Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Massimo Pugin. With me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Well, today, I am pleased to welcome our guest, Dr Judith Schlessinger, who is a psychologist, author, educator, jazz critic, musician. And we're going to be focusing mainly we do some jazz today.

No, you can stop. We're going to be focusing our discussion mainly on her most recent book, The Insanity Hoax Exposing the Myth of the Mad Genius.

But it's also worth mentioning that Judith is producing Brazilian Brazilian guitarist slash singer Paulino Garcia's solo CD, Beautiful Love, which is scheduled for release on this upcoming Valentine's Day.

Nice. Pretty exciting.

Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the show. Oh, it's a pleasure. So my first question is the very, very basic one.

What exactly is the mad genius myth and why is it a myth? OK, let's start with the magic of the place to start. Yeah, the basics. What is it? It is the expectation that the more talent and creativity a person has, the more likely they are to suffer for it. It's like a combination package. And is it talent and creativity plus intelligence or. No, it doesn't have to be genius in the sort of traditional intellectual sense.

Now, this is more artistic. OK, good.

And in fact, they have found that intelligence does not correlate very highly with creativity. Right. You only need a basic amount and the rest comes from who knows, actually.

Oh, I see. The artistic creativity. Yes.

Which is my main concern is the artistic creativity, because I, I think that there are a lot of wonderful people have been maligned by this unnecessary expectation that they must suffer for their art, that the more talented they are, the more bipolar disorder they'll have and the more miserable their life will be.

And that's pretty much the myth, although it's a lot more glamorous than it sounds, because it gives people a certain pass on responsible behavior. Oh, yes.

You know, there are artists who cultivate this myth for themselves and say, well, what do you expect of me? I'm an artist. I do the laundry. And that's that actually has a name, the Bohemian Bohemian excuse. You read my book.

And that name I am I am happy to say, came to me from Steve Allen, who was the late, lamented and completely unmoored genius.

And he used that as a as his word for people who milked the myth to get out of things, whether they were authentically geniuses or not. Yeah, I tried.

It doesn't work for me.

It's funny that this initially this reminded me of a trope that I'm often harping about, which is the straw Volcan, which is this caricature, basically the assumption that if someone is rational or analytical, then they are soulless and emotionless and they care nothing about love or fun or beauty. Mark. Exactly. Hence the name. And so I was sort of imagining this would be like, you know, the straw Einstein or something like that, or the Van Gogh.

Right. I mean, one of the poster child, Bengochea, of of this myth, you don't hold Van Gogh. So what you want to tell us about Van Gogh in particular, about the genius myth, the genius? I mean, he was a genius, but he was a genius.

But there are a lot of possibilities that accounted for not only his behavior, but his untimely end.

And none of which has anything to do with any of the mental disorders that have been ascribed to him 100 years after the fact. I just love that retroactive posthumous diagnosis. You know, it's really valid.

But but I deadpan. Yes. Note deadpan.

The thing is that where Van Gogh is concerned, he supplied the most convenient poster child image for the mad genius by having that self-portrait with bandaged.

Yeah. Mm hmm. But now I don't know if you know about the 900 letters of Van Gogh that have shown up online for free. No. Yes.

That's a writing partner. That's a lot of writing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he was a lonely guy, I mean, and he wrote to his brother and it was before the Internet, so he couldn't write. Exactly.

Probably blog posts. Right. Somewhat legibly. I mean, now they're not even teaching cursive in the schools anymore.

Who needs it.

But the point is that there are very clear intimations that his ear was cut off by Gorgan, who was his roommate.

Aha. And they had a fight. And Gorgan was a very good swordsman.

And that was a very neat slice of earlobes. And imagine trying to slice off your own earlobes. It would be.

Yeah. Yeah. What about the mailing it part? Well, the male part. I mean, if once it was, why not, you know, use it for something.

I mean, that was before reattachment. So I guess he figured he had to use it for something.

I don't even know he'd forgot to buy his girlfriend a gift. So there you go. Maybe Valentine's was right. Yeah. But anyway, so there is doubt about this. There's no doubt about that.

There's also recent stuff coming out that has actually been published in some journals that it might have been two kids fooling with guns accidentally shot him, which he never. Said because he was trying to protect them because he was, you know, he was a big lumpy guy looking for people to love him and trying to find a family everywhere.

And I'm not saying he was the happiest fellow in the world, but I don't think that we have to diminish his accomplishments by saying, oh, well, those swirly colors, that's obviously his bipolar disorder.

I mean, what is the point of that? It seems so mean spirited to me.

It's also very difficult to substantiate. I mean, of course, you can't substantiate, but that never stops. And any of the mad genius advocates now say they don't care about scientific stuff, although they spout it, they use that word a lot.

So we'll get into the details of the of the so-called evidence in a minute. But but let's stay them vango for for a second.

So I did not realize that his brother also died shortly after.

Before oh, before. Sorry. Before us for his suicide. OK, so. So it was. Yes. So what about his suicide. So how did that. What about it.

Well there's also. Am I interrupting. You know. Go ahead. OK.

Tertiary syphilis. Mm hmm. In its well, obviously, it means late stage syphilis mimics the symptoms of psychosis. And both fail and Vincent had it, and it's what killed Vincent. And they knew we had it. I mean, it killed around it the other way around. Nobody seems to take that into account when they are making a life story and pointing at his pictures and saying there's evidence of his mental disorder and there's evidence of it.

So you're saying that it's at least possible or consistent with what we know, the little we know about the personal history of Vango in this particular case, that, in fact, he committed suicide not because it was, you know, demand or range or anything just because you saw his brother dying.

His brother was the only person who ever bought any of his paintings while he lived. You know, as popular as he is now, people forget he never sold anything.

Yeah. And a good investment would have been. Oh, but oh, well, you know, I mean, that would be enough.

And one of the things in my book, I have a chapter called They Must Be Crazy.

That looks at the fact that the trying to live a life as an artist, trying to make your way with your products of your soul in your heart is fraught.

And it's it's a lot of people would look at that.

What, you have no regular paycheck. You have no health insurance. You have no guarantee that things are ever going to get better. You must be crazy.

Well, yes. So I actually wonder how much of this association, real or just perceived, comes is true almost.

You know, in people's mind, almost by definition, that, you know, that lifestyle choice and that that way of thinking one means by definition, being creative involves thinking differently than other people are expressing yourself differently than other people. And so, you know, to some extent, our definition of madness has just been something that deviates in certain significant ways from societal norms.

So I actually even before looking at the evidence, you know, statistical historical evidence or current statistical evidence, I would have I would have sort of put a moderately strong prior belief, prior expectation on the idea that there would be some over some increased well, some sort of actual association between I don't want to say madness, but some sort of unconventional mental processes and artistic.

Well, choice to be an artist, at least you're absolutely on the money there, because if you if you look at the two different things, both involve coloring outside the lines.

And in fact, the definition of mania is almost exactly the same definition as creative inspiration, with the same things going on, the same inability to sleep, the same excitement, the same talkativeness, the same lack of interest in eating or hygiene.

You know, that's when somebody has got an idea and is excited about it. That's what happens. But that can also be called mania. If it's seen by the person from that framework.

So is so they they invariably overlap by definition.

Would you would you characterize your argument in the book, your thesis, as being more that there is no real statistical there's no evidence of statistical association between anything we would call madness or anything similar to madness and artistic creativity?

Or is your argument that, yes, there was let me try and I'm sorry if that sounds.

Oh, why did I jump to the second possibility I'm trying to disambiguate here is that there is an association between artistic creativity and something, some sort of unconventional ways of thinking or feeling, but that it's wrong to call that madness.

Yes. OK, OK. I'm sorry.

No, no, I was I mean, unconventional behavior is obviously is it's been optional and therefore often is you know, it's easy to see how people would see that as pathological.

Right. There is there is a very subtle line, probably in most people's people's minds between unconventional behavior and something pathological ways is behaving that way.

But that doesn't mean, of course, that somebody mad or that's actually affected by a certified neurological disorder, whatever that is. Right.

That's I mean, there is a neurological substrate to any of this. But before we go to neurology, I want to go back to syphilis.

So you may regret that remark. Well, I might have fun. Yeah. So so so actually, you point out that other so-called mad geniuses have been affected by syphilis. I think the names include Beethoven and Lampo and so on.

So so this may actually be the syphilis thing is for a particular period of time in a particular historical context, may actually be a sort of general accounting for some of these strange behaviors that we're talking about, which, of course, had nothing to do again with, you know, being a mad genius. Right. You know, it's a completely different kind of disease. That one is an organic disease. That one we know. Yes. Yes.

And Deborah Hayden once wrote a wonderful book called Pox in which she she researches that how often it pops up in the biographies of people who are otherwise considered mad.

It was a good book. Now, I understand that if I read you correctly, that it was actually Plato who may inadvertently have started the Maginnis myth. So it's it's a long history. It's 20, 400 years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

So how did I get in, get started and then modified into what, the modern version of it? Because for Plato this the connection between genius and sort of unusual behavior was actually a positive one, right? It was goodness.

It was a longed for event to have the muse come and visit you. Right. And give you the inspiration to make your poem. And then they go away again.

Yeah. And you never knew when they were coming.

I mean, that in itself could be maddening, but not in this in the sense they're using. But it was. It was not under the person's control. So maybe some people kind of thought that was part of why it qualified as insanity, but his his use of divine madness meant divine inspiration. It was not a permanent part of the individual. It was not a a characteristic of him or a mood disorder that will endure after the Muse's left.

This was just kind of a shaking around.

And then they left and there was the poem and the person was back to normal, but it worked.

So it was a poetic way of accounting for bursts of creativity. Yes, essentially the muses.

I mean, they would pray to have the muses and they're all kinds of representations, inclusive of all the different ones.

But then it got turned into sort of at some point it became necessary, became more negative. Yeah. One thing that happened late in. Well, Aristotle helped, and I know you like him a lot. Yeah, but he was also he was also misinterpreted because he talked about melancholy.

Right. And he actually was doing that thing with the humour's, you know, and if you have too much black bile, you might be melancholic.

But he even said that a certain amount of black bile is useful because it gives you a distance and an ability to judge.

It doesn't have to make you depressed.

It's all the people afterwards, like in the 6500 Robert Byrd and writing his ode to melancholy, where it really cemented the connection between art and melancholy and depression and then forget it with Plato.

In fact, if I remember correctly, Aristotle didn't make a distinction between what you would call today, we would call sort of a pathological type of depression and, you know, just normal sadness that can, yes.

Overtake you in a particular moment in your life. But depending on circumstances in terms of. So the distinction was pretty clear for the ancient Greeks. Yes.

But then it got sort of muddled.

Well, the Middle Ages didn't help now that they usually don't because the idea of anything that was not under your control, some unbidden possession suddenly was seen as demonic instead.

That's right. So, you know, for the ancient Greeks, the the kind of life to pursue was the you demonic life. And eudaimonia, of course, means having a good demon. But for the Christian medieval people, there was no such thing as good name. Right.

Exactly right. And that that started it churning up the suspicion of the creative mind of the mind that did not color in the lines. And also, it was considered dangerous.

You know, the more that the church wanted to subjugate its population, keep them in line. You don't want people coloring outside the lines. You want them obeying. All right.

But so the interesting tension that you were alluding to earlier in this trope of the mad genius is that in some sense, it's it's sort of a way to degrade or put down creativity.

But also in this other sense, it's it's like a way to romanticize dysfunctionality and something that that the artists themselves, you know, self-described artists have have adopted proudly, you know, as, oh, good banner to wrap themselves in.

So how did I mean, since we are talking about this, tracing the sort of connotations of this trope throughout history. Do you have any sense of when it became a positive thing to be sort of wild eyed and. Oh, God, yes.

And mysterious? Yeah, that's an easy question. Romantic England are the same people who brought us Christmas.

I have to work on that one. So what are some, like, quintessential examples, Byron?

Byron, I mean, I call them professional features.

I mean, these guys always sound romantic. You know, they always had their hand to their forehead. Oh, woe is me. My I am at the depths of despair and I am in, you know, the original, IMO. Yeah. And you know that Byron slept in curl papers so his hair would look Byronic when I kind of cheating.

Okay. Well, well it was it is public expected of him. So what you have is, is researchers. And this goes back to your earlier question about evidence.

And I since this is radio, you can't see all the little air quotes I'm doing.

But research and evidence in this is crap.

And let's talk about that. So apparently two of the major sources are two studies by Nancy Andriesen 1987 and Jamison, 89, 89 and 93 later.

OK, so what what happened there?

So these these people are these are often cited as the major sources of sort of scientific. And now I'm using this character.

Well, this is really a breezily these quotes. And so but it turns out that those studies are not exactly the top standard in science. So what did they do?

Well, Nancy, who has gone on to become a very well respected psychiatrist, looking at other things, kind of stumbled into this study. She was originally a Ph.D. in English, and she ended up at somehow at Iowa.

I think that's where she got her degree and she knew the writers there and.

Put together a study in which she would talk to them and try to compare their. Percentage of mental disorder with that of a control group that she picked and how did she measure?

They were also working at the Iowa workshop. Some of them were social workers. Some of them were lawyers, some of them.

So this was a workshop for poor writers. Yeah.

The Iowa workshop is well known as a retreat, in fact, for prominent writers who are kind of burnt out.

So she's not exactly a random sample. You notice that?

Yeah, but the problem was towards depression. I mean, it doesn't mean that they're not wonderful writers, but but it does kind of skew the sample towards depression.

So what was her her metric? How did she measure degree of mental disorder with a questionnaire that is not published with her study?

She said people could ask for it and she would send it to them or have, you know.

Oh, no, it was 1987. I believe so. Yes, I think that's right.

But the reason that I I didn't ask for it is that she was she was very honest about how little she actually found because she admitted that there were no significant statistical results to her studies and without statistical significance.

And that's a mouthful.

You know, you can spit on this thing of her last name is no easier. Oh, tell me about it.

It's meaningless. It's meaningless. Not that significance by itself will give give weight to a study. But when somebody can't say for sure that they got the results because of the study, not by chance, then what is the purpose of it?

But what she did was she got around that because she was really she really cared about these writers.

And I should also tell you that this study took 15 years for her to finish.

Well, so by the time it's amazing to carry on a study for 15 years and not reach statistical significance, by the way.

Yeah, it's only used 30 writers, right. It's a sample. That's another problem.

And what happened in the course of those of all that time in that generation, one of them committed suicide. That's your sample size.

Well, not only that, but it gives you a reason to say, as she has said, that matters of statistical significance pale before the clinical significance of the study.

So, in other words, is something going on? And if we're losing people, if people are dying because of this connection between mental disorder and creativity, then who cares what the numbers say?

Yeah. And then Jamison popped in with the and the thing went straight downhill from there. So we have what was Jamieson's contribution?

Oh, well, as well, where do I begin? Well, her first study. Like Andriesen, she used her own criteria for depression or mental illness, she hand-picked her limited study of 47 white male, middle aged British writers, artists, whatever, which is we know it's representative of the world.

Yes, yes. She was very careful to give a lot of a lot of attention to women and minorities and people who are not English speaking or alleged, for that matter, yea.

Or aged, anything other than mental. But the thing is that her results, she didn't even have a control group.

So without a control group to compare, like Nancy at least had these these non supposedly noncreative social workers, I wonder if they like being designated that way.

Jamison had no control group.

All she did was collect all these people, sit with them and ask them if they'd ever been treated for a mood disorder, which she considered sufficient evidence that they had won.

Well, it's probably correlated with having won. Maybe not.

Maybe you have to use my earlier phrase. Maybe you just have a French who goes in and says, I don't feel so good. And, you know, I think they're treating me for depression all. They are as lonely and they have to go to a therapist every week because they're lonely. That doesn't make them depressed.

Oh, sure. And I would expect that certainly some of them would would just, you know, want to complain about something and not actually have any mental illness.

They would just expect that there would be at least a little bit more likely to have. Yeah, there might be.

But it also depends on who which therapist you go to.

There are and I hate to admit it, but there are therapists who will see you as long as you will come because they have their kids or if they don't have to deal with.

Oh yeah, no, I completely agree. They're going to be a bunch of families where the diagnosis is based on nothing or on profit or whatever. Oh yeah.

But what happened with, with Jamieson's study and I don't mean to jump on, but I know that we are limited in time and I, I could go on and this seems important.

She's, it's huge because she used the percentages. She can only use percentages, she couldn't use statistics. So what she would say is fifty percent of all poets have affective disorder.

If you look at her original study, which nobody does for all kinds of reasons, she's talking about nine people. Yeah, but nobody knows that. Instead, the headline about the 50 percent of poets being disturbed went all around the world as a definitive and there is another statistic, percentage from the same study.

Was it a twelve point five percent?

Yes, I'm a visual artist and that's what's one person. But nobody knows it's Masimo and that's the thing.

In fact, I have emails from students from years ago saying, you know, I read your article in whatever journal I've written about this before and said I cannot find her article.

Now, I looked it up. Is this the same Kay Jamison, who is in fact fairly famous now in the field? And in fact, yes, I do. I get it right that she actually got a MacArthur Genius award.

Yes, she did. She's kind of an ironic, you know, that's exactly what she wanted.

That was the purpose for the whole campaign because she has bipolar disorder. If she can equate genius with bipolar disorder, it makes her a genius.

When she got the MacArthur Award, she got silent.

I must say that sort of brought down a notch or two that the MacArthur Genius Award, in my estimate, or perhaps I'm just well, I feel better about not having gone in yet.

So I'm still waiting for mine. Yeah. Now, there is a third guy that you mentioned critically in your book, and that's Arnold looked at you and he's 95 book. What happened now that one is full of statistics and charts and yet.

Oh, Lord, yes. But they're meaningless, right. Because he makes up variables that he thinks are see, he's looking at all this great mass of of exceptional people and trying to figure out what are the common denominators that make people great.

But these are people that he actually picked this his biography from the news. Yeah. He didn't interview any of them. Right. That, of course, assumes that all the biographers are absolutely objective and not biased in any way.

But he threw together Harry Houdini, Amelia Earhart, Marvin Gaye, Samuel Gompers, Winston Churchill. He put them all together because they were all iminent.

I don't know if creativity is really the the red acronym exam. It's there's something. There's something.

But then he made these very, very famous. That's one thing I know. I'm like I'm making the empirical prediction that there's going to be some common traits that lead to that are more likely to lead to being famous.

But he didn't find any he didn't find any connection between any trait and mental illness and creativity and mental illness, which he says in the beginning.

But people have used his work as proof of it for the simple reason that his title and subtitle imply that the the question has been answered because his title is The Price of Greatness, and the subtitle is Resolving the Mad Genius Controversy.

So everybody's saying that the book reveals that the price of greatness is nothing or no great is something that there is inherently a price to greatness.

The man must suffer. You have you have mental disease of some sort.

But so you said he didn't find no.

But people to read it. I know that they look hard to handle. That is what has made me so crazy. Giuliani, he has he came up with variables like anger at mother.

Huh?

Now you tell me how you're going to quantify and compare a variable like that, especially from biographies of dead people.

So I'm very sympathetic to the complaints about the subjectivity and sort of arbitrariness of these measures of mental illness, disorder, whatever.

How do you think we would go about trying to come up with roughly objective or how much more reliable?

Yeah, reliable, more useful categorizations that at the very least wouldn't vary completely from researcher to researcher.

Um, another way to put the question is, if you were actually given a MacArthur Genius Award. Right. To investigate the possibility that no strings.

No, no, no. They just give you the money. But let's say you out of that. That's why I'm still waiting for you. But but let's say that somebody gives you a you know, a National Science Foundation or National Institute of Mental Health, actually more likely. Right. And said, OK, here's, you know, two million dollars or whatever it is to invest, to actually seriously redo this stuff and investigate the possibilities, like how would you go to do it?

Okay, that's right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. My first I must say, the first answer to that is that would never happen. Yes.

Because Jamison has snookered the world so thoroughly and a lot of very prominent people like the head of Bard College who invites her to talk about how crazy the Scandinavian composers were.

And she's the go to person on this. People liked the myth, it it satisfies them, it makes them feel that, well, if I can't play the guitar like Eric Clapton, at least I don't have a drug habit, at least I'm not, you know, socially dysfunctional. So there's a big social push to keep it. It's very romantic.

But the second thing that would stand in the way of assuming that somebody were interested enough to give money to have this happen to very basic problems, one, there is no consensual definition of madness. Aha. That's that's a big no biological substrates for mental illness.

There is no disease tissue. There are no blood tests. There are no lab tests, nothing.

It's just a bunch of labels that a bunch of well-placed psychiatrists get in a room and decide, OK, this behavior means this person's bipolar and this behavior means this person is.

But you can't put them in a lab and say, oh, there it is, there's bipolarity. So it's amorphous. Now, let me understand this.

So is this a criticism of the of how much how difficult it is to, let's say, come up with a reasonable definition or operate the definition of mental illness?

Or are you actually going even broader than that and say, well, it's the whole concept of mental illness that it's problematic to be OK, so you're going all out there?

I am not going to go out there. And I that does not endear me to psychopharmacologist with people who make their their living believing that there is a concrete I mean, in 2003, the American Psychiatric Association released a press release after a 21 day hunger strike.

Force them to and they said, you know what, we got to admit there's no biology here. We haven't found it. Well, could we at least just break down maybe mental illness as a category, as just, you know, irredeemable?

But if if we could break it down into more concrete questions that are sort of have more objective answers, like, does the person experience hallucinations? Does the person hear voices?

Does the person like have very intense, like unusually intense mood swings, which, you know, somewhat subjective but more objective?

Well, they have that.

So I can know because they want to use this model to apply to everybody, not just people who are hallucinating.

And besides, people who were hallucinating or psychotic, and one thing they have found is that psychosis interferes with the ability to organize your art, you're not going to produce anything.

So that's that's I mean, that seems like a relevant results. Like, that's a negative. But they have so they have passed it.

I don't know how many hundreds of diagnostic labels there are now, but even the person who who did the last DSM is saying, hey, guys, this is not valid.

And the second problem is in trying to connect madness, whatever you want to call it, bipolar, obsessive, anything.

And creativity is there is no consensual universal definition of creativity either. There's no one test for it.

People have a million different ideas about its processes and which is the most important one?

Well, maybe that is because it's a bunch of different things then. Yeah.

So we could investigate the things separately like. But no, it's related to form analogies off that. I mean so there I don't know, it depends what we're interested in I suppose, and maybe different factors would be interested.

You get different researchers who is like the blind men and the elephant one pounces on the tail and says, aha, cognitive processes, here's the key.

And somebody else says, oh no, no, it's it's disinhibition.

I love that one. Dissin inhibition, which came out years ago, was like people have less control over their over their imaginations.

But what do you do when you have disparate goals, completely different populations, completely different measurements. You can't put those together in a stack and say here's the accumulating evidence, it just slides all over the place. So the best fit.

So the basic idea is, as Joe was saying, is not that, you know, there's no such thing as mental illness, sort of broadly speaking, that that there are specific things that people that happen to people and specific, you know, behaviours that may be pathological, but they just don't it's too easy to really forget based basic them.

That is to try to put a broad label like, oh, this person is depressed or they work backwards, they see an artist and then they peer around the artist for evidence.

The thing that makes me crazy and the thing that drove me when it was hard for me to keep writing this and doing all the research and everything was the fact that and I'm not drinking it did not drive me to drink, despite the fact that it was that Jamison did a concert at the National Symphony in Washington in 1989.

Right.

When she had hit with this stuff about creativity and madness in which she she anointed certain composers as bipolar.

And the way that she got to prove that they were bipolar is that she played sad things they'd written and then happy things. They Gretton. Wow, and there there you have and the contrast was sufficient. There it is by. There it is that that is the level of empiricism that exists. So is everybody else. You can still buy that thing. By the way, it's a PBS video.

So I think oftentimes when there's a category that's kind of vague and lumpy and it's not clear whether the things in the category are even connected to each other. And we want to break it down and say, OK, look, let's look at these components separately, like, I don't know, hallucinations or mood swings or whatever.

The the question that has to drive our investigation then is why do we care? Why why were we in the first place interested in whether mental illness and creativity are connected? Because that'll tell us what you know, what more objective, concrete questions to ask instead. And I realize now bringing that up, I don't actually know why is this important. I guess it's sort of always nice to learn more about the world. But beyond that, is there a reason that we would it would matter?

There are two reasons it would matter. One is that it's such a damn romantic idea.

And you know, all those Birhan types and DPO swooning around and having such trouble and Van Gogh in his colors and it just adds romance to their productions.

But the other thing is that, as I said before, if you can really believe that the people who are doing these things you wish you could do are suffering from psychopathology, you can feel less jealous.

You can feel better about your own yeah, and to me, you made a very good point before about maybe you could pass it more carefully and be able to make conclusions based on variables that were plucked out of the lumps.

Hmm. The thing is that the field is going in the other direction.

Now they're saying they want meta analysis, which which is the technique that gives them the right to take all those disparate studies that don't match with different definitions and methods and pile up together and said the meta analysis leans in that direction.

So in order to even combine individual studies to create a meta analysis, assuming those studies aren't all looking at the exact same outcome measures, you end up with a fuzzier definition of your outcome measure than you had before you combine them and you are familiar, of course, with the crusty in bed.

I'm not actually known by that name.

Yeah, that's an interesting mythological example.

So so this this was idea that there was this guy who had this fixation of everybody should fit on a particular bed. So it should be the same height. So if they were too short, they will stretch them, too.

And if there were too long, he would chop off some sorts of sounds like just torture porn movie and saying actually the saying, believe it or not, there is a classic Laurel and Hardy movie based on the idea of Rustem.

Guess that's another way to go with it. Direction to go.

But anyway, so that's a general generally referred to as this idea of wanting to fit everything into a frostiest had the bed because I think we had travelers come by and if they wanted to rest in his bed, he'd just stretch him to fit or chop them to fit.

But it speaks to what happens to this data that doesn't fit you stretch it and chop it. And before you know it, you have a stack of stuff that is.

Yes, a lovely image, a little jumbled.

Yeah, well, it's so tomorrow we're taping this the day before Halloween night, which I just mentioned, because so several people I know inspired by the straw Vulcan discussions are actually going at straw Vulcan's for Halloween. So they're dressing up as scarecrows with Vulcan ears. So I kind of want to now inspire people for I suppose it'll have to be the next Halloween because this episode will come out after the holidays over to go as Strava and gawks Stralman goes.

Yes, that should be Mango's with two ears. Oh yeah.

Right. So we're just about out of time for this section of the podcast, and we're therefore going to wrap things up and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, we pick a suggestion from our listeners that has tickled our rational fancy. This time we ask our guest, Judith Schlesinger, for her suggestion Judith.

I'm thinking that when you look at this whole travesty of the mad genius, that perhaps the best antidote is to just reinjure the geniuses that you've always loved, pulled down that Beethoven Symphony and listen to it and see if it has to be that you have a scowling Beethoven in your head for you to enjoy it. Go to the museum and look at Van Gogh's beautiful paintings and see how much you have to think about his end.

You know, it really appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is such nonsense and it really does a disservice to the people who bring so much beauty to life. So I think if you focus more on the beauty and less on the on the rumor that things would be we'd all be better off.

And do you personally have a favorite genius, mad or otherwise, who you think is underappreciated?

Oh, Lord, that's why I'm producing records.

So you have a number of you know, it's just if I could sell more than three books a week, I might even be able to finance more definition of underappreciated.

Yes.

Well, Judy, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. You're a delight. And and I'm so glad to have a new trope to add to my set of things to complain about the drop and go.

It's important. Thank you for having me.

Well, this concludes another episode of rationally speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, true by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.