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I've always believed that "genius" is simply mental illness with an audience.

People such as Mozart were known for feeling nervous anxious etc, until they wrote music which was cathartic, which nowadays I'm sure would be diagnosed as some sort of mental illness.

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This is part of the reason why "mental illness" is a broken term for certain applications. Unevenly-matched skill (coping, etc) vs. circumstance (group psychology, social standards) is one alternate POV that better explains why a "mentally-ill" person could create genius works. They have become conditioned to exploring extremes by dint of circumstance and personal history; their liabilities, struggles, and even periodic victories in these contexts allow them to produce works the likes of which are rarely seen or even contemplated in "non-genius" company. The audience knows intuitively that they are experiencing some fundamental truth, though they cannot in a small number of steps arrive at the sequence that allowed the truth to emerge.

That last sentence is profound, nice comment +1

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