A Beautiful Mind is one of my favorite movies. I first watched this film in my high school psychology class. After watching it a second time, I still really like this film. A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Nash, a mathematics genius, and his struggle with the many delusions that he has throughout his life. During the first half of the film, everything seems to be going well in Nash’s life. He developed his own equilibrium theory which revolutionized economics. However, the twist in the movie is that Nash is schizophrenic and has been having hallucinations all his adult life. One thing that I think the film does really well is showing that mental illness does not have a certain look. Most of the time you cannot tell if a person is suffering from a mental illness. John Nash is probably the last person someone would expect to have schizophrenia. Also, just because someone has a mental illness, that does not mean that they are not intelligent or smart. Nash is a perfect example of this. He is a math genius but suffers from a serious disease. I know some critics have an issue with the way that Nash is portrayed in the film because it made him seem nicer than he actually was; but, I think that film stresses an important point that mental illness can affect anyone.

I got the chance to watch “A Beautiful Mind” on Friday in the Rose Dining Hall. I’ve been meaning to watch this film when my friend brought it up a few weeks ago. This film focuses on John Nash’s (a prolific mathematician) personal and academic life. I thought some parts of the film were a bit cheesy and overdramatic, especially the scenes where they would focus in on his face and show how he is mentally calculating arbitrary letters on a newspaper. The film had a nice twist towards the end when they revealed Nash’s condition because I would never expect him to have schizophrenia. Although the main part of the film was to celebrate Nash’s life as a mathematician and show how his illness affected his family, it also gave a very important message to its viewers. A brilliant man like Nash is not immune to mental illnesses; illness does not discriminate. Any ordinary person or award winning mathematician can become a victim to it. As the film comes to an end, I looked up John Nash on wikipedia because I was so fascinated about how he was able to deal with such a crippling illness while contributing extraordinary feats in game theory. I learned that his personality and personal life were not accurately captured in the film, and it was apparently what most of the critics were complaining about. However, the movie did a great job of portraying what it was like for him to deal with schizophrenia despite some inaccuracies in depicting his actual character.

I read the book A Beautiful Mind at some point in high school but I was refraining from watching the movie only because I never really liked biographical dramas. I didn’t really like how they decide to exaggerate certain life events or how there are inconsistencies in the stories. If it was remotely nonfiction in nature, I’d rather watch a documentary which would try it’s best to be as objective as possible. I thought that even docudramas would warp the story.Or at least I thought that way until I got a bit older and saw The Theory of Everything which I really liked. I guess that softened me to finally watching A Beautiful Mind which featured another prominent member of society,  John Nash. Unfortunately, the movie did omit another major fact about Nash’s life.  The movie excluded Nash’s relationship with Eleanor Stier and the birth of his son, John David Stier.

However, I liked how the film kind of showed how schizophrenia can effect the different aspects of life, whether that be personal or professional. I am currently taking a course on psychopathology and I recently watched the movie once more since I thought it might help me relax.  Since it is finals season and the information is new, I’m kind of surprised how Nash’s symptoms started to become obvious at age 31.Usually, if I remember correctly, schizophrenic symptoms start to arise in males around mid-adolescent and early adulthood. I do recall that Nash was somewhat impulsive as a young man and i wonder if that was somewhat of a manifestation of what would later. Since he passed away recently, there is a Times article on him that describes his early life as well. The Times article reported him to be an odd child which is characteristic of children who are at risk of developing schizophrenia. Even at Princeton, he was described as having odd habits and being a little arrogant. Perhaps, I’m looking way too into this but, his break shouldn’t have been very surprising or at least that’s what most people say in retrospect. I liked how the movie depicted that Nash decided to stop his medication because it was making him sick as most antipsychotics can. This is fairly common with people with these kinds of breaks and it resulted in another schizophrenic break which is sad. I guess another aspect to this film is that it is kind of a morale booster in that you can be in an incredibly awful situation and it may just work out. Nash was able to teach again and he remarried his wife.  I have attached the article on him just in case anyone wanted to take a look.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/science/john-nash-a-beautiful-mind-subject-and-nobel-winner-dies-at-86.html?_r=0

I read an interesting article recently about the future of BMIs. You can see the article below, if you want.

Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future

You might ask, “David, why is this relevant?” I doubt anyone is willing to read through that 30,000 word monster, but the article does discuss a lot of things about the future of the BMI industry, and how, through the power of increasingly advanced technology, we will be able to transcend inefficient “communication by words.”

It also discusses many fixes for current brain and spine-based problems, such as deafness or blindness. Current technologies to alleviate blindness and deafness are primitive, but you can sure bet that they’ll improve in the future.

Having watched A Beautiful Mind, I’ve come to realize that these incredible innovations– things that will make quadriplegics skip and jump again, things that will make painters out of blind men and composers out of the deaf– cannot necessarily fix what is truly deep down in our mind. If something goes wrong in there, well, it’ll still be wrong.

The article discusses how if complete knowledge of the brain equates to travelling a mile, we’ve only discovered about three inches of that mile. We might know which neurons trigger which parts of the brain, or which chemicals cause happiness or sadness, but we cannot give instructions to the brain to activate those specific neurons. Even if we did, we simply don’t possess the proper “programming language,” and if we did, it would take an absurd amount of resources to implement.

The article also mentions that we might be able to change how certain sensations feel. In the far future, with super-advanced BMIs, people can even relegate pain to something far less pleasant– like an alert, or a noise. “STOP USING THAT LEG, IT HAS BEEN SEVERED,” might pop up in the corner of your eye, far preferable to white-hot lances of pain rocketing across your spine. But the affliction Nash had was one of perception. To him, nothing seemed wrong, so even with this super advanced tech, he would not be able to fix himself. The only cure was to battle against the most powerful enemy– one’s own brain.

It’s a sobering thought, and it encourages solipsism as much as the Matrix did. What if I had been suffering similar ailments? Would anyone know? Because I certainly wouldn’t.

The film “A Beautiful Mind” follows the life of John Nash, a genius mathematician and economist, who lives a high stakes life code breaking and escaping soviets during  the Cold War era only to realize his life is a collection of schizophrenic thoughts that he must try and overcome. John Nash’s life offers an inspiring story of willpower and a terrifying glimpse into the reality of mental illness. John’s life as portrayed in film invites a deeper inspection into just how strange the brain is and how we perceive the world around us.

After viewing the film, I had to question just how accurately the hallucinations were depicted as John’s behavior was noticeably out of the ordinary, yet it seems he was only stopped very late in his illness. He had an imaginary roommate that any friend would have noticed as a the beginning of his condition, yet he was able to go through college and work for what seemed to be a good amount of time for an imaginary task force before finally being diagnosed. While I’m certain his life was portrayed in this manner for good cinema and a more serious reading into this would give a more accurate timeline, it definitely makes you question how long certain symptoms can go unnoticed. It’s a horrifying thought that what you believe to be true could be a fabrication and, even worse, that fabrication may seem so real that you refuse to believe it’s in your head. I’m not exactly certain how a regular person would be able to overcome this affliction and that’s perhaps why Nash’s battle with the disease is so inspiring. John Nash had to give up what he thought was part of his life, a courageous decision that I wouldn’t want to ever have to make.

I was also surprised and saddened to find out Nash had just recently passed away. I am glad his struggle was told to a wide audience and I am always reminded after viewing “A Beautiful Mind” to be grateful for good health and be more conscious of diseases that others struggle to combat.

In Flora’s Friday Films, we watched a movie about the life of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician, and his struggles with schizophrenia thought his life. We first meet John in graduate school at Princeton, as a bright, but socially awkward student, who held a certain disdain some aspects of college life, including attending class. He struggles to find an appropriate subject to research during his time there, but with the encouragement of his roommate, he eventually publishes an article that would later revolutionize economic theory. He becomes a professor, and is approached by the Department of Defense to decode enemy transmissions. He spends a majority of his time doing this and dropping off the decoded messages at a pre-approved drop site. He also gets married, after getting reunited with his old college roommate and meeting his niece. The film takes a surprising turn when viewers learn that all of his work for the Department of Defense was imagined, and his roommate and her niece are all side effects of his schizophrenia. With the help of his wife, he eventually learns to recognize people around him who are imagined, and ignores them, rather than take medication, which dulls his mind. Eventually, he eases himself back into the world of academia, and becomes a Nobel Laureate in the field of Economics. I really enjoyed this movie. It gave me a new perspective on schizophrenia- I was just as shocked as John Nash’s character when he learned that such major aspects of his life were imagined. I was also very impressed with  his determination to overcome his difficulties, and his ability to prevent setbacks from discouraging him. In all, I gained a new perspective on mental illness, and the power of proper motivation.

What a powerful movie. The movie depicts the life of John Nash, a brilliant scholar who later in life goes on to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on game theory (Nash Equilibrium among other things). Nash went to MIT, and later was invited to the Pentagon to crack encrypted communications. Nash then gets an assignment from the DOD and begins to work on deciphering soviet clues. After Nash gives a guest lecture at Harvard, he believes that soviet agents are trying to attack him. He ends up sedated after fighting, and is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. We learn that half of Nash’s life is a lie, completely made up in his head.

Schizophrenia is an incredibly scary disease to think about, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish what is real and what isn’t. What is even more incredible about this story is that Nash was able to overcome the disease, and realize that the people he was seeing were not real. It is after this that he goes on to receive the Nobel Prize in economics for his works. What an incredible story.

If you are so good at doing something, that means that you are really good at doing a lot of things that utilizes that special skill set. However, it doesn’t meant that they are all beneficial.

The Brilliant Mind displays this fact really well and it allows the audience understand the “dark side” of being brilliant.

However, the movie only highlighted a few struggles of brilliance. Schizophrenia and social struggles are two of them however, I think there are a lot of other “costs” of being smart.

Looking back at my life I can draw a couple of examples. I had a really good friend of mine who was of higher intelligence compared to those around her. At year two she could read harry potter books and her professor parents taught her advanced topics in grade school. Her older brother went to Columbia and she was always on the top of her class. However, school was always boring to her and she rarely felt invigorated through the traditional learning system. She ended up establishing distance between herself and a lot of her classmates and ended up finishing high school early.

Not that there is anything negative to that, however I think it is just interesting to see how different gifts always, not necessarily have “costs”, but imply other consequences.

For those who skip grades, they miss out with going to school with people of their own age. Are they able to establish meaningful relationships, learn social norms, find out more about themselves as quickly as their intellectual knowledge is growing?

Is there a way for us to establish educational systems that can both satisfy the “geniuses” of the world without having to compromise the rest of their lives? However, what would that type of institution entail for inequality and segregation?

It often seems that a generic explanation of schizophrenia is the symptom of seeing or hearing imaginary people. I always wondered how vivid such hallucinations were, as people who experience them must have a heavily distorted perception of what is and isn’t real. As I’m writing this, I’m wondering how cognizant of my symptoms I’d be if I were to develop schizophrenia. If someone were to walk in to my room right now and introduce himself as someone on my floor, I likely wouldn’t think twice of whether or not he was real. However, I can’t imagine that if this was a hallucination, it would be too realistic if it was the first time I was experiencing one. So maybe my mental state would’ve gradually gotten worse before I first experienced my imaginary floor-mate, enough so that I’d be convinced that he was real when I first met him.

I vaguely recall watching ‘A Beautiful Mind’ in one of my high school classes, so I remembered most of the scenes as I re-watched it. As I thought about the film and it’s depiction of Nash’s schizophrenia, I appreciated how his condition is revealed to the viewer as the people around him discover it. I can’t remember my reaction when I first watched it, but I wish I could re-experience my realization that Nash was hallucinating certain people in his life. As this revelation was unfolding, I had a feeling that I was watching some kind of psychological horror film. There wasn’t actually a horror element (beyond maybe the hallucinations), so I think the fact that these imaginary people and events seemed so real to Nash was what was slightly frightening.

I don’t know a lot about Schizophrenia and what it can do to a person, or how realistically the representation of John Nash’s condition was portrayed in A Beautiful Mind. However, I have heard that estimates as high as twenty-percent of root causes for homelessness are being attributed to Schizophrenia. In light of this, it is truly admirable how Nash was able to control his hallucination and maintain such a functional social life, not to mention the achievements of his breakthroughs in academia. Because of this, I disagree with the introduction given about how Schizophrenia trapped Nash within his own mind. I think rather than trapping him, his condition allowed his imagination to run free to harmful depths, because I do believe there is an opposite extremity to oppression. By liberating his mind and appealing to his creativity for inspirational breakthroughs, Nash escaped the real of practical reality to that of his obsession with military operations in Russia.

It is amazing what a person can accomplish with enough mettle and motivation. John Nash should serve as an inspiration to any average joe facing a difficult time. However, it concerns me that this movie might inspire people with severe psychological disorder to refuse medical treatment, or that a loved one might influence someone in need towards such a decision. While John Nash’s accomplishments are notable, I don’t believe that every person facing this struggle has the necessary means to overcome this disorder without medical attention.

Whenever I think of an underlying theme to this movie, I keep coming back to perseverance through all challenges and the achievements that are attainable to any individual with enough effort and persistence. The movie really inspires me to devote myself to my passions the way that John Nash was able to devote himself to studies in mathematics.

When I heard that John Nash, the mathematical, economic, schizophrenic genius that became a new father of modern economics, had died in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike almost exactly two years ago, I was heartbroken. But it invited me to look into his life through research and not simply a film.

This week was not the first time I’d seen the movie. I’ve watched it countless times for its direction, its gorgeous soundtrack, and its heartwarming (while largely Hollywood-fabricated) story. I’m personally a fan of 1950s vibes, so A Beautiful Mind hits the spot.

But indeed, did you know the movie greatly exaggerates and leaves out a lot of details about his life? You may remember the illusions of William Parcher, the prodigal roommate, and niece. Those were never real. In fact, Nash never even saw the people in his head; they were all visual. In addition, in the film, John and Alicia lived happily ever after as a married couple. In reality, he divorced Alicia in 1957. They continued to live together, but legally separated, for about half a century before remarrying in 2001.

This does not mean the movie is entirely dishonest or distasteful. If the characters of John’s imagination were only audio, the entire film would have been much less interesting. But it should encourage viewers to look for the truth themselves, since Hollywood is not known for accuracy.

Last week was not my first time watching A Beautiful Mind.  I had learned about John Nash, the schizophrenic genius, while I was in high school. I then watched the movie, and loved it. However, this was my first time watching it after Nash and his wife’s death on the New Jersey turnpike two years ago. The movie was more impactful this time around because it kept reminding me that someone can suffer so much and survive, only to lose to something as trivial as not putting on a seatbelt. Thinking about his death, I research Nash on Wikipedia the night before the movie. During the viewing, I was shocked at the sheer amount of discrepancies between what I was watching and what I had read the night before. Nash never hallucinated a roommate, and a CIA agent, instead he heard things that weren’t there. He didn’t have a happy marriage for 30 years; while he was in a psychiatric hospital he had an affair with one of his nurses. After getting her pregnant, he abandoned the child and wife. His first wife then divorced him (thought they still lived together) and then remarried in 2001. In addition, Nash never went back on medication like the movie said. In many ways, Hollywood directly lied so that Nash would be a more sympathetic character.

My feelings are conflicted about this. In one hand, I see why the studio lied about being on medication. If they had sent the message that you can overcome schizophrenia by sheer will, a lot of people’s lives may be damaged. Also, it’s hard to depict auditory hallucinations in film, so I see why they had him visualize things that weren’t there. Still, I think it’s harmful to lie about Nash’s personal affairs.  Nash was bad in some ways, but that doesn’t mean his accomplishments in math and overcome schizophrenia are any less amazing or notable. By striking these personal affairs from the record, you effectively forgive them. You inadvertently send a message that as long as you are great at one thing, history will forget your flaws. I love Nash for his contributions to mathematics and I admire him for conquering schizophrenia, but I don’t think we should forget that he was a human with flaws.

A Beautiful Mind follows the rise to fame of mathematician John Nash from his socially-awkward and secluded student lifestyle at Princeton to his romantic life with student and later wife Alicia Larde. The film tells Nash’s story inventively through his struggle with schizophrenia and how the illness affects all his relationships, both professionally and personally. The film is able to effectively tie Nash’s illness with his brilliance as well as follow the progress of his illness as it slowly consumes his life entirely. By embedding certain characters from its very beginning such as Nash’s roommate, Charles Herman, director Ron Howard builds trust with his audience, driving us into adrenaline-packed action and suspense as we follow voraciously Nash’s venture with the Pentagon and later his attempt to crack Soviet codes. Howard carries us on this journey, building empathy for a character so skillfully that the epiphany of the protagonist coincides with our epiphany as viewers. When Nash comes to the realization that Charles is a figure of his imagination, that the Soviet plot is his own fictional indulgence, we feel just as betrayed. When he is in denial, so are we, and when he recovers and reconciles reality with his illness, so we too come to terms with what we chose to believe and what we came to understand as story and fiction.

The film “A Beautiful Mind” pushes to break a stigma that unfortunately has yet to be broken by even the most powerful of movies (as also seen in the film “The Imitation Game” and “Pi”). The film follows the storyline of math genius John Nash and his rise to fame because of his brilliant mind, while he also struggles painfully with schizophrenia. To understand Nash is to try and understand what it is like to have to fight against yourself between what is going to bring you success (his math fame) and what will you peace (his admitting his schizophrenia and getting help and losing fame). Mental illness, especially those as complex as schizophrenia, were and are stigmatized heavily and seem to become seen as more of the person than the person themselves. Nash’s brilliance would have taken a backseat to the fear of his mental health–he would have gone from “Nash the genius” to “Nash the schizophrenic” . This movie graciously tries to reveal a respected man for all he is in the hopes that audiences will still see him , and others like him, as a respected complex, brilliant, regular humans with a mental illness, and not as a monster. I hope that many people were humbled, as I was, by this film and were challenged to think more carefully about how to treat people.

My biggest fear is schizophrenia, partly because we know so little about it. But more importantly, because the scariest thing in the entire world is not losing what you have, and not losing other people, but having what you think you have not be real. It doesn’t seem to be correlated to inheritance or any particular environmental factors. It just happens.

Honestly, thinking about diseases like schizophrenia make me think more closely about what our reality actually is. Is such a disease perhaps simply the projection of a very independent mind? Do we all have a little bit of extra-real tendencies? After all, the common phrase “your perception is your reality” speaks to the idea that each person perceives the world slightly differently. In this way, society overall has some sort of average perception of reality, which we all take to be truth. We all deviate from this mean, which causes each person to have a different personality. Some people may fall further than the mean from others, and they get labeled as ‘weird’ or in extreme cases ‘delusional.’

Ultimately, John Nash was crippled by the magnitude of his separation with the average perception of reality that the rest of society had. He was lucky to have such a wife to help him through the worst of his delusions. I hope that I have such a person in my life in the future. 

I watched A Beautiful Mind on Friday. Though I had heard of the film before, I had no idea who John Nash was and I didn’t know what the film was about. The poster description said “After John Nash, a brilliant but asocial mathematician, accepts secret work in cryptography, his life takes a turn for the nightmarish”. Upon reading the description, I assumed that it would be a spy thriller of some kind, with John’s work leading him into the secret and dangerous world of espionage. I thought of dead drops, car chases, Russians (well, in a way I suppose I wasn’t totally wrong). But the film turned out to be more than that.

The bombshell of the film occurs when it is revealed that John has paranoid schizophrenia. Charles, Marcee, and Parcher (as well as a plot against the United States by the Russians) are all figments of John’s imagination. As Dr. Rosen said in the film: Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be? The way the film robs the audience of the full understanding of what happening, as we were able to see what John was experiencing, and the revelation that a lot of what we just watched didn’t actually happen was particularly powerful. I found that the film touched upon the complexity of the human mind and found the way the film visually represented what was going on in John’s head to be interesting. I enjoyed the film and would definitely recommend watching it.