Let’s get this out of the way right up front: I’m a Salieri. I’m smart enough to recognize genius in others, but definitely no genius my own self. This is not self-denigration; I am friends with a couple of people who truly are at the genius level, and the gap between them and myself is pretty vast.

(Some of my friends would argue with this—and my mom and dad definitely would—but IMO that’s mostly because I’m simply good with words. I’m highly verbal, I was very precocious, learning to read very early, and reading well above my grade level for all of K-12. People who are articulate get a lot of credit. I’m articulate. That’s all.)

So: Doug != Genius. Okay?

As such, it’s always fascinated how media, especially visual media, tries to depict the thought process of genius. When my friend looks at a three digit arithmetic problem and instantly knows the answer, what the heck is going through his head? Or when my other friend had an upper-division geometry mapping problem in college and simply wrote down the answer, how the heck did he do that?

This came to mind because I’ve been reading and rewatching The Queen’s Gambit, and I found the way the creators visualized Beth’s gift at chess just fascinating. If you haven’t seen it, she looks up and watches games play out on the ceiling. Hundreds of moves, and they just come to her. It’s amazing and slightly scary.

It put me in mind, in a very minor way, of how I write. I just raise my mental antenna up into the aether and then sit there and watch the words appear on the screen. Of course, I have to be in exactly the right frame of mind and it definitely helps to have a quiet environment. (As opposed to the loud Starbucks full of chattering 10 year old girls in which I am currently sitting. Thank god for noise-cancelling headphones.)

And then I started thinking of how other media “geniuses” have their thought processes shown on screen.

The first time I saw genius depicted on screen was the film Amadeus, in 1984. Mozart’s father comes to stay, and (to say the least) he doesn’t get along with Mozart’s wife Constanza. In one scene, the two are arguing and Mozart checks out, goes to another room, and starts hearing music in head that he just dictates down on paper. Literally listening to the music of the spheres, as it were.

But the most amazing scene to me was when Salieri was “helping” him finish his Requiem in D Minor. Even though Mozart is sick, Salieri can barely keep up with the instructions pouring out of him. But the thing that really drove it home was that, after Salieri had taken down multiple parts—horns, voices, brass, percussion—he thinks they’re done. “And that’s all,” he says. “No,” Mozart tells him; “Now for the real fire.”

Even when taking dictation, Mozart was so far out in front of Salieri that Salieri thought the piece was finished while for Mozart all the other parts had just been the basis for “the real fire.” Amazing!

Another lovely depiction is in the much-maligned Iron Man 2, where Tony Stark invents a new element on the fly based on obscure clues his father left him in fucking landscaping for the love of god.

Another great example is from the early seasons of the British TV show Sherlock, where Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes simply notices things others don’t because his brain is so hyperactive. (Indeed in the stories he self-medicates with cocaine, totally on brand for someone with severe untreated ADHD.)

I love these. I love to imagine how truly brilliant people think. (And I shudder when I think what it must be like to live inside their heads. When Robert Downey Jr. is himself playing Holmes and someone asks him what he sees, he responds “Everything”. Can’t be easy. (Something neurodivergent people everywhere can relate to, I think.)

So which ones did I miss? And what other types of visualizations have you seen?