“He got so smart he went crazy like that!” the regulars at The Family Liquor Store said about a fellow patron named David Hauser, and they always snapped when they said “That!” to punctuate the word. They didn’t just think he was so smart, and he went crazy, they thought there was a direct link between the two. They believed there was an intellectual peak, and that David Hauser accidentally crossed it. I believed them too. I believed them because I was young, extremely naïve, and susceptible to suggestion, especially when it came from adults who knew David Hauser, and his story, far better than I did. The problem for me, decades later when I reevaluated this situation in an article, was that these adults was that they were alcoholics.

“I work hard, and I play hard,” they would say when someone would confront them about their drinking. They did work hard, no one doubted that. When they would go into the details of what they did in a day, we would cringe. As for the playing, I didn’t see much of that. I saw them sit in their chair, and they all had their chair, drinking high-octane alcohol at their favorite watering hole, The Family Liquor Store. Then they’d drink impressive amounts of that high-octane fuel to fuel the stories they all told about one another, and when I write impressive, I’m talking from the perspective of a teenager who considered a tolerance for alcohol impressive.

The article that I wrote nearly a decade ago, A Simplicity Trapped in a Complex Mind, poked fun at how naïve I was to believe so many of the wild stories these people would tell. I also poked fun at their “intellectual peak” theory, in that article, and how it pertained to David Hauser. Now, after all this time, decades after my days in The Family Liquor Store, and nearly a decade after mocking myself for being so naïve as to believe them, I’m going to attempt to execute a very difficult and rather painful 360-degree flip on this matter for your reading pleasure. I’m going to admit that those raging alcoholics, who probably killed a warehouse full of brain cells downing their drink of choice, were almost 100% correct all along.    

Before doing so, I’d like to break down the fourth wall that stands between us, look out at you and ask, doesn’t this idea that there is an intellectual peak, a maximum capacity of knowledge, or some kind of line of demarcation, a “Here, there be Dragons” spot on the mental map of the prefrontal cortex that we dare not cross, seem like something Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm would write up? It did to me when I wrote that article on it nearly a decade ago.

I didn’t question them at the time, as I said, because for all the damage they did to their brain with the daily dose of the deadly, they were worldly types who had so many more experiences in life than I had. I think all I said was, “What?” with a scrunched-up face.

“All I can tell you is he had the most brilliant brain anyone who knew him had ever encountered one day, and he was talking to imaginary friends in the corner of our friendly, Family Liquor Store the next, just like that!” they said. “From what I heard, it was almost that immediate.” 

As naïve as I was, I couldn’t shake my skepticism entirely. As much as I liked being around these patrons, they were basically the losers of life, and their goal in life was to try to find some way to even the scales with those who succeeded. “Hey, you want to read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or any of the Russian authors, be my guest,” they basically said. “All I can say is be careful, because I knew this guy named David Hauser who got so smart he went nuts, like that! I’m not going to tempt fate like that. If you want to do it, go ahead, fart around and find out.” 

They didn’t say that exactly, but they did warn me about “Trying to get so smart.” These warnings, just on the face of it, sounded like something a Will Farrell dumb guy character might say to someone everyone considered smart. Yet, modern neurologists now suggest there might be a thread between genius and madness. They say a mind diving too deep into truth could slip over the edge. It’s not only possible, they suggest, it’s plausible. 

To be fair to the drunks, they spoke to David Hauser’s ex-wife, when she occasionally came down to The Family Liquor Store to “drag my deadbeat ex-husband out of the store,” and they said she told them “Everything there was to know” about her ex-husband. To be fair to me when I wrote that article, I was questioning why I ever believed the secondhand information from a bunch of alcoholics, whose primary source was an embittered ex-wife. Plus, we were all regular joes who had no medical background, or any other level of expertise to back up what we were discussing. The fact that they were daily drinkers of hard liquor suggests that not only had they already killed off so many brain cells that their assessment of the situation was clouded, but that their fears of contracting some sort of mental illness were probably a little more familiar to them. As the writers at Mental Health Foundation suggest, “Alcohol problems and mental ill health are closely linked.” 

We know that we’re just as susceptible to some form of mental illness as David Hauser. We know that hitting our head just wrong in an accident, or having the wrong genes can lead to some form of mental illness, but can a beautiful mind, a genius, who pushes himself so hard that he crosses some imaginary line, ostensibly called an intellectual peak, fracture “just like that!” and fall to madness? To illustrate this theory, let’s switch the frame to the physical. Is it possible for a pole-vaulter to get injured while trying a jump heretofore considered beyond his capacity. Of course, we can all understand that. Why is it so difficult to imagine the same thing could happen to a man who overtaxes his prefrontal cortex to the point that he gets stuck in overdrive. It’s different but similar, but it’s so hard to wrap our minds around. Observers, familiar with Einstein, claimed he lost his sense of time when obsessing over one of his theories, and those familiar with Newton claim he was known to forget to eat. Would we search medical journals to come up with an apt description of that behavior, or would we just call it tunnel vision? Whatever we call it, we get the image of a piano wire that is tuned too tight, until it snaps “just like that.”

Here’s where we complete the painfully embarrassing 360-degree flip. Those raging alcoholics who “played too hard,” from the comfort of their chair, espousing nonsense about an“intellectual peak,” they were more correct than they probably even knew, and science backs them up. Some now theorize that the genius of John Nash, that led to creative and intellectual breakthroughs, could’ve led to a dopamine overload that could’ve tied into a heightened dopamine sensitive that resulted in a case of schizophrenia. Leonardo da Vinci chased brilliance in hypnagogia, flirting with sleep deprivation’s dark side. Ada Lovelace wrestled numbers and despair in equal measure. We can find examples of anything, anywhere in history, to prove a point, but how anecdotal are they? If we dug deeper, would we find more examples of less heralded minds slipping over the edge? Are these examples of a phenomenon that awaits us all if we dig too deep, or are they evidence of how different each individual mind is? We all have different strengths and vulnerabilities, and some minds might just more susceptible to brief flashes of brilliance followed by a flame out. Perhaps, the examples of this phenomenon suggest that, if nothing else, we might never fully understand the full extents of the complexities of the human brain in our lifetime.

We all envision these geniuses as superheroes, and their insight that reshaped our world as superpowers, but their thoughts, like ours, are tethered to very human brains with all the same frailties, vulnerabilities, and breaking points. Is it possible, or even plausible, that that which fuels extraordinary cognition (intense focus, pattern recognition, relentless curiosity) could also push these geniuses toward collapse. By weaving together cutting-edge neuroscience and the raw, personal stories of brilliant minds, do we uncover a paradox that suggests that the brighter the flame is the faster it could flicker out?

It just seemed so irrational to me, when, nearly a decade ago, I wrote that article that scoffed at the drunken tales of direct links between David Hauser, his intellectual peak, and his roller coaster-like crash into the depths of mental illness. It still seems like dumb people knowledge that we often share at bars to say, “See, see, they’re really not that much better than us. They’re human after all.” After gaining even further distance to comment on me, commenting on me, I will now complete my 360-degree flip with the admission that I probably never should’ve questioned the drunks and their drunken analysis. They were almost 100% right, all along. I’m still not sure what I learned, unlearned, or relearned, but I think I now know enough to know what I don’t know, even though I really don’t know what that means. The one thing I have learned, after chasing the idea of how chasing an idea can lead to madness is that chasing an idea can lead to madness. So, maybe I’ve inadvertently answered my question after all.