His biggest project, Xanadu, was to be a world-wide electronic publishing system that would have created a sort universal libary for the people.He is known for coining the term “hypertext.” He is also seen as something of a radical figure, opposing authority and tradition. He has been called “one of the most influential contrarians in the history of the information age.”
.. He was lonely as a child and had problems caused by his Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD).
In 1960, he enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. During his first year he attempted a term project creating a writing system
similar to a word processor, but that would allow different versions and documents to be linked together nonlinearly, by association. This was, in part, an attempt to keep track of his own sometimes frantic associations and daydreamings brought about by his ADD.
For Police, a Playbook for Conflicts Involving Mental Illness
In response to high-profile shootings of people with mental illness, police
departments around the country are turning to crisis intervention training.Yet many police officers know little about mental disorders, and what they do know is often shaped by stigma. Bizarre behavior is often interpreted as a prelude to violence. And routine police actions aimed at control — placing a hand on a person’s shoulder, for example — can backfire with someone with a severe mental illness.
.. Some departments require crisis training for all their officers. But Maj. Sam Cochran, who coordinated the first crisis intervention program in Memphis and now consults with other departments, said he believed the training worked best when departments trained a smaller group of volunteers who then took the lead on police calls involving mental health issues.
“There’s all kinds of specialization in law enforcement,” Major Cochran said. “We’ve got bomb technicians, narcotics, robbery. I want all the officers present at a scene to understand that this C.I.T. officer is the leader. That represents clarity, and responsibility brings about a level of accountability.”
Studio 360: Nancy Andreasen
Wouldn’t it be nice to find the little light bulb in your brain that goes off when you have a creative idea? Professor Nancy Andreasen, author of The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius, explains to Kurt about magnetic resonance imaging and what it can find in the brains of highly creative people
Andreasen talks about having an upper age limit of 85 or so.
The Relationship Between Creativity and Mental Illness
The science behind the “tortured genius” myth and what it reveals about how the creative mind actually works.
All the writers were euthymic at the time that I interviewed them, and so they could look back on their periods of depression or mania with considerable detachment. They were also able to describe how abnormalities in mood state affected their creativity. Consistently, they indicated that they were unable to be creative when either depressed or manic.
.. Creativity in other fields may, however, be compatible with an illness like schizophrenia, particularly those fields in which the creative moment is achieved by flashes of insight about complex relationships or by exploring hunches and intuitions that ordinary folk might find strange or even bizarre.
.. Many personality characteristics of creative people … make them more vulnerable, including openness to new experiences, a tolerance for ambiguity, and an approach to life and the world that is relatively free of preconceptions. This flexibility permits them to perceive things in a fresh and novel way, which is an important basis for creativity. But it also means that their inner world is complex, ambiguous, and filled with shades of gray rather than black and white. It is a world filled with many questions and few easy answers. While less creative people can quickly respond to situations based on what they have been told by people in authority — parents, teachers, pastors, rabbis, or priests — the creative person lives in a more fluid and nebulous world. He or she may have to confront criticism or rejection for being too questioning, or too unconventional. Such traits can lead to feelings of depression or social alienation. A highly original person may seem odd or strange to others. Too much openness means living on the edge. Sometimes the person may drop over the edge… into depression, mania, or perhaps schizophrenia.
.. Creative ideas probably occur as part of a potentially dangerous mental process, when associations in the brain are flying freely during unconscious mental states — how thoughts must become momentarily disorganized prior to organizing. Such a process is very similar to that which occurs during psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia. In fact, the great Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who gave schizophrenia its name, described a “loosening of associations” as its most characteristic feature
.. All human beings (and their brains) have to cope with the fact that their five senses gather more information than even the magnificent human brain is able to process. To put this another way: we need to be able to ignore a lot of what is happening around us — the smell of pizza baking, the sound of the cat meowing, or the sight of birds flying outside the window — if we are going to focus our attention and concentrate on what we are doing (in your case, for example, reading this book). Our ability to filter out unnecessary stimuli and focus our attention is mediated by brain mechanisms in regions known as the thalamus and the reticular activating system.
.. Some of the writers in her study, upon realizing they had a tendency to be too sociable, employed various strategies for keeping themselves isolated from human contact for sizable stretches of time in order to create. (Victor Hugo famously locked away all his clothes to avoid the temptation of going out while completing The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1830, which he wrote at his desk wearing nothing but a large gray shawl.)