Smear merchants lie through their teeth about people like me who want
to help others so their bosses can stay in power to help themselves.
Partisan bickering will not solve our problems. We need outside-the-box
ideas that help liberals, conservatives, and everyone else get more of what
they want. Requires pixie dust? Impossible? No. Read an example of how
we could make government affordable without penalizing anyone.

Kevin Pezzi, MD

The Singing Surgeon™
I'm part Native American and revere natural health,
so should I also call myself a Medicine Man, too? :-)

Iconoclastic views on economics, politics, technology, science, and life

I'm a PBS mind in an MTV World

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

Why geniuses are often so fond of sex

While the affinity for sex is as natural as the desire for tasty food, not everyone is equally captivated by sex. Researchers discovered a link between giftedness (especially the eminently gifted) and prenatal exposure to higher levels of testosterone.

University of Alberta researcher Dr. Marty Mrazik noted that “excessive prenatal exposure to testosterone facilitates increased connections in the brain, especially in the right prefrontal cortex [and unique patterns of inferior frontal activation]. That's why we see some intellectually gifted people with distinct personality characteristics that you don't see in the normal population.” One of these is extreme creativity; another is a heightened interest in sex, which is affected by prenatal and subsequent androgen exposure.

In The Neurobiological Foundations of Giftedness, the authors wrote:

“Leonardo Da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Pablo Picasso illustrate exceptional individuals whose extraordinary accomplishments will forever stand out in history. Yet the autobiographical and biographical accounts of these figures reveal [behavioral] patterns . . . outside the normal range.”

Freud's fascination with sex is legendary, but Albert Einstein and other super geniuses were also intensely interested in sex. Here's an excerpt from one of my articles:

Evidence released after his death showed that Einstein couldn't get enough women. After nearly 3500 sealed pages of his personal correspondence were made public, the press had a field day with Einstein, calling him a “Phys-sex Genius,” a “Scientific Pimp,” a “Stud Muffin,” a “galactic womanizer,” and even a “sex-fiend.” Einstein's weakness for pretty women was indulged by chasing skirts that culminated in many affairs, including one with a “beautiful Soviet spy.” After infidelity ended his first marriage, “he spent some time deciding whether to shack up with his 42-year-old cousin, Elsa, or her 20-year-old daughter, Ilse.”

Other eminent physicists, including Richard Feynman, Erwin Schrödinger, Marie Curie, and Robert Oppenheimer, formed “a roster of lamentable philanderers.” Feynman, “probably the only Nobel Prize winner to befriend porn stars,” claimed he had “a foolproof manner for bedding women and do his calculations on napkins in strip clubs.” Judging by what buxom porn star Candi Samples wrote on her picture given to him, she was more impressed by the size of his anatomy than his mind: “To Big Dick, Love from Candi.”

Oppenheimer, head of the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos during World War 2, “tried to run off with the wife of Linus Pauling and bed the wife of another colleague.”

Schrödinger's Nobel Prize-winning idea came to him while shacked up in an alpine villa with an old girlfriend during a “late erotic outburst.”

Founding Father Ben Franklin consorted with a number of women other than his wife, and he was no stranger to prostitutes. As he put it in his autobiography, “that hard-to-be-governed passion of youth hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risk to my health.”

Franklin wrote a letter in 1745 advising a young man that relationships with older women conferred several advantages, citing their inability to get pregnant and the relative preservation of their vaginas compared with the aging of their faces and breasts, making intercourse with them at least as pleasurable as with younger women. Franklin wrote:

“Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.”

Franklin was indisputably a polymath: “a leading author and printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat.” Walter Isaacson called him “the most accomplished American of his age,” and he was the foremost heartthrob of the 18^th century.

Franklin “freed his slaves and became one of the most prominent abolitionists.” He refused to patent any of his inventions, reasoning that he was already rich enough. He discovered the principle of conservation of charge and originated the concept of positive and negative electrical charges. A list of Franklin's other accomplishments could fill a book; he wasn't just a genius, but a multifaceted super genius.

To Americans who are more comfortable discussing the sex lives of celebrities than their own, it may be difficult to reconcile Ben Franklin the Founding Father and super genius with Franklin the patron of prostitutes and lifelong womanizer who wrote about the sensate characteristics of vaginas as women aged, but Franklin unabashedly discussed sex because he viewed it as part of human nature—which it clearly is. Franklin fit in as well with royalty as he did with tradesmen because he was an intellectual superstar but down-to-earth.

Our Founding Fathers are often idolized and revered as saints or demigods, but some of them had Clintonian sexual appetites. Besides Franklin, there was Thomas Jefferson—another polymath—who had a longstanding affair with Sally Hemings (one of his slaves) that produced several children.

Other researchers believe that increased prenatal exposure to testosterone may improve interhemispheric communication (via an unusually developed corpus callosum) and enhance right-brain development, thus facilitating creativity.

When extraordinarily intelligent people are exceptionally creative, their creativity often manifests in diverse areas, including sex, thus explaining why polymaths such as Franklin sought creative ways to enhance sexual pleasure.

The authors of The Neurobiological Foundations of Giftedness wrote:

“A unique attribute of gifted individuals is the capacity for creative thinking. Intellectually creative individuals are typically highly task motivated (Lykken, 1998) and able to consider a problem from many different perspectives. These individuals are sometimes referred to as "outside-the-box" thinkers because they can generate perspectives that most others do not consider.”

Considering that sex is one of our most basic and intense drives, it is hardly surprising that outside-the-box thinkers would seek creative ways to maximize sexual pleasure. I've discovered (and written about) thousands of ways to increase libido and sexual enjoyment.

Ultimately, people marry not to share a mortgage, but because they want to have sex. People routinely seek to enhance one of the other great pleasures—eating—by dining in the best restaurants they can afford, preferentially purchasing tasty foods, and scouring many cookbooks, magazines, and websites for the best recipes. For most people, it is easy to find foods that are bursting with flavor. Furthermore, eating usually remains very enjoyable throughout life, while various diseases, conditions, and the aging process itself can decimate sexual pleasure.

Sex is part of medicine, so it is taught in medical school, but even the best schools don't have time to thoroughly cover this subject. Gynecologists and urologists learn more, but even they generally only scratch the surface in terms of addressing problems with libido and sexual pleasure. A new medical specialty will eventually emerge, but bright, creative people aren't waiting for that; they seek solutions now.

Considering the almost universal desire to amplify sexual pleasure and the ubiquity of sexual problems that limit libido, pleasure, or performance, why doesn't everyone put down the TV remote control and read sex books?

First, sex seems deceptively simple, and it can be, when everything is OK with both partners.

Second, sex books are usually filled with tips that most adults need about as much as they need to be told to look both ways before crossing a street.

Third, many people assume that whatever sexual pleasure they obtain is as good as it gets, even though the pleasure peak for most people is substantially below what they could obtain.

The apparent simplicity of sex leads many unqualified people to write about it. Even when they don't understand neurophysiology, endocrinology, biochemistry, nutrition, microbiology, pharmacology, neurology, and other subjects that form the basis of the science of sex, they somehow feel qualified to write about it and mislead—or disappoint—their readers.

After reading a few sex books written by such no-nothings, it isn't surprising that most people pick up a TV remote control instead of another sex book. However, very smart people often keep searching, intuitively knowing that while sex is just as complex as any other facet of medicine, an author (such as myself) who understands all that gobbledygook can translate the science of sex into simple tips that can make libido and sexual pleasure skyrocket.

My approach to enhancing sex can also improve health, appearance, longevity, intelligence, creativity, memory, alertness, and mood, so seeking to boost libido and sexual pleasure can also heighten brainpower and the general enjoyment of living. It's thus a very smart thing to do, so it is not surprising that especially smart people are very interested in this subject.

“No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.”
— Aristotle

Comments (2)

Bravo!

Absolutely right on the head of the nail! Trying to explain the interests some have in this topic; the interest in all aspects of sex, at least to those who are repressed or otherwise assumingly not interested, is much like trying to explain being intelligent or gifted to an average intellect. One may well be speaking in tongues—it simply does not compute. So, to my wonderful wife who intellectually understands my womanizing nature and understands the threat is not from other women, but from the concept of secrecy and deceit within the relationship. While the grass may be fresh on the other side of the fence, it is rarely more green when taken in the same context.