The Dark Side of Genius: Weird Facts About Smart People

There’s a trope that incredibly smart people often come with a few quirks, the side effects of a brain that runs a little differently from the rest of ours. But unlike many stereotypes, this one has some facts to back it up: many of the most famous people in history had some bizarre tendencies. Read on to find out the weirdest habits of the greatest geniuses.

1. Alfred Hitchcock is well known as a filmmaking genius, but there was also something a little scary about him as a person. While filming “The Birds,” he nearly tortured the lead actress Tippi Hedren into the performance she gave by having real birds attack her until she collapsed on set, and during the filming of “Marnie” he sexually propositioned her and enforced the proposition with professional threats.

2. Fact: Edgar Allen Poe was hardly a popular author in his time, but he made things worse for himself by annoying his editors with his habit of writing on scrolls rather than paper.

3. A genius that is generally unsung is Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu, the inventor of the floppy disc and over 3,300 other inventions. How does he do it? He intentionally stays underwater until just before the moment of drowning, believing that it stimulates his brain. He also likes to think in a bathroom tiled in 24 karat gold because he believes that it blocks out television and radio waves.

4. Many smart people rely on coffee to get jumpstarted each day, but Honore de Balzac took it a step further: he drank up to 50 cups of coffee a day.

5. There are many stories about Einstein’s eccentricities, but his chauffeur has revealed some of his oddest tendencies: sometimes he would eat insects straight off the ground, and he would also bring his violin with him to go birdwatching, often crying while he played.

6. Nikola Tesla has a wide following on the internet today, but he’s hardly someone to emulate. He would often work from 3AM to 11PM, leading to a breakdown at 25, which he recovered from and then continued the same schedule for another couple of decades. More oddly, he had a deep-seated hatred of jewelry, most especially pearls.

7. Thomas Edison had an odd way of deciding who would work in his lab. He would have an interviewee eat a bowl of soup in front of them and see whether they added salt before they tried it. If yes, the interviewee had no place in Edison’s work: they had too many assumptions. Similarly to Tesla, he had an odd sleeping cycle, and he practiced polyphasic sleep, a way of sleeping in short cycles rather than overnight.

8. Charles Dickens may have been an amazing author, but he was an odd barber. He was obsessed with keeping his hair neat, and so he always had a comb on hand to neaten his hair hundreds of times a day. Similarly, he was incredibly specific about how his study was to be arranged.