The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (41 page)

    
“Apart from brain impairment and magnetic stimulation,” they wrote, “savant-like skills might also be made accessible by altered states of perception or by EEG-assisted feedback
.
[Oliver] Sacks provides support for the former view. He produced camera-like precise drawings only when under the influence of amphetamines. Early (savant-like) cave art has been attributed to mescaline induced perceptual
states”: Snyder, Mulcahy, Taylor, Mitchell, Sachdev, and Gandevia, “Savant-like skills exposed in normal people by suppressing the left fronto-temporal lobe,” pp. 149–58.

Snyder’s Citations

Perception

Snyder, A. W., and D. J. Mitchell. “Is integer arithmetic fundamental to mental processing? The mind’s secret arithmetic.”
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character
266 (1999): 587–92.

EEG-assisted feedback

Birbaumer, N. “Rain Man’s revelations.”
Nature
399 (1999): 211–12.

Oliver Sacks

Sacks, Oliver. “The Mind’s Eye.”
New Yorker
, July 28, 2003, pp. 48–59.

Cave art

Humphrey, N. “Comments on shamanism and cognitive evolution.”
Cambridge Archaeological Journal
12, no. 1 (2002): 91–94.

    
It was his contention that the most successful children were endowed with elite genes propelling them to lifelong success
.
To prove this, he began tracking nearly fifteen hundred California schoolkids identified as “exceptionally superior.”

Ann Hulbert writes:

Since Terman didn’t have the resources to comprehensively test the more than a quarter-million students in the California school districts he was looking at, he enlisted teachers to help make the first cut. They supplied him with the kids they considered the best, a group unlikely to include “some nerdy person in the corner mumbling to himself,” points out Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in the scientific study of historical genius. Testing this cohort—as well as other batches of bright children he rounded up earlier—Terman emerged with an overwhelmingly white and middle-class sample of roughly 1,500 students whose average age was 11 and whose I.Q.’s ranged between 135 and 200, about the top 1 percent. (The mean I.Q. in this group was 151, and 77 subjects tested at 170 or higher.) It is worth noting that his methods selected for a conscientious breed of parents as well, given that lengthy questionnaires about their children were part of the drill. (Hulbert, “The Prodigy Puzzle.”)

   The group was mostly middle class and mostly white; there were just two African Americans, which Terman took care to note “are both
part
white … exact proportion of white blood is not known.” (Italics mine.) (Terman,
Genetic Studies of Genius: Volume I, Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children
, p. 56.)

   In his first report, published in 1925, Terman tried to temper his expectations. “To expect all or even a majority of the subjects to attain any considerable degree of eminence would be unwarranted,” he warned. But still, he could not contain his optimism: “It is with the most distinguished 25 to 50 of [any average group of 5,000 adults] that our gifted boys could be most fairly compared a few decades hence.” (Terman,
Genetic Studies of Genius: Volume I, Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children
, p. 641.)

    
None went on to earn the Nobel Prize—as two children
rejected
from Terman’s original group did
.

Ann Hulbert writes:

In 1956, the year Terman died, a Nobel Prize was awarded to William Shockley, who as a California schoolboy didn’t make the cut for the Termites but went on to help invent the transistor (and was later hailed as a catalyst in the creation of Silicon Valley, and also pilloried as a racist eugenicist). In 1968, another reject, Luis Alvarez, won the prize for his work in elementary particle physics. No Termite ever became a Nobel laureate, though some became well-published scientists and multiple patent holders. Alumni include journalists, poets and movie directors as well as professors, among whom psychologists have been particularly distinguished, perhaps not surprisingly. Terman, after all, pulled Stanford strings and did everything he could to help his protégés, who had been selected for what are often now called “schoolhouse gifts” and had grown up as a self-identified group imbued, not least by him, with expectations of academically approved achievement.

The fact that “the group has produced no great musical composer,” as the study’s authors wistfully noted, “and no great creative artist” perhaps wasn’t so surprising, either. (Hulbert, “The Prodigy Puzzle.”)

  Holahan & Sears found that the “Termites” in their seventies and eighties were no more successful in adulthood than if they had been randomly selected
from the same socio-economic backgrounds—regardless of their IQ scores. This was somewhat mirrored in the findings of Subotnik, Kassan, Summers & Wasser (1993) who investigated a sample of 210 New York children selected for the Hunter College Elementary School by nomination and high-IQ scores (mean IQ 157). None had reached eminence by the ages of 40 to 50, nor were they any more successful than their socio-economic and IQ peers in spite of their tailor-made gifted education. (Freeman, “Giftedness in the Long Term,” pp. 384–403.)

    
“One is left with the feeling that the above-180 IQ subjects were not as remarkable as might have been expected,” concluded Tufts’s David Henry Feldman in a 1984 retrospective of the long study
.
“There is the disappointing sense that they might have done more with their lives.”

The entire text of the quote:

On the whole, one is left with the feelings that the above-180 IQ subjects were not as remarkable as might have been expected. Without question they have done better than the general population in most major categories and there is some evidence (although not a great deal) that they were more successful in their careers than the 150 IQ group. But, when we recall Terman’s early optimism about his subjects’ potential, and the words of Hollingworth (1942) that “the children who test at above 180 IQ constitute the ‘top’ among college graduates,” there is the disappointing sense that they might have done more with their lives. (Feldman, “A follow-up of subjects scoring above 180 IQ in Terman’s genetic studies of genius,” pp. 518–23.)

Ann Hulbert adds:

Focusing on a small cohort of children with I.Q.’s above 180, [Leta] Hollingworth’s case studies couldn’t supply clear-cut evidence that a high-testing childhood was a precursor of later extraordinariness. (Hulbert, “The Prodigy Puzzle.”)

    
“Most gifted children, even most child prodigies, do not go on to become adult creators
”:
Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69;.

Ericsson strongly affirms this point:

Notably, there are only comparatively few prodigies, such as Mozart, Picasso, and Yehudi Menuhin, who continued their success into adulthood—
most prodigies do not live up to expectations (Bamberger, 1986; Barlow, 1952; Freeman, 2000; Goldsmith, 2000). (Ericsson, Roring, Nandagopal, “Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance: an account based on the expert performance framework,” pp. 3–56;.)

Ericsson’s Citations

Bamberger, J. “Growing Up Prodigies: The Mid-life Crisis.” In
Developmental Approaches to Giftedness and Creativity
, edited by D. H. Feldman. Jossey-Bass, 1986. pp. 61–67;

Barlow, F.
Mental Prodigies
. Greenwood Press, 1952.

Freeman, J. “Teaching for Talent: Lessons from the Research.” In
Developing Talent Across the Lifespan
, edited by C. F. M. Lieshout and P. G. Heymans. Psychology Press, 2000, pp. 231–48;.

Goldsmith, L. T. “Tracking Trajectories of Talent: Child Prodigies.” In
Talents Unfolding
, edited by R. C. Friedman and B. M. Shore. American Psychological Association, 2000, pp. 89–118;.

Middlesex University’s Joan Freeman adds:

Trost (1993) calculated that less than half of “what makes excellence” can be accounted for by measurements and observations in childhood. The key to success, he said, lies in the individual’s dedication. (Freeman, “Families, the essential context for gifts and talents,” pp. 573–85;; Trost, “Prediction of Excellence in School, University and Work,” pp. 235–36.)

    
“Technical perfection wins the prodigy adoration, but if the prodigy does not eventually go beyond this, he or she sinks into oblivion
.
”

More from Ellen Winner:

A creator is someone who changes a domain. Personality and will are crucial factors in becoming an innovator or revolutionizer of a domain. Creators have a desire to shake things up. They are restless, rebellious, and dissatisfied with the status quo. They are courageous and independent. They are able to manage multiple related projects at the same time, engaging in what Gruber calls a “network of enterprise.” For these two reasons, we should never expect a prodigy to go on to become a creator. The ones who do make this transition are the exceptions, not the rule. (Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69.)

Joan Freeman writes:

Subotnik, Kassan, Summers & Wasser (1993) have shown that giftedness may take many different forms; it may appear in quite unexpected situations and at different points during a lifetime. It is not always possible to identify future gifts. (Freeman, “Giftedness in the long term,” pp. 384–403.)

   With all due respect to Professor Freeman, isn’t the effort to “identify future gifts” a slightly crazy way of discussing future achievement? If we step away from the “giftedness” paradigm and simply regard achievements as achievements, the same research cited above would be restated simply:
Adults with undistinguished backgrounds and childhoods often turn out to be high achievers, and those achievements can happen at various points in their lives
.

    
“Prodigies [can] become frozen into expertise,” says Ellen Winner
.
“This is particularly a problem for those whose work has become public and has won them acclaim, such as musical performers, painters, or children who have been publicized as ‘whiz kids’ … It is difficult to break away from [technical] expertise and take the kinds of risks required to be creative.”

Ellen Winner on “when giftedness ends”:

One non-inevitable reason that prodigies may fail to make the transition is that they have become frozen into expertise. This is particularly a problem for those whose work has become public and has won them acclaim, such as musical performers, painters, or children who have been publicized as “whiz kids.” Expertise is what has won them fame and adoration as child prodigies. It is difficult to break away from expertise and take the kinds of risks required to be creative. A second non-inevitable reason is that some with the potential to make the transition do not do so because they have been pushed so hard by their parents and teachers and managers that they lose their intrinsic motivation. At adolescence they begin to ask, “Who am I doing this for?” And if the answer is that they are doing this for a parent or a teacher but not for themselves, they may decide that they do not want to do this anymore. And so they drop out. The case of William James Sidis, a math prodigy pushed relentlessly by his father,
is one such case among many
. (Italics mine.) (Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69.)