A Beautiful Mind (4 page)

Some creative people … of predominately schizoid or depressive temperaments … use their creative capacities in a defensive way. If creative work protects a man from mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity. The schizoid state … is characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and futility. For most people, interaction with others provides most of what they require to find meaning and significance in life. For the schizoid person, however, this is not the case. Creative activity is a particularly apt way to express himself … the activity is solitary … [but] the ability to create and the
productions which result from such ability are generally regarded as possessing value by our society.
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Of course, very few people who exhibit “a lifelong pattern of social isolation” and “indifference to the attitudes and feelings of others” — the hallmarks of a so-called schizoid personality — possess great scientific or other creative talent.
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And the vast majority of people with such strange and solitary temperaments never succumb to severe mental illness.
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Instead, according to John G. Gunderson, a psychiatrist at Harvard, they tend “to engage in solitary activities which often involve mechanical, scientific, futuristic and other non-human subjects … [and] are likely to appear increasingly comfortable over a period of time by forming a stable but distant network of relationships with people around work tasks.”
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Men of scientific genius, however eccentric, rarely become truly insane — the strongest evidence for the potentially protective nature of creativity.
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Nash proved a tragic exception. Underneath the brilliant surface of his life, all was chaos and contradiction: his involvements with other men; a secret mistress and a neglected illegitimate son; a deep ambivalence toward the wife who adored him, the university that nurtured him, even his country; and, increasingly, a haunting fear of failure. And the chaos eventually welled up, spilled over, and swept away the fragile edifice of his carefully constructed life.

The first visible signs of Nash’s slide from eccentricity into madness appeared when he was thirty and was about to be made a full professor at MIT. The episodes were so cryptic and fleeting that some of Nash’s younger colleagues at that institution thought that he was indulging a private joke at their expense. He walked into the common room one winter morning in 1959 carrying
The New York Times
and remarked, to no one in particular, that the story in the upper left-hand corner of the front page contained an encrypted message from inhabitants of another galaxy that only he could decipher.
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Even months later, after he had stopped teaching, had angrily resigned his professorship, and was incarcerated at a private psychiatric hospital in suburban Boston, one of the nation’s leading forensic psychiatrists, an expert who testified in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, insisted that Nash was perfectly sane. Only a few of those who witnessed the uncanny metamorphosis, Norbert Wiener among them, grasped its true significance.
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At thirty years of age, Nash suffered the first shattering episode of paranoid schizophrenia, the most catastrophic, protean, and mysterious of mental illnesses. For the next three decades, Nash suffered from severe delusions, hallucinations, disordered thought and feeling, and a broken will. In the grip of this “cancer of the mind,” as the universally dreaded condition is sometimes called, Nash abandoned mathematics, embraced numerology and religious prophecy, and believed himself to be a “messianic figure of great but secret importance.” He fled to Europe several times, was hospitalized involuntarily half a dozen times for periods up to a year and a half, was subjected to all sorts of drug and shock treatments, experienced
brief remissions and episodes of hope that lasted only a few months, and finally became a sad phantom who haunted the Princeton University campus where he had once been a brilliant graduate student, oddly dressed, muttering to himself, writing mysterious messages on blackboards, year after year.

The origins of schizophrenia are mysterious. The condition was first described in 1806, but no one is certain whether the illness — or, more likely, group of illnesses — existed long before then but had escaped definition or, on the other hand, appeared as an AIDS-like scourge at the start of the industrial age.
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Roughly 1 percent of the population in all countries succumbs to it.
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Why it strikes one individual and not another is not known, although the suspicion is that it results from a tangle of inherited vulnerability and life stresses.
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No element of environment — war, imprisonment, drugs, or upbringing — has ever been proved to cause, by itself, a single instance of the illness.
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There is now a consensus that schizophrenia has a tendency to run in families, but heredity alone apparently cannot explain why a specific individual develops the full-blown illness.
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Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term
schizophrenia
in 1908, describes a “specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling and relation to the external world.”
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The term refers to a splitting of psychic functions, “a peculiar destruction of the inner cohesiveness of the psychic personality.”
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To the person experiencing early symptoms, there is a dislocation of every faculty, of time, space, and body.
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None of its symptoms — hearing voices, bizarre delusions, extreme apathy or agitation, coldness toward others — is, taken singly, unique to the illness.
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And symptoms vary so much between individuals and over time for the same individual that the notion of a “typical case” is virtually nonexistent. Even the degree of disability — far more severe, on average, for men — varies wildly. The symptoms can be “slightly, moderately, severely, or absolutely disabling,” according to Irving Gottesman, a leading contemporary researcher.
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Though Nash succumbed at age thirty, the illness can appear at any time from adolescence to advanced middle age.
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The first episode can last a few weeks or months or several years.
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The life history of someone with the disease can include only one or two episodes.
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Isaac Newton, always an eccentric and solitary soul, apparently suffered a psychotic breakdown with paranoid delusions at age fifty-one.
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The episode, which may have been precipitated by an unhappy attachment to a younger man and the failure of his alchemy experiments, marked the end of Newton’s academic career. But, after a year or so, Newton recovered and went on to hold a series of high public positions and to receive many honors. More often, as happened in Nash’s case, people with the disease suffer many, progressively more severe episodes that occur at ever shorter intervals. Recovery, almost never complete, runs the gamut from a level tolerable to society to one that may not require permanent hospitalization but in fact does not allow even the semblance of a normal life.
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More than any symptom, the defining characteristic of the illness is the profound feeling of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility that sufferers provoke in other people. Psychiatrists describe the person’s sense of being separated by a “gulf which defies description” from individuals who seem “totally strange, puzzling,
inconceivable, uncanny and incapable of empathy, even to the point of being sinister and frightening.”
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For Nash, the onset of the illness dramatically intensified a pre-existing feeling, on the part of many who knew him, that he was essentially disconnected from them and deeply unknowable. As Storr writes:

However melancholy a depressive may be, the observer generally feels there is some possibility of emotional contact. The schizoid person, on the other hand, appears withdrawn and inaccessible. His remoteness from human contact makes his state’of mind less humanly comprehensible, since his feelings are not communicated. If such a person becomes psychotic (schizophrenic) this lack of connection with people and the external world becomes more obvious; with the result that the sufferer’s behavior and utterances appear inconsequential and unpredictable.
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Schizophrenia contradicts popular but incorrect views of madness as consisting solely of wild gyrations of mood, or fevered delirium. Someone with schizophrenia is not permanently disoriented or confused, for example, the way that an individual with a brain injury or Alzheimer’s might be.
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He may have, indeed usually does have, a firm grip on certain aspects of present reality. While he was ill, Nash traveled all over Europe and America, got legal help, and learned to write sophisticated computer programs. Schizophrenia is also distinct from manic depressive illness (currently known as bipolar disorder), the illness with which it has most often been confounded in the past.

If anything, schizophrenia can be a ratiocinating illness, particularly in its early phases.
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From the turn of the century, the great students of schizophrenia noted that its sufferers included people with fine minds and that the delusions which often, though not always, come with the disorder involve subtle, sophisticated, complex flights of thought. Emil Kraepelin, who defined the disorder for the first time in 1896, described “dementia praecox,” as he called the illness, not as the shattering of reason but as causing “predominant damage to the emotional life and the will.”
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Louis A. Sass, a psychologist at Rutgers University, calls it “not an escape from reason but an exacerbation of that thoroughgoing illness Dostoevsky imagined … at least in some of its forms … a heightening rather than a dimming of conscious awareness, and an alienation not from reason but from emotion, instincts and the will.”
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Nash’s mood in the early days of his illness can be described, not as manic or melancholic, but rather as one of heightened awareness, insomniac wakefulness and watchfulness. He began to believe that a great many things that he saw — a telephone number, a red necktie, a dog trotting along the sidewalk, a Hebrew letter, a birthplace, a sentence in
The New York Times —
had a hidden significance, apparent only to him. He found such signs increasingly compelling, so much so that they drove from his consciousness his usual concerns and preoccupations. At the same time, he believed he was on the brink of cosmic insights. He claimed he had found a solution to the greatest unsolved problem in pure mathematics,
the so-called Riemann Hypothesis. Later he said he was engaged in an effort to “rewrite the foundations of quantum physics.” Still later, he claimed, in a torrent of letters to former colleagues, to have discovered vast conspiracies and the secret meaning of numbers and biblical texts. In a letter to the algebraist Emil Artin, whom he addressed as “a great necromancer and numerologist,” Nash wrote:

I have been considering Algerbiac [sic] questions and have noticed some interesting things that might also interest you … I, a while ago, was seized with the concept that numerological calculations dependent on the decimal system might not be sufficiently intrinsic also that language and alphabet structure might contain ancient cultural stereotypes interfering with clear understands [sic] or unbiased thinking… . I quickly wrote down a new sequence of symbols… . These were associated with (in fact natural, but perhaps not computationally ideal but suited for mystical rituals, incantations and such) system for representing the integers via symbols, based on the products of successive primes.
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A predisposition to schizophrenia was probably integral to Nash’s exotic style of thought as a mathematician, but the full-blown disease devastated his ability to do creative work. His once-illuminating visions became increasingly obscure, self-contradictory, and full of purely private meanings, accessible only to himself. His longstanding conviction that the universe was rational evolved into a caricature of itself, turning into an unshakable belief that everything had meaning, everything had a reason, nothing was random or coincidental. For much of the time, his grandiose delusions insulated him from the painful reality of all that he had lost. But then would come terrible flashes of awareness. He complained bitterly from time to time of his inability to concentrate and to remember mathematics, which he attributed to shock treatments.
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He sometimes told others that his enforced idleness made him feel ashamed of himself, worthless.
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More often, he expressed his suffering wordlessly. On one occasion, sometime during the 1970s, he was sitting at a table in the dining hall at the Institute for Advanced Study — the scholarly haven where he had once discussed his ideas with the likes of Einstein, von Neumann, and Robert Oppenheimer — alone as usual. That morning, an institute staff member recalled, Nash got up, walked over to a wall, and stood there for many minutes, banging his head against the wall, slowly, over and over, eyes tightly shut, fists clenched, his face contorted with anguish.
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While Nash the man remained frozen in a dreamlike state, a phantom who haunted Princeton in the 1970s and 1980s scribbling on blackboards and studying religious texts, his name began to surface everywhere — in economics textbooks, articles on evolutionary biology, political science treatises, mathematics journals. It appeared less often in explicit citations of the papers he had written in the 1950s than as an adjective for concepts too universally accepted, too familiar a part of the
foundation of many subjects to require a particular reference: “Nash equilibrium,” “Nash bargaining solution,” “Nash program,” “De Giorgi-Nash result,” “Nash embedding,” “Nash-Moser theorem,” “Nash blowing-up.”
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When a massive new encyclopedia of economics,
The New Palgrave,
appeared in 1987, its editors noted that the game theory revolution that had swept through economics “was effected with apparently no new fundamental mathematical theorems beyond those of von Neumann and Nash.”
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