GENIUS is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavour that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for the future, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabilities of competitors. Genius is associated with intellectual ability and creative productivity. The term genius can also be used to refer to people characterized by genius, and/or to polymaths who excel across many subjects.
Walter Isaacson, biographer of many well-known geniuses, explains that although high intelligence may be a prerequisite, the most common trait that defines a genius may be the extraordinary ability to apply creativity and imaginative thinking to almost any situation. Talent is a prerequisite.
The current view of psychologists and other scholars of genius is that a minimum level of IQ (approximately 125) is necessary for genius. Alone, IQ is not sufficient, and must be combined with personality characteristics such as drive and persistence, plus the necessary opportunities for talent development. A multiplicative model of genius consists of high ability, high productivity, and high creativity.
Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person. Originality is essential. This genius is a talent for producing ideas which can be described as non-imitative.
A genius is someone in whom intellect predominates over “will” much more than within the average person. This allows the genius to create artistic or academic works that are objects of pure, disinterested contemplation, the chief criterion of the aesthetic experience. Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see – “an original power of thinking”.
ASPERGER’S and GENIUS
The Asperger’s brain is uniquely suited to develop genius. One could even go so far as to accept the corollary – genius is only possible in an Asperger’s brain. Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — all were/are geniuses and all have Asperger’s syndrome. Society is starting to understand the significant positive impact great Asperger’s ancestors have left behind toward an enlightened and improved society and world.
A distinctive cluster of aptitudes, skills, attitudes, and abilities is part of autistic intelligence. They can see things and events around them from a new point of view. This ability can lead to exceptional achievements which others may never attain. They have specialist knowledge in a particular area, good visual and spatial memory, are methodical and organized, can understand abstract concepts, and have problem-solving/logical reasoning.
Some people with Asperger’s are visual thinkers, and others are math/pattern/number, or music thinkers, but all think in specifics. The Asperger’s mind wants to figure out how things work and enjoys and focuses on details, while the normal mind is more skilled at assembling whole concepts from details. The absence of a functioning anterior cingulate gyrus locks the autistic brain in focus.
People with autism and other cognitive differences make contributions to society that so-called normal people are incapable of making. Rather than being considered a normal child trapped within an “autistic shell,” waiting to be rescued, Asperger’s is “a way of being” that colours every experience, sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter, every aspect of existence.
But in the social terrain, streamlined concentration became awkward and unwieldy.
1. Hyperfocus. Hyperfocus is the perpetual and unrelenting state of intense single-minded concentration fixated on one thought pattern at a time, to the exclusion of everything else, including one’s feelings. Hyperfocus is the underlying factor responsible for the autistic person’s withdrawal into an inner world that is entirely mental.
Hyperfocus keeps a person’s awareness trapped in the intellectual/analytical left frontal lobe with little ability to access whatever may be happening in the right frontal lobe, where emotions and social connectivity are felt. Autistic hyperfocus explains most traits of Asperger syndrome.
2. Abstraction ability is a prerequisite for scientific endeavours. The autistic mind is like a vehicle streamlined for rapid passage through the fluid of thought, capable of maneuvering with little outside friction. They turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, to rethink a subject with originality.
3. Use of logic and common sense. Thought processes are confined to a pedantic, literal, and logical chain of reasoning. Temple Grandin said, “I like the really logical way that I think. I’m totally logical. In fact, it kind of blows my mind how irrational human beings are,” She said. “If you totally get rid of autism, you’d have nobody to fix your computer in the future.”
4. Quantifiable data, highly organized systems, and complex machines fascinate many autistic people. It runs like a half-hidden thread through autism.
5. Intense curiosity. Autistics are irrepressibly curious observers of society from the outside, an “anthropologist on Mars,” as Temple Grandin put it.
6. Accept nothing on faith. Asperger’s people are innovators in their field of interest precisely because they were constitutionally unable to take things on faith.
Types of Thinking Peculiar to the Autistic Brain
a. Math/Pattern recognition. The Asperger’s brain tries to make sense of its surroundings, so a break in the pattern may show itself quite clearly. Pattern problems like math and art may be very enriching.
b. Photorealistic thinking. In her book, The Autistic Brain, Temple Grandin presents three types of specialized thinking. They are the photorealistic visual thinkers who think the way she does, math/pattern thinkers, and word thinkers. For autistic and photo-realistic visual thinkers, such as Grandin, understanding comes from being able to see and work through a concept in images, creating what is, in effect, a virtual reality program that plays out in the brain. In this manner, Grandin, who didn’t speak until she was almost four, conceptualized down to minute details her design for a humane livestock restraint system now used on nearly half of the cattle in the U.S.
“When I said that early stuff, I didn’t realize how different my thinking was. I was doing a lot of construction projects in the early 90s. Before I attempt any construction, I draw something and test-run the equipment in my imagination. I could draw the layout for a meat-cutting line and could make the conveyors move. I visualize my designs being used in every possible situation, with different sizes and breeds of cattle and in different weather conditions. Doing this enables me to correct mistakes before construction”.
”Visual thinking is an asset for an equipment designer. I am able to ‘see’ how all the parts of a project fit together and see potential problems”. She began to think of herself as having a powerful digital workstation in her head, capable of running instantaneous searches through a massive library of stored images and generating 3-D videos from the sketches on her drafting table.
Likewise, Nikola Tesla, possibly the greatest inventor of all time, was a photorealistic visual thinker. He embarked on his career as an inventor when he discovered that he could visualize theoretical machines in minute detail and even set them running in his mind, tweaking his design as parts wore out. “I needed no models, drawings, or experiments,” Tesla recalled in his memoir. “I could picture them all as real . . . It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance.”
I do not doubt that Elon Musk also has this ability.
c. Music. Musicians and composers thought to be autistic include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Glenn Gould, Courtney Love, Susan Boyle, Michael Jackson, Ladyhawke, Adam Young, Bela Bartok, John Denver, Bob Dylan, and James Taylor.
d. Word/Imagination Thinkers. Some autistic people use imagination and a fantasy life to create another world in which they are more successful. Searching for an alternative world can lead some children to develop an interest in another country, culture, period of history, or the world of animals.
Sometimes, the degree of imaginative thought can lead to an interest in fiction, both as a reader and author. Some children, especially girls, with AS can develop the ability to use imaginary friends, characters, and worlds to write some remarkable fiction. This could lead to success as an author of fiction for children or adults. For example, both Hans Christian Anderson and Lewis Carrol had Asperger’s syndrome.
The escape into imagination can be a psychologically constructive adaptation.
THE WORLD WITHOUT ASPERGER’S PEOPLE
The world needs Asperger’s people. After all, the social people who sat around the campfire talking were probably not the makers of the first stone spear. It is also likely that most social people did not create the great culture of our civilization, such as literature, art, engineering, music, science, and mathematics.
If the genes that caused autism were eliminated, there might be a terrible price to pay. Efforts to eradicate autism from the gene pool could put humankind’s future at risk by purging the same qualities that had advanced culture, science, and technological innovation for millennia. People with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly geniuses. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.
Most cases of autism are not rooted in rare de novo mutations but in very old genes that are shared widely in the general population while being concentrated more in certain families than others. Whatever autism is, it is not a unique product of modern civilization. It is a strange gift from our deep past, passed down through millions of years of evolution.
This is a list of famous people known or strongly suspected of having Asperger’s syndrome. It reads like a “who’s who” of anyone who has made a significant contribution to science or the arts. Where would society be if none of these people lived?
Mathematicians, Physicists, Chemists, Biologists: Sir Isaac Newton, Henry Cavendish, Charles Darwin, Nikola Tesla, Marie-Curie, Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Barbara McClintock. Alan Turing, Carl Sagan.
Inventors and Businessmen: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Temple Grandin, Steve Jobs. Bill Gates, Elon Musk.
Authors: Emily Dickinson, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Isaac Asimov.
Children’s authors: Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll.
Artists: Michelangelo, Andy Warhol, Vincent Van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky
Actors, and Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Hopkins, Dan Akroyd, Jerry Seinfeld, Daryl Hannah, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Michael Palin, Robin Williams.
Musicians, Composers. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ludwig Van Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Glenn Gould, Courtney Love, Susan Boyle, Michael Jackson, Ladyhawke, Adam Young, Bela Bartok, John Denver, Bob Dylan, James Taylor.
Others: Bobby Fischer, Greta Thurnberg.
Christopher Langan
The television quiz show, 1 vs 100, features a permanent gallery of 100 ordinary people who serve as what is called the “mob”. Each week, they match wits with a special guest with a million dollars at stake. In the fifth episode of the 2008 season, Chris Langan was the special guest. Few were as superbly qualified to answer more questions correctly. With an average IQ of 100, Einstein was 150, and Chris was 195. Over the past decade, Chris had achieved a strange kind of fame. He had become the public face of genius in American life, a celebrity outlier. He gets invited on news shows and profiled in magazines, and he has been the subject of a documentary, all because of a brain that appears to defy description.
The television show 20/20 gave Chris an IQ test – his IQ was off the charts and too high to be accurately measured. He took an IQ test specially designed for people too smart for ordinary IQ tests. He got all the questions right except one.
He was speaking at 6 months. At three, he taught himself to read comics and at five, he questioned his grandfather about the existence of god (he remembers being disappointed with the answer he got). In school, he could walk into a test in a foreign language, skim the textbook for 3 minutes and ace the test. In his early teenage years, he read widely in theoretical physics. He got a perfect score on his SAT. At 15, he could match Jimi Hendrix on a guitar. Half the time, he didn’t attend school at all but just showed up for tests.
Back on the set of 1 vs. 100, he answered every question without a pause as if a triviality and abruptly stopped at $250,000, exiting at the top as, we like to think, geniuses invariably do.
Chris Langan’s mother had 4 sons, each with a different father. Chris was the eldest. They were incredibly poor and very dysfunctional. He won a scholarship to a college but lost it as his mother failed to fill out a parent’s financial statement for its renewal. When he returned to university, he couldn’t arrange an afternoon class that he could get to and dropped out. He floundered and worked as a bouncer in a bar most of his life. He had no concept of the culture and particulars of the institutions.
Every experience he had had ended in frustration. He knew he needed to do a better job at navigating the world, but didn’t know how. Chris Langan never had help along the way. It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one–not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses–ever makes it alone.
Lewis Terman
A young professor of psychology at Stanford, his specialty was intelligence testing. He created the Stanford-Binet, the standard IQ test taken by millions around the world. He found that Henry Cowell, who had been raised in poverty and chaos, didn’t get along with other children and had been unschooled since seven. He worked as a janitor at a one-room school near Stanford. Throughout the day, he would sneak away from his job and play the school piano. Terman tested Henry Cowell – his IQ ended up being above 140, and Terman began to look for others like Henry.
He found a girl who knew the alphabet at 19 months, and another reading Dickens and Shakespeare at 4. A young man had been kicked out of law school for reciting long passages of legal opinion from memory.
Terman Longitudinal Study. In 1921, Terman sent a team of fieldworkers out into California’s elementary schools. Teachers were asked to name the brightest children in their classes. They were given an intelligence test. The ones who scored in the top 10% were given a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 were given a third IQ test. And from that, Terman selected the best and the brightest. Of 250,000 elementary students, 1,470 had an IQ above 140, with a range of 200. The group became the “Termites” and was the subject of one of the most famous psychological studies in history.
For the rest of his life, Terman tracked, measured, tested and analyzed educational level, marriages, illnesses, and psychological health. He wrote letters of recommendation and doled out a stream of advice and counsel. All was recorded in thick red volumes entitled Genetic Studies of Genius. As they grew older, updates and achievements were chronicled.
Today, many of Terman’s ideas remain central to the way we think about success. Schools have programmes for the “gifted”. Elite universities require intelligence tests, and high-tech companies measure cognitive abilities. They are all convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential. We feel awe. Geniuses are the ultimate outliers.
Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity. The genius should be the purest and most distilled outlier. But you need to understand what a real outlier is.
Raven’s Progressive Matrices is one of the most widely used intelligence tests. It requires no language skills or a specific body of acquired language. It’s a measure of abstract reasoning skills. A typical Raven’s test consists of 48 items, each one harder. The ones at the end are really hard. People like Chris Langen are brilliant because they have a mind that can figure out puzzles like this.
How does a person’s performance on an IQ test like the Raven’s translate into real-life success? An IQ below 70 is considered mentally disabled, just above 100 is necessary to handle college, and 115 is required for a competitive graduate program. The higher your score, the more education you’ll get, the more money you’ll make and the longer you’ll live.
However, the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once 120 is reached, having additional IQ points doesn’t translate into any measurable real-world advantage. IQ thresholds are less important for success than are personality and character. A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel prize as one whose IQ is 180.
IQ is a lot like height in basketball. You need to be at least six feet one to play professional basketball. And being taller is better, but only up to a certain point. Being 6’8” is a little better than someone who is 6’6” (Michael Jordan’s height). A basketball player only has to be tall enough, and the same is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a threshold. Both Einstein’s 150 and Chris Langan’s 195 are smart enough, not 30% smarter.
The idea that intelligence has a threshold goes against intuition. The same goes for the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. There was not a preponderance of Ivy League schools, one only had to go to a school that was good enough. Harvard’s students may score an average of 10-15 points higher on their entrance exams, but that doesn’t help in the end. Elite schools should give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above a threshold. How well a graduate does in the real world shows that minority students are just as successful as white students – the quality is high, as they are all above the threshold – they are smart enough.
IQ tests are convergence tests (they ask you to sort through a list of possibilities and converge on the right answer). But divergence tests require you to use imagination and take your mind in several directions. There is no single right answer. They measure the number and uniqueness of your responses and reflect creativity. Being successful is about a lot more than IQ; the intellectual scale means little. It involves a type of fertile mind.
Termites in adulthood. Some had published books and ran for public office, but few were nationally known figures, and none were Nobel Prize winners. They tended to earn good incomes, but not that good. The majority had careers considered ordinary, and a surprising number were failures. Two students who went on to be Nobel Laureates were missed – their IQs were not high enough.
It was shown that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children and dispensed with IQs completely, he would have ended up with a group almost as impressive as the carefully selected group of geniuses. S
The word genius vanished. Intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.
Eventually, the records of 730 Termites were examined. The top 150 (20%) were the true success stories – lawyers, doctors, engineers and academics. 90% graduated from college, and there were 98 graduate degrees. The middle 60% were doing satisfactorily. The bottom 150 had done the least with their superior mental ability. They were the postal workers, bookkeepers or men lying on their couches at home without any job at all. 1/3 were college dropouts; 25% only had a high school diploma. And all 150 in this group had been dubbed a genius at some point in their life. Only 8 had graduate degrees.
In the end, only one thing mattered: family background. The As overwhelmingly came from the middle and upper classes. Their homes were filled with books. Half the fathers had a college degree. The Cs were from the other side of the tracks: a third had a parent who had dropped out of school before the 8th grade.
Robert Oppenheimer
Considered a genius as a child, he went to Harvard and Cambridge for a doctorate in physics. He struggled with depression. His interest was theoretical physics, but he was enrolled in experimental physics. He tried to poison his tutor but was only put on probation. His treatment could not have been more different than Langan’s.
He used charm to finally get to head the Manhattan Project. He possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world. He had practical intelligence – what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect. It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical, that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. It’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. Having general intelligence doesn’t imply the presence of practical intelligence or vice versa. Robert Oppenheimer had lots of both.
Analytical intelligence comes in part from your genes. Chris Langan started talking at 6 months and taught himself to read at 3. He was born smart; IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability.
But social savvy is knowledge – it’s a set of skills that have to be learned – the attitudes and skills learned from our families. When many families are examined, there are only two parenting philosophies, and they are divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time.
This intensive scheduling is almost absent from the lives of poor children. Play wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other neighbourhood kids. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential.
A girl’s interest in singing isn’t viewed as a signal to help her develop an interest into a formal talent. She frames her child’s skills as character traits – singing is what makes her “Katie”. She sees the shows her daughter puts on as cute and as a way for Katie to “get attention”.
Poor parents are intimidated, react passively and stay in the background. The strategy is “accomplishment of natural growth”.
Middle-class parents talk things through, reasoning with them. The children are expected to talk back, negotiate and question authority. Parents challenged the teachers and intervened on their behalf. The parenting style is called concerted cultivation – fostering and assessing a child’s talents, opinions and skills. They develop a sense of entitlement, taught as an attitude suited to succeeding in the modern world.
1. Excerpted from “Outliers – the Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell. “The Trouble with Genius Part 1 and 2”. Little, Brown & Company. New York.
THE CURSE OF GENIUS
We see exceptional intelligence as a blessing. So why are so many brilliant children miserable misfits?
This article is a book review of “The Curse of Genius” by Maggie Ferguson and was published in the April 29, 2019, edition of The Economist.
It is interesting that the word autistic or Asperger’s is not mentioned once as a cause of the “curse” when it is the only plausible cause. Both the genius and social dysfunction that are described in this book are part and parcel of the same thing – autism. The hyperfocus that is the core of the genius is not possible in the neurotypical brain.
Walter Isaacson in his biographies of both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk never mentions the word autism or Asperger’s as any explanation for their genius. He never gets his head around the idea that people who are so brilliant can be such social misfits.
Tom remembers the day he decided he wanted to be a theoretical astrophysicist. He was deep into research about black holes and had amassed a box of papers on his theories. In one, he speculated about the relationship between black holes and white holes, hypothetical celestial objects that emit colossal amounts of energy. Black holes, he thought, must be linked across space-time with white holes. “I put them together and I thought, oh wow, that works! That’s when I knew I wanted to do this as a job.” Tom didn’t know enough maths to prove his theory, but he had time to learn. He was only five.
Tom is now 11. At home, his favourite way to relax is to devise maths exam papers complete with marking sheets. Last year for Christmas, he asked his parents for the £125 registration fee to sit maths GCSE, an exam most children in Britain take at 16. He is currently working towards his maths A-level. Tom is an only child, and at first, Chrissie, his mother, thought his love of numbers was normal. Gradually, she realized it wasn’t. She would take him to lectures about dark matter at the Royal Observatory in London and notice that there were no other children there. His teacher reported that instead of playing outside with other kids at breaks, he wanted to stay indoors and do sums.
One day, his parents took him to Milton Keynes to have his intelligence assessed by an organization called Potential Plus, formerly the National Association for Gifted Children. “We told him it was a day of puzzles,” Chrissie says. “It was my dream world,” Tom says. “Half a day of tests!” His mother waited while he applied his mind to solving problems. When they were shown the results, Tom’s intelligence put him in the top 0.1% in Britain.
Precocious children are often dismissed as the product of pushy, middle-class parents. Nurture and environment do play an important role in any child’s intellectual development. Talk to your child about politics over the dinner table, and he is likely to develop confident opinions about the way the world should be run. Suggest that your toddler think of slices of cake in terms of angles, and she may well display an early aptitude for mathematics. Practice can make perfect. The child with a gift for playing the piano who practises five hours a day is more likely to end up performing at Carnegie Hall than the equally gifted one who plays for just 20 minutes a week.
But children like Tom are different. He was brought up in an underprivileged part of South London: 97% of pupils at his first school didn’t speak English as a first language. When it comes to numbers – or his other passions, such as Latin and astrophysics – Tom’s parents have little idea what he’s talking about. His genius is not in their engineering.
Intelligence tests are marked “on a curve”, meaning that the results are transformed into a bell curve: what matters is how you do compared to others who take them. By definition, most scores bunch in the middle: the average result in a cohort becomes an intelligence quotient (IQ) of 100; the middle two-thirds of scores become IQs of 85 to 115. The outliers are few. About two people in 100 have IQs below 70, and another two have IQs above 130. By the time you get 45 points away from the average of 100 in either direction, you’re down to about one person in 1,000. But since only a small percentage of any population takes IQ tests, identifying very exceptional children is hard. Most schools have none.
Society prizes intelligence. Geniuses are viewed with awe and assumed to be guaranteed prosperity and success. Yet there is a dark side to intelligence. Like many gifted children, Tom’s childhood has often been unhappy. Aged five, he talked about wanting to end his life: he said he planned to do this by banging his head repeatedly against a wall. “Life’s like a maze, only bigger,” Tom told his mum. “I feel I’m getting lost.” His GP said he was suffering from severe depression, and reckoned its roots lay in Tom’s “genius”, and the frustration and isolation this was causing him.
Tom finds it hard to relate to other children and has few friends. At school, he has been shunted out on his own into corridors and offices. “They didn’t want him in the class because he’s doing different stuff,” Chrissie says. To distract his mind from “dark thoughts”, Tom turns to puzzles and calculations, often late at night. He has long suffered from insomnia. The strain affects the whole family: “I don’t understand parents who seek this,” says Chrissie. “I can’t cope with it. I just want to take it away.”
Many others echo the pain of Tom and his family. Mensa, an international organization founded in Britain in 1946 to nurture the country’s most intelligent people, has 20,000 members (you must apply to join). When I put out a request via Mensa to hear from gifted children and their parents, my inbox fills with emails, many of them anguished. Those that I speak to say that, for fear of inspiring jealousy, they don’t dare talk to others about their children’s abilities. Given a sympathetic ear, they pour out their woes at such length that I nearly despair of getting them off the phone. Almost all are afraid of being identified and insist on fake names.
Some countries value extremely high intelligence more than others and offer specific educational provisions for such children. Yet even if your genius is prized, admired and cultivated, social and psychological issues that often accompany great ability may make it an unwelcome gift. From the inside – and for many families that I spoke to – genius can feel more like a curse than a blessing.
Most experts reserve the term “gifted” for children who demonstrate three characteristics. First, gifted children begin to master a particular discipline – a language, maths or chess – much younger than most. They do so easily, so they also progress much faster than their peers.
Secondly, this mastery is achieved largely on their own, rather than as a result of parental prodding. A child’s surroundings and socio-economic background certainly affect their speed of development: there is a close correlation between the number of words a child’s parents have spoken to them by the time they’re three and the child’s academic success aged nine. Studies suggest that children born into professional families may have heard some 4 million more words by then than the offspring of parents with lower educational backgrounds. Such families often have higher incomes to provide more educational opportunities, too. But reading Nietzsche to your five-year-old, or forcing them to do three hours of extra homework, cannot “make” a genius.
Many children with extremely high IQs show signs of extraordinary ability even as tiny babies, before pushy parenting can have much impact. From a very early age, pre-language, these children understand what is going on around them, understand what people say, but cannot respond. Most toddlers appear to explore the world as they encounter it, distracted by passing cars or the arrival of a new toy. By contrast, gifted children of that age are “driven”: They never stop and set themselves incredibly high standards. We often associate the early years of childhood with taking joy in simple things, living in the present and an inability to think through the consequences of actions. Instead, watching gifted toddlers is almost as if someone has taken an 18-year-old and put them in a newborn body.
A third characteristic of gifted children is that their interests often seem near-obsessive. They have what is sometimes called “a rage to master”. Jesse is five. When he was one and crawling, he would do anything to avoid having his nappy changed. “We found that the only way we could keep him still was to give him things to take apart and put back together again. We had a yellow torch with a built-in bulb, and he would take the battery out, put it back in, and test whether it worked. If he’d put the battery in the wrong way round, he’d persevere until he got it right.”
The first IQ tests to measure intelligence were developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in the early 20th century. They evaluated short-term memory, analytical thinking and mathematical ability. Though the tests have changed since then, the basic skills they attempt to measure have remained the same. Within a few points either way, IQ is fixed throughout your life: the only way you’ll lose it is because of a brain injury.
So-called “intelligence” tests abound online. Many children take aptitude tests at school. Most of these can be gamed or, at least, children can be trained to excel at them. Mensa does its best to make its tests “culture fair” – in other words, it aims to identify intelligence that is intrinsic rather than taught. The original gifted children invented the wheel and discovered fire, but testing IQ is not like measuring height. No assessment is completely objective.
Most tests look only at particular types of intelligence, such as mathematical and verbal reasoning. That reflects how narrow society’s notions of giftedness are. Many other types of skills and characteristics are missed, such as voracious curiosity or the ability to make intellectual connections. The tests are unlikely to identify future novelists or poets, or children who may be exceptionally good at sports or music. We don’t yet have a way to measure creative, artistic or emotional intelligence. The sorts of children we rate as “geniuses” tend to be only those who fall into the standard categories.
Some people question the very notion of giftedness. The definition of a gifted child has fragmented. Some don’t see aptitude as innate as everywhere you look in the world, the children of wealthy parents are over-represented in cohorts of gifted children. Those who come from minority backgrounds are under-represented: Latinos don’t get selected [for programmes] in the US, Maoris don’t in New Zealand.
What marks out brilliant and high-achieving children – and adults – is often determination. The difference between two equally talented physicists, one who goes on to win a Nobel prize and one who does not, is their will to succeed. Apparent genius is a combination of some kind of potential, along with the right support and personal drive.
Most parents, usually highly educated, take pride in having a “gifted child” to show off. But this view wasn’t borne out by the parents I spoke to, most found their children’s gifts to be a source of anxiety, even distress. Many of these parents face two main difficulties. One is how to cater to the advanced intellectual development of their child. The second is that exceptionally intelligent children are often socially isolated, even disruptive. This may be more problematic. Gifts that are admired in the abstract often seem less welcome in person.
If you were to meet Ophelia Gregory, you’d think that the good fairies must have clustered around her cradle. Now 17, she is willowy and beautiful, with deep-green eyes. Her family – mother Kerry, father Tom and three younger brothers – is close and loving. At the age of 12, Ophelia clocked 162 on Mensa’s IQ test. It is the highest possible score for someone under 18, and on a level with Stephen Hawking, the ground-breaking cosmologist who died last year.
Yet so far, extraordinary intelligence has brought Ophelia little happiness. For her, being categorized as “gifted” is simply “more trouble than it’s worth”. She has been bullied and changed schools several times. To a parent longing for a gifted child, I’d say, ‘It should be a great thing, but it’s not. It never will be.’”
We have long known that some individuals have extraordinarily high intelligence. Only more recently have psychologists started to look at whether and how this affects other areas of these individuals’ lives. Gifted children often experience what psychologists call “asynchronous development”: exceptional abilities in some areas may be associated with, or come at the cost of other aspects of maturity. The parts of the brain that control the learning of words, patterns and numbers develop extremely quickly in these children. But the frontal lobe, which controls the regulation of emotions, doesn’t develop as fast.
A gifted child may have an advanced ability to master something like maths, but a more limited capacity to deal with their social environment. A gifted child might be prone to complete social meltdowns. They can’t understand how other children work, and they can’t control their emotions. Being exceptionally able in some areas means they need “the right support” in others.
In the early 20th century, American psychologist Leta Hollingworth talked about “socially optimal intelligence”, which she associated with an IQ of between 125 and 155. Ratchet the score beyond that, and a “pathology of superiority” can creep in: the dominance of one bit of the brain can affect the development of other parts.
We don’t yet know why this is, or whether it’s down to nature, nurture or both. One study shows that among members of Mensa in America, the rate of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is almost twice that diagnosed in the general population. Others argue that because some gifted children are so different from their peers at school, and may interact little with them in the classroom, they may do so less in the playground too. Though in some ways their aptitudes are very adult, many find themselves unable to play games that we often refer to as “childish”: their social development is more restricted. If an exceptionally able five-year-old spends her free time doing algebra, she often doesn’t want to spend time with a peer who prefers to play with cars. Yet once a child is left out of some social situations, her opportunity to catch up or learn these skills diminishes.
There are several characteristics common to gifted children without identified behavioural disorders. Many are deeply anxious, usually as a result of overthinking everything. Your brain can work out all the variables so it inevitably does. Hilary emailed me about her son, Lorenzo: “I am finding it increasingly difficult to cope with his heightened emotion and anxiety.” Lorenzo, now 12, became a member of Mensa two years ago and so has opportunities to mix with other very bright kids both in person and online. Lorenzo scored 162 in his IQ test (“Same as Einstein,” Hilary tells me. I don’t have the heart to tell her that Einstein never had his IQ measured). He worries incessantly: “Waiting for a flight to Hong Kong recently, he asked so many questions about what might go wrong with the plane that the waiting hall cleared around us.”
The sleeping pattern of such children often differs from the norm: switching off their brains can be very difficult. The mother of one gifted child told me that he didn’t sleep for more than 90 minutes at a stretch until he was nearly five.
The emotional and physical health associations with genius don’t stop there. The American branch of Mensa, which has more than 50,000 members, refers to its affiliates as having “hyper brains”. A recent survey of its members suggested that people with exceptionally high intelligence very often have “over-excitabilities” or “super-sensibilities”, such as a heightened awareness of one of the five senses, experiencing extremely intense emotions or having very high levels of energy. Among these individuals, the incidence of depression, anxiety and ADHD is higher than in the average population.
Giftedness may even be linked with physiological conditions such as food allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases, which sometimes go hand-in-hand with “sensory processing disorder”. For many exceptionally intelligent individuals, everyday stimuli such as a radio playing in the background, the colour or texture of food, a vibrant display on a classroom wall or a scratchy label in a piece of clothing can become almost unbearable. Because his brain function is so acute, Lorenzo’s senses are more than usually finely tuned, believes Hilary. “He can hear things that we can’t. He can find it impossible to do his homework in a room that would seem to most people completely silent.”
Neurologically, a high IQ goes with increased efficiency in neural functioning. That’s measurable. If a person is getting a lot of stimulation and processing it very quickly, they are susceptible to being over-stimulated.
Many gifted children struggle with failure. The trouble is if you’re known for being a brainbox, you don’t have to try and so you don’t build up resilience. Many bright children won’t put pen to paper. At workshops for gifted children, the kids sometimes play Twister, a game where players contort themselves over a mat covered with coloured dots. They’re in hysterics. They can’t get it right, so you’re teaching them to do something just for the joy of it.
Rebecca’s daughter Lizzie is five. She was conceived with donor sperm, and her biological father had three degrees. Ahead of her first birthday, she was using whole sentences. She completed a puzzle with 48 pieces that matched pictures to the corresponding words at 16 months. By her second birthday, she could recite “The Gruffalo”, a 24-page children’s story written in rhyme. When Rebecca forgot her face cloth at bath time, Lizzie chided, “Mummy, you are an abomination!” Aged three, she announced, “Mummy, I’m not pretty. It’s my chromosomes’ fault.” But like many gifted children, she can become distraught if she gets things wrong. “Some days I feel sorry for her,” says Rebecca. “I just want her to be as normal as possible.”
That is difficult. Ahead of play dates, Rebecca clears away Lizzie’s toys so that the other mothers can’t see how advanced she is. People look for gifted children to fail, says Rebecca, “I’ve learned to cover for Lizzie.” Rebecca teaches children with special needs, but says that for her daughter’s particular needs, “there’s nothing”.
The word “gifted” can connote “privilege”, in that the gifted person is seen as having an advantage over everyone else. But it’s not necessarily an advantage. Someone gifted, but who grows up in an environment that is not supportive, can suffer. This suffering is hugely under-acknowledged. A woman had an abortion as she couldn’t bear the idea of giving birth to a child who might suffer for her “gifts” as she had.
Emily’s son Peter is nine. Since he was tiny, he has preferred adult company to that of his peers: “At nursery, he used to sob all morning,” says Emily. Physically fragile and a loner, he has ended up in the hospital three times after being beaten up at school. In common with many gifted children, he has difficulty eating because he is hyper-sensitive to food textures. But for Peter, as for many other children, the greatest problem is that humdrum, day-to-day life is so hard to deal with. He finds school crushingly dull. His head teacher doesn’t see that this is a problem. “A bit of boredom is quite good for you,” he told Emily.
But boredom can be torture. A gifted student needs a fraction of the hours to master a GCSE subject. It is comparable to a seasoned runner being forced every day to trudge in step with people who walk extremely slowly.
How best to educate a gifted child? The challenges are complex and often competing. On the one hand, they can master material sooner and more rapidly than their peers. On the other hand, because the social skills of many such children are poorly developed, it can be extremely difficult for them to be a child in the traditional sense, to fit in and to learn many of the non-verbal, non-testable skills that social activity teaches you in preparation for being an adult. And without meaning to, such children may come across as smart-arses who, even with the best of intentions, other kids and adults may simply not wish to be around. Adults, especially teachers, may find extremely clever children threatening: a small child talking to you as an equal can put you on the back foot. They literally know more than the adults around them and can’t help but tell them so.
After Tom’s assessment at Potential Plus, Chrissie sought advice on how best to educate him. It was obvious to her that his south-London primary school couldn’t cope. Apart from his first teacher at the school, whom Tom describes as “incredible” and who encouraged his interest in maths by sitting with him during break times to work through problems, his other teachers seemed to hate him. One appeared to enjoy belittling him, announcing to the class that “Tom found maths hard today,” while neglecting to mention that he was doing work meant for children ten years older than him.
Chrissie was told she had two options: she could either homeschool Tom or send him to a private school that could give him more individual attention. Both ideas horrified her. She disagreed with home-schooling on principle – surely it would exacerbate his feeling of isolation. Private school was beyond the family’s financial means, but Tom received a bursary and now attends a respected, selective school in London, where the annual fees are £20,000. He still struggles to relate to other kids and finds the economic disparity between him and his fellow pupils shocking. But he finds the teaching more stimulating. “I do like her, and she has given me harder work,” he says of his maths teacher.
Debate rages about the wisdom of accelerating children out of their age group. If they are moved up, they may struggle socially. If they stay down, they may switch off intellectually. Students need social and psychological support, like programmes for gifted adolescents, like the Early Entrance Programme at the University of Washington in America: young teenagers can begin studying at university as part of a group of similarly advanced people their age, so they are intellectually stimulated but keep socializing with their peers.
Faced with sons and daughters who are bored and miserable at school, many parents of gifted children opt to take things into their own hands. Home-schooling is surprisingly common for gifted children of highly educated parents. In the mid-1980s, a father and daughter, Harry and Ruth Lawrence, made a striking pair, travelling around Oxford on a tandem bicycle. Harry had given up his career in computing and home-educated Ruth since she was five; at 12, she won a place to study maths at Oxford University. Harry accompanied Ruth to all her lectures, making sure that she never “wasted” time by socializing with other young people. She now works as a respected–but–not–outstanding mathematician. When she had her first child, she vowed not to push him to move any faster academically than he wanted to.
Some countries have cultivated an educational environment that is welcoming to gifted children. Singapore runs a highly selective programme designed to identify the most exceptionally intelligent students each year. At the age of eight or nine, all children are assessed in maths, English and reasoning. The top 1% are transferred from “normal” classes to the Gifted Education Programme, which is run in nine primary schools up to the age of 12. They can then choose whether to attend certain secondary schools that offer such classes. Selected children get “personalized education plans” that include teaching on particular topics in greater depth and breadth, access to additional self-taught online courses, placement in higher classes for specific subjects, and early admission to primary school for very young children. But emphasizing educational attainment has proved controversial. Since 2007, there have been efforts to increase socialization between children of different abilities.
Such an approach reflects a very traditional idea of intelligence – using certain types of tests to identify children with apparently innate intellectual abilities. Elsewhere, educationalists are using a broader range of methods to spot highly intelligent children and increasing their focus on attitudes and personality traits often found in the most successful people. In Project Bright Idea, a programme at Duke University in North Carolina, 10,000 ordinary nursery and primary-school children were taught using methods usually applied to the cleverest kids – fostering high expectations, encouraging complex problem-solving and developing meta-cognition (“thinking about thinking”). Nearly all of them went on to do much better in tests than their comparable peers.
What will become of Tom and Ophelia, Lizzie, Lorenzo and Peter? Those who score in the top 5% of standard tests at primary school are many times more likely than the other 95% to file patents as adults – and that probability is far higher among bright kids from rich families. Whatever their natural talents, children whose aptitudes are nurtured and given opportunities have a far better chance in life.
But gifted children do not necessarily shine later on. Some are “lost Einsteins”: children who weren’t given an outlet for their intelligence or the encouragement to stretch their intellect, or who needed help to deal with the isolation of their experience. There are those whose abilities are missed by the limitations of IQ tests. And there are the many exceptional children who face barriers in later years because they never developed the interpersonal skills needed to succeed in the workplace or the wider world of social activity.
In the 1920s, Lewis Terman, an American psychologist, studied 1,500 children with very high intelligence. Others followed that group 70 years later. They found that they had accomplished no more than their socio-economic status would have predicted. One child Terman excluded as not bright enough, William Shockley, had co-invented the transistor and won the Nobel prize in physics.
And an unhappy childhood stays with you. Kim Ung-yong was a child prodigy in South Korea. Now a civil engineer in his 50s, he feels he was cheated of a childhood. He began speaking at six months and had mastered four languages by the age of two. He gained his first PhD at age eight and was then headhunted to work for NASA. “I led my life like a machine,” he has said. “I woke up, solved the daily assigned equation, ate, slept…I was lonely and had no friends.” Even Albert Einstein, one of the most emblematic examples of genius, wrote in 1952: “It is strange to be known so universally and yet be so lonely.”
That’s a bleak message for the child geniuses of today. Looking to the future, Tom’s mum, Chrissie, doesn’t seem hopeful. “Show me a story of a child like this which ends well,” she says. “They don’t exist.” Then she turns to Tom, reassuringly. “Maybe you will be the first.”
- Excerpted from “The Curse of Genius” by Maggie Ferguson. Published in the April 29, 2019, edition of the Economist.
HOW and WHY TO SEARCH FOR YOUNG EINSTEINS
New research suggests new ways to nurture gifted children
EVERY year in Singapore, 1% of pupils in the third year of primary school bring home an envelope headed “On government service”. Inside is an invitation to the city-state’s Gifted Education Programme. To receive the overture, pupils must ace tests in maths, English and “general ability”. If their parents accept the offer, the children are taught using a special curriculum.
Singapore’s approach is emblematic of the traditional form of “gifted” education, one that uses intelligence tests with strict thresholds to identify children with seemingly innate ability. Yet in many countries, it is being overhauled in two main ways. The first is that educationists are using a broader range of methods to identify highly intelligent children, especially those from poor households. The second is an increasing focus on fostering the attitudes and personality traits found in successful people in an array of disciplines, including those who did not ace intelligence tests.
New research lies behind these shifts. It shows that countries which do not get the most from their best and brightest face big economic costs. The research also suggests that the nature-or-nurture debate is a false dichotomy. Intelligence is highly heritable and perhaps the best predictor of success. But it is far from the only characteristic that matters for future eminence.
IQ tests have attracted furious criticism. Christopher Hitchens argued that: “There is…an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and [his] propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ.” Like any assessment, IQ tests are not perfect. But researchers in cognitive science agree that general intelligence—not book-learning but the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly and so on—is an identifiable and important attribute which can be measured by IQ tests.
Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY). Founded in 1971, over 25 years recruited 5,000 precocious children, each of whom had intelligence-test scores in early adolescence high enough to gain entry to university. Of the SMPY participants who scored among the top 0.5% for their age group in maths and verbal tests, 30% earned a doctorate, versus 1% of Americans as a whole. These children were also much more likely to have high incomes and to file patents. Of the top 0.01% of children, 50% went on to earn a PhD, medical or law degree.
Do gifted children go on to become disproportionately troubled? There are, of course, exceptions. But on average, having a high IQ as a child is associated with better physical and mental health as an adult. Being moved up a school year tends to do them little harm.
Linking gifted education to economic growth is common sense in countries without many natural resources, such as Singapore. In 2013, two specialist maths schools were started in England. Sadly, however, the potential of poor bright children is often wasted. The likelihood of filing patents is still much greater among smart kids from rich families. A lot of talent is being squandered.
Gifted schemes have often not helped. When applications are voluntary, they come mostly from rich or pushy parents. 70% of pupils admitted to such programmes were white or Asian (only 30% of the school-age population).
It helps when schools test every child. Universal screening resulted in admissions increasing by 180% among poor children, 130% among Hispanics and 80% among black pupils. (Admissions among white children fell.) Miami-Dade has a lower IQ threshold for poor children or those for whom English is a second language, and 6.9% of black pupils are in the gifted programme, versus 2.4% and 3.6% in Florida and nationwide.
The “gifted” label has changed in favour of “high-ability”. No state relies on a single IQ score to select students. School districts are also testing for other attributes, including spatial ability (ie, the capacity to generate, manipulate and store visual images, which is strongly linked to achievement in science and technology in later life). Relying only on measures of intelligence will fail to find children with the potential to excel in adult life. Other possible paths to success may include passion, determination and creativity.
Whether termed “grit”, “task-motivation,” or “conscientiousness”, persistence is important. “As much as talent counts, effort counts twice.” Deliberate practice over a long period (popularly understood as 10,000 hours) is critical. Talent requires development, and that should involve promoting hard work.
Children’s “mindset” (the beliefs they have about learning). Children who think they can change their intelligence have a growth mindset and quickly start to do better in tests. Teaching methods help. Interventions based on growth-mindset are less effective than their hype implies.
Gifted education should influence education more broadly. If primary-school pupils are taught using methods often reserved for brainier kids, fostering high expectations, complex problem-solving and cultivating meta-cognition (or “thinking about thinking”). Nearly every one of them went on to do much better on tests than their similar peers.
Roughly 50% of the variance in IQ scores is due to genetic differences. Nurture, hard work, and social background matter, but they undermine the idea that intelligence can simply be willed into being. As long as they are open to everyone, IQ tests still have a vital role to play. To find lost Einsteins, you have to look for them.
- Excerpted from “How and Why to Search For Young Einsteins” in the
