We see exceptional intelligence as a blessing. So why are so many brilliant children miserable misfits?
Interestingly, 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’s biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk never mention the word autism or Asperger’s as an 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 and white holes, hypothetical celestial objects emitting colossal energy. Black holes, he thought, must be linked across space-time with white holes. “I put them together and 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 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 the maths GCSE, an exam most children in Britain take at 16. He is currently working towards his A-level in math. Tom is an only child, and Chrissie, his mother, initially 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 no other children were there. His teacher reported that he wanted to stay indoors and do sums instead of playing outside with other kids at breaks.
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 play an essential role in any child’s intellectual development. Talk to your child about politics over the dinner table, and he will likely develop confident opinions about how 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 likelier to perform 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 scores become IQs of 85 to 115. The outliers are few. About two people in 100 have IQs below 70, and another two have 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. However, identifying exceptional children is hard since only a small percentage of any population takes IQ tests. 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. At the age of 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. He has been shunted out on his own into corridors and offices at school. “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 had insomnia. The strain affects the whole family: “I don’t understand parents who seek this,” says Chrissie. “I can’t cope with it. I 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). When I sent a request via Mensa to hear from gifted children and their parents, my inbox filled with emails, and many of them were anguished. Those I speak to say that, for fear of inspiring jealousy, 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 with three characteristics. First, gifted children begin to master a particular discipline – a language, maths or chess – much younger than most. They do so easily and progress much faster than their peers.
Secondly, this mastery is mainly achieved 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. A close correlation exists 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 at age 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 happening around them and 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 like 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. 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.”
Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed the first IQ tests to measure intelligence 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 intrinsic rather than taught intelligence. The original gifted children invented the wheel and discovered fire, but testing IQ is unlike measuring height. No assessment is entirely 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 skills and characteristics are missed, such as voracious curiosity or the ability to make intellectual connections. The tests will unlikely identify future novelists, 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 overrepresented in cohorts of gifted children. Those who come from minority backgrounds are underrepresented: Latinos don’t get selected [for programmes] in the US, and Maori 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 potential, along with the proper 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 brilliant children are often socially isolated and can even be disruptive. This may be more problematic. Gifts that are admired in the abstract usually 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 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 “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. More recently, psychologists have examined 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 learning words, patterns and numbers develop extremely quickly in these children. But the frontal lobe, which controls the regulation of emotions, doesn’t grow 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 discussed “socially optimal intelligence,” which she associated with an IQ between 125 and 155. Ratchet the score beyond that, and a “pathology of superiority” can creep in: the dominance of one part of the brain can affect the development of other parts.
We don’t yet know why this is, 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 usually 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 has opportunities to mix with other bright kids 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.”
Such children’s sleeping patterns often differ 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 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 energy levels. 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 knowledgeable 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 seems completely silent to most people.”
Neurologically, a high IQ leads to increased efficiency in neural functioning. That’s measurable. If a person gets a lot of stimulation and is processing it very quickly, they are susceptible to overstimulation.
Many gifted children struggle with failure. If you’re known for being a brainbox, you don’t have to try, 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 isn’t easy. Ahead of play dates, Rebecca clears away Lizzie’s toys so the other mothers can’t see how advanced she is. Rebecca says people look for gifted children to fail: “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. However, for Peter, as for many other children, the most significant problem is that humdrum day-to-day life is 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 daily to trudge in step with people who stroll.
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 tough 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 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 apparent 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: homeschooling Tom or sending 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 talented 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’s highly selective programme identifies the most brilliant students each year. All children are assessed in maths, English and reasoning at eight or nine. The top 1% are transferred from “normal” classes to the Gifted Education Programme, which is run in nine primary schools up to 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, 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 traditional idea of intelligence – using specific tests to identify children with apparently innate intellectual abilities. Elsewhere, educationalists are using a broader range of methods to spot brilliant 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 wealthy families. Whatever their natural talents, children whose aptitudes are nurtured and given opportunities have a far better chance in life.
However, 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 dealing with the isolation of their experience. There are those whose abilities are missed by the limitations of IQ tests. Many exceptional children face barriers in later years because they have never developed the interpersonal skills needed to succeed in the workplace or social activities.
In the 1920s, an American psychologist, Lewis Terman, 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, William Shockley, whom Terman excluded as not bright enough, 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 mastered four languages by age two. He gained his first PhD at age eight and was 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 and published in The Economist’s April 29, 2019, edition.
