Ignorance Is Bliss (House)

"Ignorance Is Bliss" is the ninth episode of the sixth season of House. It aired on November 23, 2009.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, House and the team take on the case of James Sidas (Esteban Powell), an exceptionally brilliant physicist (IQ 178), in fact the youngest person to ever graduate MIT, who traded his successful career for a job as a courier to be with his intellectually inferior wife (IQ 87). For the ailing patient, intelligence is a miserable burden that alienates him from others. The team eventually suspects he suffers from TTP, but the splenectomy they perform does not improve his situation, ruling that condition out. However, it is later revealed that a depression as a teenager due to his loneliness as a child prodigy led him to attempt suicide, and House realizes that the ribs he broke back then made his spleen split into several parts, which is why the procedure had no effect – it was TTP all along. The remaining symptoms are explained after the discovery of his addiction to DXM (mixed with alcohol to prevent brain damage), which he used to reduce his intellect. As Sidas regains his status of intellectual genius by not abusing the addictive medicine, he begins work in applied physics, drawing a schematic for a toroidal helicon plasma device, and is reassured that he cannot relate to his wife with his original intellect. House, relating to his situation, essentially helps "lobotomize Einstein" by giving him back his meds, as the patient wishes to be dumb and happy rather than smart and miserable.