Great men, it was reasoned, would have magnificent and extraordinary brains.
It suggests that evolution has given us extraordinary brains, and that if someone could only take hold of this gift, there is no telling what he might do: engineer a corporate merger, run for political office, buy a huge apartment, order food at a restaurant in a foreign language.
He proved, long, long ago, that he is a virtuoso blessed with extraordinary brains and heart as well as a strong arm and nimble fingers.
"George was reminiscent of his great hero, Bishop Berkeley, in that he combined an extraordinary brain with an extraordinary heart, " Muldoon said.
The city's future is in the extraordinary brain power gathered in offices, theaters, studios, banks, libraries, universities, digital start-up companies and long-established businesses.
Undoubtedly he had the painter's most recent works in mind when he wrote that Tintoretto was "the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has produced".
"They are intellectually intact people, with good computer skills but extraordinary brain-based naïveté, acting in social isolation, compulsively pursuing interests which often unknowingly take them into forbidden territory," the lawyer Mark J. Mahoney writes in a recent paper.
Intellectuals of the era, while in awe of Tintoretto's gifts, scolded him for being too fast, careless, and insolent; when Vasari credited him with "the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced," it wasn't meant as unalloyed praise.
His contemporary Giorgio Vasari described him as the "most extraordinary brain that painting has ever produced". Considered to be one of the three great painters of 16th-century Venice, along with Titian and Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto is admired for his dramatic treatments of sacred and secular narrative subjects and his insightful portraits of the Venetian aristocracy.
For, as the 19th-century man of letters Paul Leicester Ford indicates in his preface to the almanac, while it is true that most of the thoughts originated with Franklin's predecessors, the reason they are remembered today is because they were filtered through his extraordinary brain and "tinged with... Mother Wit".
Tired people not only fail to come up with innovative solutions to complex problems – to use this extraordinary brain – but their ability to function generally, sense of humour, social interactions fall apart really quickly". And that, he says, is just relatively short-term sleep loss.
