A Gift and a Curse: Psychological Approaches to John Forbes Nash

John Forbes Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia. His father, John Nash Sr., was a veteran of World War I and worked as an electrical engineer at the Appalachian Electric Power Company in Bluefield. His mother, Virginian, was a former English teacher who was stricken with partial hearing loss due to a bout of scarlet fever when she was young. Nash had one sister, Martha, who was about two-and-a-half years his junior.

Signs of Nash's two most distinctive character traits, mathematical brilliance and asocial behavior, were present since his childhood. He adopted an elitist attitude at an early age, shrugging off the ensuing social rejection by saying that the social events of his peers would do nothing but distract him from his work, which by the age of 12 included conducting amateur science experiments in his room. He described Bluefield as a city of businessmen and lawyers that owed it's existence to the nearby coal fields, a fact which he said presented an intellectual challenge to learn from the world's knowledge since he could not, or at least felt that he couldn't, learn from his immediate community. While still in high school Nash took classes at Bluefield College, and shortly thereafter enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (known now as Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, on the George Westinghouse Scholarship. He graduated in 1948 at the age of 20 with both a bachelor's and a master's degree in mathematics.

After Carnegie Nash attended graduate school at Princeton, where he developed and published some of his most important work in mathematics. His doctoral dissertation contained the definitions and properties for what would later be called the Nash equilibrium and the Nash embedding theorem, which in recent times have become the foundation on which modern economics is based. He received his doctorate from Princeton in 1950 and continued work there as an instructor until the summer of 1951 when he was hired to a higher-paying instructor position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While at MIT, Nash met a woman from El Salvador named Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Larde, a physics student at the time. They were married in February of 1957. Shortly thereafter Nash became intensely paranoid and began to show signs of mental illness. The specific date that the illness began differs; Nash himself says in his autobiography that the delusions began in 1959 during his wife's pregnancy, while other sources claim it began earlier in 1958. The illness was severe enough that he was forced to resign from MIT and in 1959 was committed to the McLean Hospital by his wife, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. His son, John Charles Martin Nash, was born soon afterwards.

During this first of what would be many hospital stays, Nash underwent 50 days of psychiatric observation and treatment including insulin shock therapy. After he was released from McLean he fled to Europe hoping to live there under refugee status, but returned to Princeton in 1960. He spent the next decade going in and out of mental hospitals in the New Jersey area. His stays lasted anywhere from five to eight months at a time, and were almost always against his will. In 1963 Nash and his wife divorced, but then reunited in 1970. In 1970 Nash vowed to never take antipsychotic medication again for the detrimental effect it had on his work and personal life. At this time his relationship with his wife remained strained to say the least, and more resembled that of roommates. With time Nash gradually overcame his illness.

In 1994 Nash, along with two colleagues, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics* for his work as a student at Princeton. He and his wife rekindled their romantic relationship and were remarried on June 1, 2001. In early 2002 the movie A Beautiful Mind was released, which is based on the events in Nash's life taken from his biography by Sylvia Nasar. Nash is currently working as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University. He is still alive today.

* In the interest of accuracy I should note that Nash didn't actually receive the Nobel Prize in Economics because there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. Technically he was awarded "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel," which was established by the Swiss Central Bank in 1969 in lieu of an economic award. However it is presented at the same ceremony and is commonly referred as the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Biological Approach

My intention with this section was to somehow link schizophrenia with increased cognitive ability on a biological level. John Nash seems to be a perfect example of this possible link. I originally hypothesized that it would be difficult to tell if Nash's abnormally high level of intelligence was caused by schizophrenia or if in fact the opposite was true. Having now thoroughly researched his life it seems unlikely that schizophrenia caused Nash's intelligence. Nash received his doctorate from the prestigious Princeton University, his dissertation for which included most of what would later be called his most important work and would eventually win him the Nobel Prize, all before he began to show any signs of mental illness. It is also worth noting that during the time he was most ill, roughly the period from 1959 to 1970, he did very little work at all. This being true, it seems more likely, according to my hypothesis, that rather than schizophrenia causing his genius, his genius may have caused him to be schizophrenia. But I fear this is also false.

Consider the possible causes of schizophrenia. To do this, one must acknowledge the fact that, to date, no definitive cause of schizophrenia is known, at least not in a singular sense. Science has identified many possible causes of schizophrenia, some of which may even be termed likely causes, but they all seem to act in only a contributory capacity and are not directly causal. Genetics is one of these likely factors, with some estimates rating the correlation as high as 80%. Many studies have been done of schizophrenic twins, yielding evidence that suggested a chance of over 28% that one twin will turn out to be schizophrenic if the other already is. These studies though have been criticized for not considering any other factors besides heritability.

Current studies in molecular genetics are attempting to identify specific genes that may cause schizophrenia. So far seven genes have been identified as being likely to contribute to schizophrenia, with two being especially likely. One of these genes is called dysbindin (DTNBP1). Researchers at the Zucker Hillside Hospital and Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics in Boston published a paper in 2006 that named the dysbindin gene as one that is associated with a lower than average level of intelligence. In this paper they linked schizophrenia to intelligence, but to lower intelligence, specifically 3% to 5% lower intelligence, as opposed to my hypothesis of schizophrenia causing higher intelligence. This would seem to conclusively prove that my hypothesis is wrong.
Which is acceptable, except for something that John Nash wrote in his autobiography:

"So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos."

Nash suggests that his current rationality of thought limits him, which is consistent with the idea that schizophrenia might have augmented his intelligence. This has been biologically proven to be false, so perhaps biologically is the wrong way to approach this link.

Cognitive Approach

When I was much younger, I remember seeing a picture of Albert Einstein and thinking that he looked like a crazy person. I also knew that he had done great, brilliant things, and it occurred to me that maybe, in order to do brilliant things and be brilliant, one had to be somewhat crazy. Being crazy by definition expands the mind so that one thinks some things are possible that others would never believe to be possible. This can be to good or ill effect, mostly to ill I would imagine. It is also worthwhile to note that Albert Einstein's son, Eduard Einstein, was schizophrenic.

Does schizophrenia increase intelligence? No, almost definitely not. It does however cause an individual to think things that they would not otherwise think and to believe impossible things are possible. Nash's genius lent itself to pattern recognition, which was identified as the stimulant for many of his hallucinations. Maybe this cognitive expansion is why John Nash was able to propose ideas that refuted currently accepted facts and later became the foundation of economics.

Schizophrenia undoubtedly disrupts the serial system of cognitive theory. Stimulus information received by the brain is most definitely off-balance, since some of it is produced by delusions and hallucinations. Since stimuli are where the system begins and from which the rest of the information is derived then by extrapolation the whole cognitive system is influenced. Most likely this is almost entirely debilitating, and most people diagnosed as schizophrenic would likely suffer as a result, but the transformation of the thought process could be advantageous in certain, specific ways and allow some to see beyond what normal cognition would allow them to see.

An example that I believe is applicable, if slightly crass, is that of a standup comedian name Doug Stanhope. In his recent HBO special, Stanhope describes how three of his chief vices - illegal drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol - enabled him to succeed in his chosen profession. He said that use of illegal drugs expanded his mind so that he may "think outside the box" and come up with unique ideas, that smoking gave him the patience to sit and write down his ideas, and that alcohol gave him the courage to perform his act and voice said ideas. The latter two are irrelevant to the topic at hand, but the claim that drugs allowed Stanhope to think abstractly is parallel to my claim about schizophrenia. The drugs LSD, PCP, and ketamine produce symptoms very similar to schizophrenic symptoms, so similar that those drugs were once used to induce a temporary schizophrenic state in test subjects for study. LSD has since been discredited, but the dissociatives PCP and ketamine are still considered to cause a reliable facsimile of schizophrenia. Thus use of certain illegal drugs can be an apt comparison to a schizophrenic state.

Integration of Approaches

I consider myself a reductionist as opposed to humanist. I believe that Nash's internal experiences and thoughts can be reduced to chemical reactions in his brain and body, such as the fact that, if one accepts the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, he was essentially just a victim of his own limbic system. But if the biological approach was incorrect and the cognitive approach may be right but abstract, then perhaps the approach that is needed is something else. If one can discover what specifically caused Nash's schizophrenia, then one will discover what caused his brilliance.

All of the approaches to psychology study the same thing from different perspectives. The biological approach seems to be the most basic approach, a way to study the system underlying the workings of the brain. The cognitive approach is more of a functional approach. It delves a little bit in to what the brain can do with the system it has. I think it is therefore important to understand each of these approaches individually, so that one can begin to look at them together as two parts of a whole.

Strictly speaking, no one knows for sure what the word "schizophrenia" refers to. In medical literature, a person who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia is referred to in that way, as "a person who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia" rather than "a schizophrenic person." The latter is too conclusive. Schizophrenia is only a diagnosis, not an actual disease per se, and may in fact refer to a number of mental ailments rather than just one. For this reason, Eugen Butler, who coined the term in 1908, called the disease "the schizophrenias." The only way to conclude that a person has schizophrenia is by observing their symptoms, though one person's symptoms may be caused by something entirely different from another person's. Since it is entirely symptomatic, the best approach may be one not even mentioned yet. It seems likely that since schizophrenia is diagnosed by observing symptoms, the trait approach would be most helpful in studying schizophrenia. It may also be helpful in identifying a link between John Nash's illness and his genius.

The web site Schizophrenia.com lists about eighteen or so famous people who were either diagnosed with schizophrenia or strongly suspected of it. The majority of these people are musicians or artists, along with a couple sports stars, a dancer, an author, and John Nash, Nobel Prize-winning mathematician. No one else on the list appeared to have had anything to do with math, with the possible exception of Eduard Einstein. So what traits link these people, including John Nash, other than their disease? Creativity is a significant one. All had to be creative to excel in their field (Nash called game theory his "original idea"). Another is that if one thinks in the abstract, all the musicians were in fact proficient in math through their music. Science recognizes music and math as being essentially the same thing, since they deal with the same properties, and studies show that those who excel in one are likely to excel in the other.

It seems that I may have found a tentative link with trait approach. Perhaps though I merely imagined the trait pattern, since the aforementioned list is incredibly far from a comprehensive list of everyone who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Most people experience it in an entirely debilitating way. The point is, in order to see a comprehensive view of schizophrenia and what it may or may not be capable of one would probably have to approach it from every standpoint possible. The disease is still very poorly understood and other approaches may identify what causes it, and perhaps will find a link between schizophrenia and increased intelligence. Regardless, John Nash stands as a testament to the fact that this may be true, and more importantly is an example of a man who overcame incredible hardship to succeed and exceed throughout his life.

Sources:

"The Personality Puzzle, Third Edition" by David C. Funder; W. W. Norton & Company, 2004

Wikipedia article on John Nash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash

Autobiography: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1994/nash-autobio.html

Schizophrenia news archive: http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/003341.html

Schizophrenia information site: http://www.schizophrenia.com/famous.htm

Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268978/trivia

Wikipedia article on schizophrenia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia