Having had a lot of experience with a mentally ill family member, a lot of the time their actions “don’t add up”. Their logic defies any rational explanation.
Just because they are mentally ill, doesn’t mean they can’t be smart. They can be extremely cunning and capable.
For one well known example, look at Albert Einstein, a strange man, forgetting to dress in the morning and sh owing up in pajamas with no shoes. Nikolai Tesla. John Nash. The famous artists who had bouts of mental illness are too numerous to attempt mentioning.
Combine creativity and intellectual pursuits, as in the instance of a burgeoning and relatively new field such as neuroscience, and I'd suspect eccentricity at a minimum was more the norm than normal behavior. Crazy wouldn't preclude success and employment so long as he continued to produce and didn't kill anybody.