A Beautiful Mind

Title: A Beautiful Mind
Class: Economics IB HL
Category: Other Classes

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                During our IB Economics class, we watched the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, a movie about the famous mathematician (John Nash)’s life. He was a noble-prize winner and a graduate from Princeton University, was famous for discovering the Game Theory used in economics and had schizophrenia. Due to this illness, he was able to perceive certain things (in his case, other people) that were not there in reality. With these constant visions, he developed a whole new life in his mind. He thought that he was a spy trying to decode the new bomb location. He thought he was sharing a dorm with another guy who later on became his best friend in his mind. He did not know how to differentiate his visions from reality because they all seemed real to him. He could perceive the people in his visions through different types of perceptions, mainly auditory, cutaneous and visual perceptions.

How was he to know what was real and what was solely his vision? How did he separate the two? Is it possible that he is normal and that we are not capable of perceiving what he perceives? If there is a possibility of this being true, then why is he diagnosed as having a mental disease called schizophrenia? Why does he have to take medications to help with his visions if there is a possibility that we may not be able to see these visions that may be true? Is it because he is not part of the mass? Does this mean that common knowledge is always considered to be true? Do the mass always determine what is to be considered as being true? If this is the case, then how reliable is truth itself?