Chapter 2070: 2070 Legendary Experience

The upheaval of Hollywood is not important to Hugo, because after confirming the partner, Hugo devoted all his experience to the adaptation of the script.

Hugo has been looking for information for nearly three weeks, but he still has no clear idea. He not only read the biographical novel of "A Beautiful Mind" three times, but also carefully watched a story about John- Nash interview documentary.

Among many literary works, John Nash and his game theory are the hot focus, not just mathematics and economics. Hugo gradually discovered that game theory is also an absolute hot spot in the frontier research of other various disciplines. It seems that adding a little game theory to one's own research will make the whole paper fashionable. The more fields that are far from game theory, such as biology, comparative literature, history, etc., the more scholars rack their brains I want to apply game theory to my own research.

This is a very interesting phenomenon. Until Hugo discovered that psychology also took John Nash as a research object. It's not John's game theory, though, but John himself. This is also Hugo's expectation when he discovered the interview documentary. It was Hugo who went to the headquarters of CBS Television Station in Burbank and searched for it for two hours.

The first sentence of the interview narration is very interesting, "John Nash once suffered from severe schizophrenia, but he insisted that his illness was cured entirely by willpower."

It is not a secret that John suffers from schizophrenia, on the contrary it has become one of his important labels. However, John hated mental hospitals, drugs, and doctors. Until now, when his wife sent him to a mental hospital, he still had palpitations.

John has been admitted to the hospital twice. The first time was in the upper-class McLean Hospital. The doctors there regarded schizophrenia as a mental illness and provided psychological counseling every day, trying to dig out the cause of the illness from his childhood experience. John's colleague Donald Newman (Donald. Newman) visited him and said, "Donald, if I don't become normal, they won't let me out. But, I've never been normal..."

The second time was the Trenton Mental Asylum. During the interview, John and the interviewer revisited the old place, but John just stood on the lawn of the hospital, watching from a distance, but refused to take half a step closer. “They give you injections to make you look like an animal so they can treat you like an animal.” Here, he was forced to undergo the now-discontinued insulin coma: after massive injections of insulin, Let the patient fall into a coma, even when the patient is awake, it is like a walking dead. John protested the hospital treatment by starting to eat only vegetarian food - of course, no one took it seriously. After a long period of insulin coma treatment, he finally became "normal", and he had never been so humble and polite in his life. "He looked as good as he'd just been beaten," Donald's wife recalled.

Half a year later, the humble and polite John was finally discharged from the Trenton Hospital. He staggered out of the hospital. The first thing he did was to find his childhood friend, "Tell me about the things we played together. That treatment took my childhood away." Memories are erased."

This made Hugo start to think: If returning to reason only means taming the social system, social framework, and social standards, and means the loss of memory, personality, and emotion, is healing really worthwhile? Especially for a genius like John who sees math as "the only thing that matters".

The purest mathematics in John's mind is not reason, not numbers, but inspiration. Reason is but a means of communicating this inspiration, and if regaining it means losing it, then he would rather give it up. A friend visited him when he was in the hospital, "When you go crazy you claim that aliens are talking to you, but how can a rational mathematician like you believe in such nonsense as aliens?"

John replied, "The idea of ​​mathematics came into my head like an alien. I believe in the existence of aliens, just as I believe in mathematics." He wrote in Notebook Hill, "The rational four blocks people from Cosmic proximity."

From this perspective, John is indeed a lunatic—a lunatic like countless miracle-creating geniuses in history.

After coming out of Trenton Hospital, John refused to take any medication because it left him feeling sluggish and unable to think about math. He got a slack as a researcher at Princeton University. As a result, students at Princeton University can often see a middle-aged man wearing red running shoes wandering around the campus like a walking dead, writing illogical formulas on the entire blackboard, holding hundreds of mathematical formulas he calculated just the night before Show up at a professor's office. The students nicknamed him "the ghost of the math building", but few people know who this ghost is.

As we entered the seventies, John's friends and family began to notice that he was losing his mind. John's eyes became clear, and his behavior became logical. But how did John recover in the absence of medical treatment? John thought, "As long as I want to. One day, I started to want to be rational." From that day on, he debated with the voices of his hallucinations, refuting those voices, "Separating irrationality with reason and delusion with common sense. "

This is a very interesting case, although Hugo's understanding of psychology is limited, but in John's case, madness and reason seem to become a free will choice. So much so that Hugo no longer even believed that he was really crazy, but... chose madness rationally, and returned to rationality madly. Or to be more accurate, before the 1970s, he crazily applied all his rationality to mathematics, which caused his life to lose control; after entering the 1970s, he consciously chose to apply part of his madness to Mathematical inspiration, and the remaining madness is imprisoned by rationality.

This kind of idea is too bold and too crazy. Even if Hugo has never studied psychology, he knows that the possibility of this is very slim. However, thinking about the origin of John's madness, it seems that it is not so unfounded.

John has been a weird, arrogant, introverted and withdrawn person since ancient times. His grades in elementary school were not good, including mathematics, and he was even considered by the teacher as a student whose academic performance was lower than the intelligence test. His method of solving problems was criticized by the teacher, but John's mother was full of confidence in her son. Later facts also proved that this kind of alternative method was exactly the embodiment of his mathematical talent. Not just math geniuses, but most geniuses, there's nothing surprising about that.

But how could a man who was already eccentric be thought to have gone mad all of a sudden? The reason is that at the end of the fifties, John suddenly claimed to be a communist one day when he was thirty years old. Produce. activists and anti. common. He declared that Eisenhower and the Pope had no sympathy for him; he was so disturbed by the turmoil in the Middle East that he called friends and family anonymously to say the end of the world was coming.

Under such circumstances, John was sent to a mental hospital for the first time. When he later left McLean, he resigned from MIT, withdrew all his pension, and announced he was going on a trip to Europe. In July 1959, John arrived in Paris. He saw that the whole city was full of demonstrations, strikes, and explosions protesting against the nuclear arms race. He asked the local government for help several times, hoping to give up his American citizenship; The city, known for its friendliness to refugees, declared to the Swiss that "the American system is fundamentally wrong," but no one believed him. In the end, he was put on a plane and sent home, where he later claimed he was put on a ship, chained like a slave.

Before being deported, John wandered in Europe for nine months. Everywhere was full of noise and turmoil under the consciousness of the Cold War like Paris. The shadows of NATO and Warsaw Pact hovered over the European continent. These nine months were extremely full of metaphors. Wandering can't help but remind people of the wandering heroes in the fictional world: the female beggar who never forgets the Ganges in the works of Marguerite. Mr. Bloom who traveled to Dublin in time, Odysseus who spent ten years returning home sung by Homer, and Don Quixote who traveled all over the world in the works of Cervantes Saavedra...

This brings Hugo back to his college days, and the characters in classical literature and John began to overlap bit by bit: they used endless physical wandering in an attempt to achieve some kind of spiritual goal.

The crazy scenes that John witnessed in Europe made Hugo curious: how does a schizophrenic patient who just left the mental hospital face a real world that is even crazier than the mental hospital. It's like McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", who is eager to get out, like Truman who struggles out of his cocoon in "The World of Truman", like 1900 who can never get out in "The Pianist on the Sea".

This real world has been flaunting itself as "normal" and "rational", but the continuous wars in the European continent make the mental hospital look like a paradise.

Does the cruel and bloody reality make human beings more rational or crazy? People always stand on the moral high ground and pronounce "you are crazy" to some people, but in fact, the boundary between madness and reason has become a manifestation of social power: anyone who deviates from the so-called mainstream track of society is a lunatic; It is normal for those who keep their own place. This is "Truman's World", but also "American Beauty", and it is John Nash's life.

When people can't wait to pronounce John a lunatic, it is not the persecution of minority groups by mainstream society. Of course, John's mysterious hallucinations and nonsense may make people timid and frightening, but after the fall of the Iron Curtain of the Cold War, people discovered that John's "crazy remarks" were more like prophecies, The unknown, the fear of uncertainty, labeled John a "lunatic".