What does it take to be a visionary?

Here's a question I can't quite figure out the answer to. Think of the people we consider visionary today. They come from technology (Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg), film (James Cameron, George Lucas Steven Spielberg), science (Einstein, Edison or Dawkins) or politics, either on the official end like FDR or the action end like Martin Luther King).

And what's the one thing the people we think of as visionary and who've changed the world in some tangible way have in common?

They're all rich. Einstein as worth $12m when he died in 1955. Martin Luther King was from a wealthy family because of his influential father. You can't make any kind of splash in the technology world today without a mystique born out of billion dollar venture capital and expensive start-up funds. The smallest possible cut of some of the most successful movies would still put any film director or producer among the 1 percent.

Is that a prerequisite to being a visionary? We all have ideas, some of us huge ones, and many of them would undoubtedly change the world if they were bought to fruition. But it's a big world, and that means that on an industrial/practical level there's a high cost barrier to entry in executing world-beating ideas.

Almost everyone you care to mention who's done something that's changed the world has done so with the backing of an extensive infrastructure. Steve Jobs might have dreamed up the Mac or the iPod (he actually did neither), but without a company the size of Apple behind him to develop, manufacture and distribute it, he would have stayed a scruffy hippy with a passion for computers.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are transforming more industries than we can count and will be long remembered as visionaries, but would they be making the advances they are in AI or self-driving cars without that kind of money behind them?

There are actually two really good reasons supporting the idea that all it really takes to be a visionary is that you be loaded.

First, Steve Jobs didn't invent the iPod in isolation. Nor did James Cameron paint every set or stitch every costume of Titanic or program the motion capture software of Avatar. Nobody we consider visionary can claim full ownership, command or even stewardship over the aspects of a product or change the word 'visionary' bestows upon them.

Society thrusts that upon them because we need a figurehead, a human face to put on industrial success. Bill Gates or Peter Jackson are easier to latch onto rather than tens of thousands of software engineers who created Windows or Weta Digital or the negotiating lawyers who ushered all those companies and products to users.

The second reason, closely related to the first, is that if you put any other educated, socially aware person in the place of those we think of as visionary, they might do just as good a job at changing the world. It might be easier than it looks with all that structural backing to do the kind of R&D, product marketing or distribution to create (or just approve) something that changes the world.

Most people who've ever done a day's work already realise the way to extract the best possible performance from any kind of commercial development apparatus is to populate it with the smartest and best people you can find.

Steve Jobs didn't walk around the design teams at Apple loudly telling them to come up with a new kind of digital music player or phone (as far as we know), he just saw the potential when it bubbled up from the dank labs that can be found in any huge company. At Google it's the famous 20 percent of employees' time rule where they get to make up and work on their own projects.

Of course, any of us might fail spectacularly because we back the wrong project – Jobs did so with Lisa and NeXt, and no less than Stephen Hawking threw all his research out at one point and set about disproving it because he realised it was wrong.

We simply underestimate the extent to which the people we idolise for being so brilliant are in the right place at the right time. Nobody has superpowers and most of them are no smarter, more forward thinking or more talented than you or I.

Give any bozo on the street $150m and expect him to make a hit movie? Undoubtedly not, but those who do aren't blessed with any potential you weren't born with too.

On why the orgasm is the emblematic state of the human condition

The human being is a very unique combination of hardware and software, enmeshed to work in tandem at the minutest level (probably cellular), and I don't think anything illustrates that as perfectly as the orgasm.

To begin with, it's an unmistakably physical process. The friction of skin and muscles eventually causes the spontaneous and rhythmic contraction of muscles around and throughout the pelvis in both sexes and pumps sperm from the testicles in men.

But there's one problem concerning the physical description of orgasm that's never been explained. In talking about orgasm physiology we tend to talk about the high number of nerve endings packed into the head of the penis and the clitoris, and saying we get pleasure from sex because of the number of nerve endings is like saying you get wet while you're drowning – it doesn't even begin to cover the extra dimension of extreme physicality that's more than just heavy sensory input.

If that was the case we might feel heady sexual satisfaction or pleasure from having our lips or fingertips stroked, both areas that are as much or more sensitive than the genitals thanks to the number of nerve endings in them.

The end result of sex (assuming we're both doing it right) is the burst of explosive pleasure we feel, not just a keen sense of touch. Where does that come from?

Obviously the flood of sexual pleasure we get from lovemaking is physical as well, somehow, and it's got a lot to do with pressure on certain muscles – you didn't know what it meant when you were little, but swing hard on a swing set today and you'll feel the unmistakable pleasure of G forces pressing on something in your groin and crotch.

It's also where the software comes in. Think of the emotional response to orgasm. Release – although the word doesn't even begin to cover how powerful and cleansing it is. You can't keep worries in your mind when you orgasm.

Togetherness – the resulting hormones flood your body and brain and prompt responses from wanting to be physically close to the person you just had sex with to believing you're falling in love.

Joy – is there anything else that makes most of us (again, assuming we're doing it right) as happy as adults as sex and orgasm?

And the release, togetherness and joy are heavy and palpable, physical sensations themselves as much as emotional responses. Orgasm prompts a wave of feeling in both senses of the word that floods the physical brain and body and the sentient mind.

The physical sensation of the pleasure is so complete, so deep seated, so seemingly stitched to our body at a micro-level it has the power to overcome almost any prior mental state of being and completely overwrite or re-program it at a stroke (no pun intended), the hardware rewriting its own software and generating a completely new expression of it. It's as if Windows or OSX knows we're having trouble because we have too many documents and windows open and spontaneously reboots itself to clear the cache.