The earth-shaking situation of Hollywood did not matter to Hugo, because after deciding on the partner, Hugo put all his experience on the adaptation of the script.

Hugo had been searching for information for nearly three weeks, but still didn't have a clear idea, and he not only read the biography of "A Beautiful Mind" three times, but also carefully watched a documentary interview with John Nash.

Among many literary works, John Nash and his game theory are hot focuses, not only mathematics and economics, Hugo gradually found that in the cutting-edge research of various other disciplines, game theory is also an absolute hot topic, as if being able to add a little game theory to his own research will make the whole paper fashionable, the more those fields that are thousands of miles away from game theory, such as biology, comparative literature, history, etc., the more scholars rack their brains to apply game theory to their own research.

It was an interesting phenomenon until Hugo discovered that psychology also studied John Nash. However, it is not John's game theory, but John's himself. This is also the hope of Hugo to discover the interview documentary. This documentary was found by Hugo himself when he went to the headquarters of CBS TV in Burbank and searched for two hours.

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

It is no secret that John suffers from schizophrenia, on the contrary, it has become one of his important labels. However, John hated the mental hospital, the drugs, and the doctors, and until now, when he mentions the circumstances of his wife sending him to a mental hospital, he still has palpitations.

John was admitted to the hospital twice, the first at the upper-class Maclean's Hospital, where doctors treated schizophrenia as a mental illness and conducted daily counseling to try to dig out the cause of the illness from his childhood experiences. John's colleague Donald Newman Newman) went to visit him, and he said, "Donald, if I don't become normal, they won't let me out." But I've never been normal......"

The second was at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. During the interview, John and the interviewer revisited the same place, and John just stood on the lawn of the hospital, looking from afar, 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 insulin coma treatment, which has now been discontinued by the Western medical community: a massive injection of insulin that puts the patient into a coma, even when he is awake, like a walking corpse. John began to eat only vegetarian food as a protest against the hospital's treatment – which, of course, no one took seriously. After a long period of insulin coma treatment, he finally became "normal" and he had never been so humble and courteous in his life. Donald's wife recalled, "He looked like he had just been beaten." ”

Half a year later, the humble and polite John was finally discharged from Trenton Hospital, and he staggered out of the hospital, the first thing he did was to find his childhood friend, "Tell me about the time we played together, that treatment erased all my childhood memories." ”

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

In John's mind, mathematics in its purest form is not intellectual, not numerical, but inspiration. Reason is nothing but a means of communicating this inspiration, and if regaining it also means the loss of inspiration, then he would rather give up his senses. A friend went to visit him when he was in the hospital, "You claimed that aliens talked to you when you went crazy, but how could a rational mathematician like you believe 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 four positions of reason block man's closeness to the universe. ”

In this sense, John was indeed a madman—a madman like countless miracle-winning geniuses throughout history.

After he was released from Trenton Hospital, John refused any medication because the treatment made him feel dull and unable to think about math. He was offered a slump as a researcher at Princeton University. As a result, students at Princeton University can often see a middle-aged man in red running shoes wandering around campus like a walking corpse, writing illogical formulas on an entire blackboard, and showing up in a professor's office with hundreds of mathematical formulas that had just been calculated the night before. The students nicknamed him "The Ghost of the Math Building," but few knew who the ghost was.

In the seventies, John's friends and family began to notice that he was no longer crazy. John's eyes cleared, and his actions became logical. But how did John recover from the lack of medical care? John thinks, "As long as I want." One day, I started to want to be rational. From that day on, he began to debate with his hallucinatory voices, refuting them, "distinguishing the irrational with reason, and delusion with common sense." ”

This is an interesting case in which Hugo, despite his limited knowledge of psychology, seems to have become a free-will choice in John's case. So much so that Hugo no longer even believed that he was really crazy, but ...... Rationally chose madness, and madly returned to reason. Or, to be more precise, before the seventies, he was so mad about applying all reason to mathematics that his life got out of control; In the seventies, he consciously chose to apply some of his madness to mathematical inspiration, while the rest of his madness was imprisoned by reason.

Such an idea is too bold and too crazy for Hugo to know that it is very unlikely, even if he has not studied psychology. However, if you think about the origin of John's madness, it seems that it is not so unfounded.

John had been an eccentric, arrogant, introverted and withdrawn man since ancient times, and his grades in elementary school were not good - including mathematics, and he was even considered by his teachers to be a student whose academic performance was lower than that of intelligence tests, for example, in mathematics, his unconventional methods of solving problems were criticized by teachers, but John's mother was full of confidence in her son, and later facts proved that this alternative approach was precisely the manifestation of his mathematical talent. It's not just math geniuses, but most geniuses do, and there's nothing surprising about that.

But how can a person with an already eccentric personality be considered to have gone crazy all of a sudden? The reason is because one day in the late fifties, when John was thirty years old, he suddenly claimed the Communists. Give birth. Activist and anti. Common. The activists are in a gang, they are all "conspirators"; He declared that Eisenhower and the Vatican pope had no sympathy for him; Deeply disturbed by the turmoil in the Middle East, he made anonymous phone calls to friends and relatives that the end of the world had arrived.

Under such circumstances, John was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for the first time. Later, when he left Maclean's Hospital, he resigned from MIT, withdrew all his pensions, and announced that he was going to travel to Europe. When John arrived in Paris in July 1959, he saw the whole city filled with marches, strikes, and explosions protesting against the nuclear arms race, and he went to the local government several times to ask for help, hoping to renounce his American citizenship; He even went to Geneva, where the city was known for being refugee-friendly, and he 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 back, and afterwards, he claimed that he was put on a ship, chained like a slave.

Before his deportation, John spent nine months wandering around Europe, filled with the noise and turmoil of the Cold War consciousness like Paris, and the shadow of NATO and the Warsaw Pact hovering back and forth over the continent. Duras) is obsessed with the female beggar of the Ganges, James Joyce. Mr. Bloom, who spent a day in Dublin, and Odysseus, whom Homer sang about returning home after ten years, and Don Quixote, who traveled the world in the pen of Cervantes Saavedra......

This takes Hugo back to his college days, and the characters in the classics begin to overlap with John little by little: they wander endlessly in an attempt to achieve some kind of spiritual goal.

The madness that John witnessed in Europe made Hugo wonder how a schizophrenic who had just left a mental hospital could face a real world that was even crazier than a mental hospital. It's like McMurphy who longs to get out in "One Flew Over the Asylum", like Truman who struggled out of the cocoon in "Truman's World", and like 1900 in "The Pianist at Sea" who could never get out.

The real world has always advertised itself as "normal" and "rational", but the continuous wars on the European continent have made the psychiatric hospital seem like a paradise.

Does the brutal and bloody reality make humans more rational or more insane? People always stand on the moral high ground and pronounce "you are crazy" to a certain part of the people, but in fact, the line between madness and reason has become the embodiment of social power: those who deviate from the so-called mainstream of society are crazy; And those who follow the rules and keep to themselves are normal. This is "Truman's world", and it is also "American beauty", and it is the life of John Nash.

When people can't wait to pronounce John as a madman, it is not the persecution of the minority group in mainstream society. Of course, perhaps John's mysterious hallucinations and nonsense are timidity and fear, but after the Iron Curtain of the Cold War fell, people found that John's "crazy remarks" were more like prophetic prophecies, and people's fear of the unknown and uncertainty labeled John a "madman".