“A Beautiful Mind” Questions
Answer the following questions using your knowledge of schizophrenia.
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful
muscles, but no personality," Albert Einstein wrote in Out of My Life.
1. What are your impressions of Nash in the opening third of the film while he's
attending graduate school at Princeton?
2. How would you describe his attitude toward intellect — his own and that of
others?
3. Nash was told by his second grade teacher that he had been given two
helpings of brain but only one helping of heart- what did that mean?
4. Do you consider yourself an intellectual person? If so, what major challenges
have you faced by placing so much emphasis upon the intellect?
"There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships," Barbara G.
Harrison has observed.
5. What scenes in the drama best illustrate Nash's underdeveloped social skills?
6. How does he describe himself in relationship to other people?
7. What happens when Nash is forced to deal with mental illness and rely upon
the tender ministrations of his wife Alicia
8. Does the danger in human relationships excite or terrify you?
"That which we call genius has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great
deal to do with nerve . . . unexplored spaces do not frighten them as much as they
frighten those around them," self-esteem writer Nathaniel Branden has written.
10.Which of Nash’s character qualities would you say are the “up side” of his
genius?
11. Do you share Robert Oppenheimer’s opinion quoted in the film that genius is
defined as "knowing the answer before the question is posed?"
14. Marsha Sinetar as well as Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall have written
books about spiritual intelligence, which they connect with meaning, value,
and moral sense. How was Nash’s spiritual I.Q.?
In The Eden Express, which recounts his battle with schizophrenia, Mark Vonnegut
has written: "Every time my head cleared for as much as ten minutes, I believed
myself completely cured and ready to take on the world . . . a lot of that is due to the
deceptive nature of schizophrenia. One day you're fine and the next you're clutching
your knees trying to hold on."
15.What is the scariest part of the mental illness of schizophrenia?
16.When in the drama does Nash become most touching as a human being
struggling to regain a measure of himself?
17.What insights has this film given you into the symptoms and treatment of
schizophrenia?
18.What insights has this film given you into the stigma associated with
schizophrenia?
19.What insights has this film given you into the challenges of caring for a
schizophrenic?
Note from Mr Chavez-
**Many if not most schizophrenics, even if they understand their condition, cannot
reason themselves out of their delusions as the film's Nash says he has done. The
actual Nash was apparently helped in the later years of his struggle by the chemical
effects of aging, something that most schizophrenics do not benefit from. Before
that, he was disabled by his condition for many years, and his marriage, in fact, did
not survive his schizophrenia--although, remarkably, he and Alicia remarried
recently after having been divorced for almost forty years.
And in reality there was no Nobel acceptance speech, Nash not having been invited
to give one because of concern over his highly eccentric behavior. Finally, the film
leaves open a possible connection between Nash's schizophrenia and his brilliance as
a mathematician. Whatever the truth in Nash's case, schizophrenia--unlike bipolar
disorder, which is often associated with creativity--typically involves distortions in
cognition that make its "insights" difficult to connect with consensus reality.**