I wouldn't just chalk it up to Berkson's paradox. A lot has been written on the connection between genius and madness and it seems to me that folk psychology ge

I wouldn't just chalk it up to Berkson's paradox. A lot has been written on the connection between genius and madness and it seems to me that folk psychology gets it right on this point, at least in essence. It's easy to feel like we've solved that mystery by just denying that there's such a thing as a genius, that they're just incredibly talented people who were in the right place at the right time to produce that deep seismic shift in perspective that creative genius is associated with. This demystification might appeal to our competitive, status-seeking side as well, it's uwarranted. There are those people who discover/invent a whole new field and those many many more people who are engaged in the vital and equally important collective effort of working out the consequences and filling in the gaps of those initial discoveries/inventions. I would expect the latter cohort (of very talented people), but not the former one, to be more psychologically and physically robust than the average.