Commitments : A Different Drummer : Eccentrics are not necessarily crazy. In fact, a new book argues that they’re actually happier and healthier than the rest of us.

Ann Atkin keeps 7,500 gnome figurines in her garden, and knits tiny caps for her entourage.

* Marvin Staples walks everywhere backward, proclaiming that life in reverse is more spiritual--and easier on his aching back and arthritic knees.

* John Ward invents such things as an electric spoon, a brassiere warmer and a catamaran made of welded-together bathtubs.

* Californians Bill and Charlotte Steed run Croaker College in Emeryville, “the only institution of higher learning for frogs.” To prepare for jumping contests, the amphibians undergo hypnosis and psychoanalysis “to free them of their anxieties,” listen to Norman Vincent Peale motivational tapes and pump themselves up in a froggy gym. “We are trying to raise the self-image of frogs,” says Steed. “Green is beautiful.”

Time was when such batty folk would have been roundly dismissed as half-cracked, one maraca short of a band or pedaling next to their bicycle. But a new book argues that eccentrics like these are actually happier and healthier than the rest of us normal, stodgy puds. The wildly weird are not necessarily mentally ill or chasing after chimera, writes David Weeks, a neuropsychologist at Scotland’s Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

“Eccentrics experience much lower levels of stress because they do not feel the need to conform and lower stress levels mean that their immune-response systems can function more efficiently,” he writes in “Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness,” (Villard Books, 1995), co-authored with writer Jamie James.

What’s more, Weeks argues, eccentrics are beneficial to the evolution of the human species. The earliest eccentric may have been that nutty Neanderthal fiercely rubbing two sticks together.

“Eccentrics are essential for the health of the social organism, for they provide the variety of ideas and behavior that permits the group to adapt successfully to changing conditions,” writes Weeks. “All intellectual evolution depends on new ideas: They are the essence of science, of exciting new art, indeed of all intellectual progress.”

Weeks, 51, spent 10 years interviewing 1,000 British and American individuals who fit a new rubric: eccentric personality type . (Only one proved seriously psychotic.)

“Eccentrics were to psychology what black holes once were to astronomy,” said Weeks during an interview in Los Angeles, adding that we all can find our inner eccentric if we just let go and get weird.

“I was trying to think of an operational definition of eccentric. These people describe themselves, especially English aristocrats, as individualists. The behavior is intrinsically rewarding and it’s driven by curiosity . . . most motivation is based on instincts and emotion.”

Eccentrics happily revel in their strange proclivities--unlike schizophrenics, who hallucinate and are delusional, and sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, who are racked at turns by anxiety and depression, says Weeks.

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“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” Thoreau wrote in “Walden.” “Let him step to the music he hears.”

Weeks says some hear that drummer as young as 8, the age at which numerous study subjects say they knew they were a breed apart. Studies show that curiosity plateaus for roughly 70% of adolescents, but, for youthful eccentrics, adolescence is where they take the unconventional path over more normal pursuit.

“Inflexible, sometimes eccentrics choose paths intellectually or otherwise even when they are told that it will be a dead end, but they remain true to their personality type,” Weeks says.

Generally, Weeks found that eccentrics are usually the oldest or only child (70% of study), are middle class and are above average intelligence (a mean IQ of 120). Many opt to live alone (several in caves, one in a shoreline cave where high tide makes it a tad uncomfortable) and they tend to be healthier than their conformist peers. The eccentrics in Weeks’ sample visit doctors eight times less than non-eccentrics, wield a “mischievous” sense of humor and tend to be lousy spellers.

Not surprisingly, eccentrics can be difficult. Single-minded, tirelessly optimistic and opinionated, Weeks’ eccentrics had a 5% higher divorce rate than the general population (the high-tide dwelling caveman is on his fourth wife) and report experiencing dissension with bosses and colleagues because of their lack of conformity.

“Their social intelligence is not as acute,” says Weeks. “They have rough edges, blurt things out and are low on tact and diplomacy.”

Roughly one in 10,000 people is an eccentric, according to Weeks’ research. While eccentricity shows up in men early in life, a common pattern is that “a female eccentric holds back until her children grow up, then she may get rid of her husband and there is a blossoming of her eccentricity and creativity.”

Among famous eccentrics, Weeks cites Benjamin Franklin, who regularly took “air baths” by sitting naked in front of an open window and breathing deeply. Lord Monboddo (James Burnett), the Scottish scientist who was the first to suggest man descended from apes, also was a nudist, as was Charles Richter, inventor of the earthquake scale.

Alexander Graham Bell covered the windows in his house to keep out the “pernicious rays of the full moon” and tried to teach his dog to talk.

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Albert Einstein--who sometimes forgot where he lived and was known to struggle with making bus change--visualized a train moving down a track and a man walking at different speeds, mental images that ultimately spawned the theory of relativity.

Many eccentrics share this propensity for “visual thinking,” says Weeks, something that might be fostered by eccentrics’ bountiful dream life, rich with extremely vivid images and original ideas.

“Some of the eccentrics have devised dietary things, like eating very ripe Camembert cheese, wheat germ or mushrooms, part of the theory that substances in these foods produce more vivid dreams.” (This is what motivated Salvador Dali to eat that ripe Camembert cheese).

But not every eccentric makes humanity-furthering breakthroughs. There is the man who eats only potatoes and chocolate, a woman who has never thrown anything away because she deems it immoral (she keeps the rubbish in an opera house), an astrophysicist who is attempting to prove the existence of leprechauns in space using satellite surveillance and an international group of spiritualists who communicate via e-mail with dead scientists living in the afterlife’s parallel world.

The group reports that Einstein and Marie Curie have promised to help perfect the communication system but that Alexander Graham Bell has refused. “Mr. Bell could have been of great help in improving our telephone connections,” scientist Swejen Salter allegedly messaged from the afterlife, where she has been since she died in 1987.

Weeks superficially explores the possibility that some living person sent that message in Salter’s name, but concludes this way: “Even if they are inventing the whole thing, is their myth-making essentially different from that of Plato in his writings about Atlantis?”

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Post-Gold Rush California was the Golden Age of Eccentricity, documented by Weeks with the lives of characters zanier than any conjured by Hollywood or literature:

* Joshua A. Norton, self-proclaimed emperor of California, in 1859 suspended the Constitution, dissolved the Republican and Democratic parties on the grounds that they created dissension. Norton also printed his own money, which was accepted by many merchants of the day.

* Oofty Goofty, the Wild Man of Borneo, swathed himself in furs and emitted animal yelps and yowls. He supported himself by taking kicks from passersby for 10 cents, a caning for a quarter and a wallop from a baseball bat for a half dollar. (He’d be a rich man in L.A.).

* The King of Pain, a patent medicine salesman, decked himself out in scarlet underwear, a stovepipe hat and a velour robe.

By some accounts, Weeks’ decade-long fascination with oddballs can be explained this way: It takes one to know one.

“Unlike virtually every psychologist I have ever met, [Weeks] is possessed by a childlike enthusiasm, is single-mindedly obsessed by his chosen topic, and seems impervious to the highly developed academic ambition which burns within that citadel of Edinburgh psychology,” wrote Anthony Clare, a psychiatry professor at Trinity College in Dublin, who reviewed the book for the Sunday Times of London. “By his own criteria, [he] is a genuine eccentric.”

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Are You Eccentric?

If you have at least 10 of these 15 qualities, in descending order of importance, you are an eccentric. According to neuropsychologist David Weeks, that could mean you are healthier and will live longer than your normal pals--if, that is, you have any.

* Nonconforming

* Creative

* Strongly motivated by curiosity

* Idealistic (wanting to make the world a better place and the people in it happier)

* Happily obsessed with one or as many as six hobbyhorses

* Aware from early childhood of being different

* Intelligent, opinionated and outspoken

* Convinced that you are right and the rest of the world is wrong.

* Non-competitive (not in need of reassurance or reinforcement from society)

* Unusual in eating habits or living arrangements

* Not particularly interested in the opinions or company of other people except to convert them to your point of view

* Possessing a mischievous sense of humor

* Single

* Eldest or only child

* A bad speller