It's been speculated that Sidis's intelligence was due in part to having thin-walled blood vessels in the brain, making it easy for nutrients like oxygen to diffuse into brain cells. This theory explains his and his fathers' premature deaths due to stroke.<p>It also suggests that ordinary people today might increase their intelligence by trying to eliminate arterial plaque.
It's ironic that there's a comment about intelligence tests being misleading, and that no scale is defined for the supposed IQ score of 250 to 300. 'IQ' means nothing by itself--you need to know which scale is being used (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliability" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabili...</a>). 110 on one can equal 150 on another--and that's the main reason IQ scores are chiefly given in 'percentile of population', i.e. "higher than 98% of the population", nowadays.
And yet (leaving the debate about whether these IQ numbers are meaningful aside) he never produced anything of any real value.<p>His one published book apparently "<i>predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law of thermodynamics operated in reverse to the temporal direction that we experience in our local area. Everything outside of what we would today call a galaxy would be such a region. Sidis claimed that the matter in this region would not generate light.</i>". This not only sounds wrong, it sounds like the kind of wrong that only somebody not particularly versed in thermodynamics (even as it existed in the 1920s) would write. His writings on other subjects seem to be equally wrong-headed.<p>It's a classic smart person disease, to think<p>(a) I have an idea<p>(b) I am smart, therefore<p>(c) My idea must be right!<p>See also: Einstein on politics.
Cool -- never heard of this guy. I have a theory that the vast majority of the greatest human ideas never come to fruition because the people who have them are too f<i></i>ked up to ever implement them, or to even articulate them in an appropriate environment (academic paper, novel/book , whatever).