undeniable chess genius (Hsu, 2002). Without a doubt, nothing mystical would be required.
The foregoing conclusion might be interpreted as saying that geniuses are just like the rest of us. Yet this interpretation is wrong. Geniuses tend to feature some personal characteristics that make them identifiably different. This conclusion is established in the chapters making up Part III, which all concern the *attributes* of geniuses. Although genius is often associated with exceptional intelligence - and frequently defined as a superlative IQ - other individual-difference variables are involved as well (see also Simonton, 2011). At the same time, there is no such thing as a single generic type of genius. Instead, genius comes in different flavors depending on the domain of achievement.
The obvious next question concerns the *origins* of genius, the central subject of Part IV. Although the issue about whether genius is born or made goes back centuries, Francis Galton (1874) was the first to formulate the question in scientific research. Not surprisingly, the chapters span the full range of treatments, from genetic factors to environmental influences. This discussion must necessarily include the critical relation between child prodigies and adulthood genius. Although prodigies are often loosely referred to as geniuses in the popular media, that designation may add more confusion than enlightenment.
The last remark suggests the need to understand the *trajectories* of genius, the focus of the five chapters in Part V. Actually, these chapters form a kind of intellectual sandwich. The middle three chapters all use historiometric methods to study the course of a creative career in three domains, namely, science, music, and literature. On the outside are chapters that report the results of the two most ambitious psychometric longitudinal studies ever conducted. Although the last two chapters use very different methods, they both introduce the important issue of life expectancies - the terminal point of the trajectory.
Up to this point, genius has been treated as an entirely individualistic phenomenon. Yet as pointed out long ago, genius takes place in a larger sociocultural milieu (Candolle, 1873; Kroeber, 1944). This point is well demonstrated in the chapters in Part VI that in various ways treat *contexts* of genius. For example, some of the contributors scrutinize the recognition process. Although people will sometimes speak of the "neglected genius," from the standpoint of the social context, this expression becomes an oxymoron. Other contributors devote more attention to the factors that affect the emergence of genius that will earn the recognition not just of contemporaries but also of posterity.
Part VII concludes the handbook with a single chapter dealing with *prospects*. Besides bringing everything together, here the editor endeavors to lay out the future history of genius science. Although highly speculative, it is hoped that these speculations will inspire research for another century or more."