By David Brooks, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times - Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness — Dante, Mozart, Einstein — whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe. We, of course, live in a scientific age...

Are people fascinated by so much in the world because of their intellectual development, or does consciously feeding our mind stimulate high level thought and creative ability? Steve Pavlina, for example, writes, "Leonardo da Vinci, considered a genius by any reasonable standard, achieved competence across a diverse set of fields, including art, music, science, anatomy, engineering, architecture, and many others. While some would argue that such wide-ranging interests were a result of his intelligence, I think it is more likely that they were the cause of it - or at least a major contributing factor."

By Steven Pinker - People have long wondered about the source of genius. Neuroscientists examining the brain of Albert Einstein said it had large and unusually shaped inferior parietal lobules, a seat of mathematical and spatial reasoning... Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius.

As a neurosurgeon, I don't normally slice brains open, right down the middle, so this will give me a different perspective. With pathologist Robert Reichard and Rex Jung, a psychologist at the MIND Institute who studies creativity, we head to the dissection room. When looking for creativity inside a human brain, the first thing you notice is -- nothing unusual. Most scientists say that current brain imaging technology doesn't tell you much more. But Jung and his colleague Dr. Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine, claim they are on the verge of refining imaging techniques to a point that would make traditional intelligence tests obsolete.

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Great people are great in the sense that they are willing to explore their own specialty and values, and have the courage and insistence to apply their values to society, creating something meaningful.

A sober look at any field shows that the top performers are rarely more gifted than the also-rans, but they almost invariably outwork them. This doesn't mean that some people aren't more athletic or smarter than others. The elite are elite partly because they have some genetic gifts - for learning and hand-eye coordination, for instance - but the very best rise because they take great pains to maximise that gift.

By Cheryl M. Ackerman, Ph.D. -- In a society that largely considers gifted adults to be those who have achieved some significance in their field, and which focuses almost all of its attention (when it pays any at all) on gifted children, it is challenging to think about gifted adults in other ways.

Prof. Dweck talks [in multiple videos] about how people's beliefs concerning their own intelligence affects whether they can use and grow their skills.

ScienceDaily news story on research of Carol Dweck, PhD and others -- Research on how junior high school students' beliefs about intelligence affect their math grades found that those who believed that intelligence can be developed performed better than those who believed intelligence is fixed.