In the Academy Award-winning film A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe’s John Nash offers us a simple phrase that seems curiously resonant in today’s world. In the film, Nash explains that he manages his hallucinations with a “diet of the mind” and chooses not to “indulge” the false ideas that often dominate his mind. It’s memorable, but it never came from Nash himself. Actually, the line was written for the film, which was based on Sylvia Nasar’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated biography of Nash that shared the same title.

Nasar’s book tells a different story from the way Ron Howard’s direction brings it to the screen. Nash, the Nobel Prize–winning mathematician, described his recovery in a rather sober language of discipline. He learned to intellectually reject his delusional pathways. The impulses remained, but he “starved” them of

© Psychology Today