Hometown of Alfred Nobel 9 letters. Biography of Alfred Bernhard Nobel

Thomas Edison is the greatest American inventor and entrepreneur who created devices that no one can do without now. Edison's most famous invention is the electric incandescent lamp. The merits of the brilliant engineer include the improvement of the telephone, film equipment, telegraph and the invention of the phonograph. Not everyone is familiar with the rather amazing and incredible life story of this unique person.

The words "killers" or - the power of the word

It turns out that the world-famous inventor Thomas Edison not only did not show any promise from childhood, but teachers considered him mentally retarded and called the child “stupid idiot” right to his face. The boy was absent-minded in class and slightly deaf due to a complication after an infection.

Teachers might consider him a special talent. But instead, the following happened: one day the teacher wrote a letter and asked the boy to pass it mother, it said that Edison was stupid and not worthy to study at this school. Therefore, it needs to be picked up and taught on its own.

In this situation, Thomas Edison's mother acted very wisely, and this is what allowed the young talent to become famous all over the world.

She read the letter to her son, unable to hold back her tears, but did not convey to the boy its real content, which could “kill” the child and forever bury the unsurpassed talent of the inventor. She put her own meaning into them and completely rephrased the message. The teacher, allegedly, asks to leave the child at home schooling, since he is a genius and there are no teachers in the school who can teach the boy.

Do you feel the magic of transforming the meaning of murderous words into creative ones? With these words, she literally programmed Edison to believe in himself and, thus, gave him a ticket to a happy future.

For Thomas Edison, the impossible was possible

Having not studied at school for more than three months, the boy had to engage in self-education. Mom hired a tutor who was able to instill in him all sorts of experiences and experiments. Since then, Edison read scientific books avidly, and as a result, without a higher education, he was able to achieve stunning results.

Many years after the death of his mother, being a well-known personality of the twentieth century, the inventor found that same ill-fated letter in the family archives, and found out its true content. Edison was amazed and shocked, the find was a discovery for him. crying over the letter for more than one hour, he made an entry in his diary, in which his mother. She said that Thomas Alva Edison (the real name of the inventor) was backward in development, but the heroism of his mother helped to bring into the world another brilliant personality of mankind.

History knows other great personalities who were considered losers. These include: Charles Darwin, Walt Disney, Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford and Dmitri Mendeleev, who opened the table of chemical elements to the whole world.

Thus, Thomas Edison and his other followers were able to prove to everyone and to themselves, including that the key to real success is not always higher education and the opinion of others, but above all, faith in one's own strength, perseverance and hard work. Indeed, according to the laws of aerodynamics, a bumblebee also cannot fly, but in spite of everything, it succeeds! Do you have such examples from life when his strength worked wonders - please share in the comments!

Remember the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man? Despite his mental disability, he possessed amazing abilities. He had an amazing memory, which helped his brother (Tom Cruise) while playing in a Las Vegas casino.

Such a person is an excellent specialist in any narrow field. He can only do one thing very well, and he fails at most other things. We think of these people as mentally handicapped, or, to put it correctly, "handicapped people" and often put them in the hospital because they can't take care of themselves. But in fact, they are amazing people. Today, psychologists continue to puzzle over the mystery of brilliant madmen.

Genius madmen are intellectually handicapped people who have some kind of outstanding ability, knowledge, skill or talent. Let's take a look at some of these unusual people.

1. A "mentally deranged person" can repeat the entire content of a newspaper verbatim after it has been read to him. Another is also able to literally reproduce its content, but, for example, backwards.

2. The so-called weak-minded boy of 12 years old, who can neither read nor write, correctly and with incredible speed multiplies three-digit numbers in his mind.

3. A 22-year-old woman with the mental development of a five-year-old child remembers the dates of each visit to her home and the name of each visitor.

4. "Mentally retarded" can remember the day of the funeral in the local parish of any person over the past 35 years, the age of the deceased and the names of everyone who came to say goodbye to him.

5. Genius madmen sometimes gain wide popularity. For example, the "genius of Earlswood Hospital", a deaf, weak-minded patient, had amazing abilities: he drew, invented, and was well versed in technology. He was widely known and highly respected.

6. Thomas Fuller, a slave from Virginia, who lived in the 18th century, was considered hopelessly imbecile. However, he could quickly calculate the exact number of seconds in 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours, including 17 leap years.

7. Gottfried Mind, who was considered a "dumb-headed cretin", had an amazing gift for drawing cats. His images seemed so alive that throughout Europe he was known as "the feline Raphael". One of his drawings adorned the collection of King George IV.

8. Blind Tom Bethan, the famous ingenious madman with an extremely limited intellect, already at the age of four years old played Mozart's works on the piano and could accurately reproduce a piece of music of any degree of complexity. He was able to repeat a speech of any length in any language without losing a single syllable. Once he passed the test, accurately repeating two works of 13 and 20 pages.

9. Ellen Boudreau, a blind mentally retarded girl with rickets, had an incredible gift for music. She could repeat any melody sung or played, regardless of its complexity, after the first listening.

10. Kieshu Yamashita, who had a very low level of intelligence, was a genius in graphic art. He was called the Japanese Van Gogh.

11. Alonso Clemons, whose IQ did not exceed 40, lived in a mental hospital in Boulder, Colorado, where he created hundreds of sculptures. One of them was sold in 1992 for $45,000.

12. I. K., a mentally handicapped man from Canada, is a better draftsman than any professional artists who have been compared to him. According to doctors, I.K. sees three-dimensional images with amazing clarity and a sense of perspective "without applying the rules."

13. A resident of London Stephen Wiltshire with an IQ of 30 has created several books with amazingly beautiful drawings. One of them, Floating Cities, topped the UK bestseller list.

14. George and Charles, the calculator twins, are mentally handicapped brothers with an amazing ability to describe any day in the last 80,000 years. For example, they can easily tell what day of the week April 24, 929 was. They also remember in detail the weather of every day of their adult life.

15. Prematurely born blind Leslie Lemke has an amazing memory. He sings, plays and often participates in TV shows. Lemke was the subject of two films: The Woman Who Wanted a Miracle (1985), which won four Emmys, and Island of Genius (1987).

16. Kim, a math genius living in Salt Lake City, Utah, was the inspiration for the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Dr. Darold Treffert, who has worked with such people for many years, was a consultant on the film. Treffert wrote one of the most famous books on this issue, Amazing People: Understanding the Genius Madman. The doctor considers this condition relatively rare.

Scientists looking for explanations

According to some experts, approximately 10% of children with autism can show genius. One study of 90,000 psychiatric patients found "54 brilliant lunatics, or about one in two thousand patients." There are significantly more men among them than women (the ratio is approximately 6:1). Treffert believes that "until now, no theory has explained this mysterious phenomenon." He writes that "the hypotheses put forward are almost as varied and numerous as the cases described by physicians."

Despite the six current hypotheses, each of them lacks something. The first is that the imagination of such people far exceeds that of a normal person. This refers to the ability to quickly view, store and reproduce large amounts of information. However, some patients are blind and cannot see anything at all.

There is a version that such patients inherited their abilities from their parents. But brilliant madmen are also produced by people without outstanding abilities, and the children of the sick in almost all cases turn out to be quite normal.

The third hypothesis states that genius madmen suffer from sensory deprivation and social isolation. In some cases this may be true. But deprivation is more a result than a symptom of such a condition. Many people live in ordinary surroundings.

According to the fourth theory, such people have a weakened ability for abstract thinking. However, Treffert believes that this view is "descriptive" and not an explanation.

Finally, some believe that gifted mentally retarded people have brain damage or problems with the distribution of functions between the right and left hemispheres. However, many of these patients have quite normal EEG and CT scan results.

Treffert concludes that the behavior of genius madmen “is complex and difficult to understand; although this phenomenon is a real phenomenon, it remains incomprehensible both in specific cases and in general. The search for explanations continues. No model of how the brain works, especially memory, is complete until it includes the gifted madman syndrome.”

What does all this teach us? This phenomenon illustrates the extremes of human abilities - the combination of "genius" and "madness" in one person. We must strive to understand and accept these extremes, we must not ridicule and blame such people. Most of us are similar to each other. Some are different from the majority, but there are also very special people.

Case of T.M.: unusual memory

Psychologists at the University of London have presented evidence that people with extraordinary memories are actually special, even if they don't seem so at first glance. They describe the mental activity of T. M., a 25-year-old man with an incredible ability to remember. However, for T. M. himself, this is not a mystery, and he clearly explains the memorization mechanism. Here is an example. T. M. asks a person in the audience to give his date of birth and very quickly says what day it was ... The calculation of the day is done by using the numerical codes of years and months and using calculations. With practice, various principles and methods of memorization are developed. Now T.M. can instantly understand that certain dates mean certain days, as if it were a multiplication table. Each year and month has a code from 0 to 6, and T.M. learned the codes for all years from 1900 to 2000. The method is to add the month and year codes and divide the sum by 7; the remainder is the day of the week. For example, October 27, 1964 gives 27 + 1 (October code) + 3 (1964 code) = 31. Dividing this number by 7, we get a remainder of 3, which means the third day of the week is Tuesday.