The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (12 page)

Courtesy of Joseph Keul

Gene-gift proponents would have us believe in genetic fate and strict limits. The real lesson of genetics, though—and of identical twins—is precisely the opposite. None of us is stuck in some sort of destined body or life. We inherit—and we also become.

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CHAPTER FIVE
Prodigies and Late Bloomers

Child prodigies and superlative adult achievers are often not the same people. Understanding what makes remarkable abilities appear at different phases of a person’s life provides an important insight into what talent really is.

I
n Michael Jordan’s prime, he could leap so far to the hoop, and remain airborne for so long, it looked as though he could actually defy gravity.
They called it “hang time
”—that spectacular second or two during which Jordan seemed to suspend himself in midair and fly forward, rolling his tongue, pumping his wing-legs, and finally stuffing the ball. Then he’d gently descend back to earth. It was far from the only move in his arsenal; for several years Jordan could move, shoot, pass, defend, and dunk so much better than any other player that he took on a superhuman aura. Near the end of his career, when Jordan confided to Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson his intention to retire, the coach responded with an unusual appeal. “Michael,” he said,
“pure genius is something very, very rare
and if you are blessed enough to possess it, you want to think a long time before you walk away from using it.”

But where did that indisputable “pure genius” come from? Interestingly, it had been nowhere in sight during Jordan’s childhood. Michael was not the best athlete in the Jordan family as a youth (his older brother Larry was); not the most industrious (of five siblings, he was by far the laziest); and not very mechanically inclined (a prized family skill).
“If Michael Jordan was some kind of genius, there had been few signs of it when he was young
,” writes David Halberstam in his biography
Playing for Keeps
. In his sophomore year of high school, after attending summer basketball camp with his friend Roy Smith, Jordan didn’t even make the varsity basketball squad. Smith did.

The virtuoso cellist
Yo-Yo Ma, on the other hand, showed his stuff from very early on
, dazzling his piano teacher at age three, playing difficult work by Bach on the cello at age five, and performing for Leonard Bernstein and President John F. Kennedy at age seven. On hearing the young Yo-Yo play for the first time, legendary cellist
Pablo Casals called him simply “Wonder Boy
.”

What makes abilities come into view at such different times in a person’s life? In the popular imagination, a person either has talent or does not; if so, it flows through him or her like an invisible river of energy, constant and timeless. The reality, though, is that even superachievers develop very different abilities at different ages—so much so, in fact, that
researchers have discovered that child prodigies and adult superachievers are very often not the same people
. For every wonder child like Yo-Yo Ma who also thrives in adulthood, there is a long list of child prodigies who never become remarkable adult achievers.
At the same time, an equally long list of profound adult achievers manage to attain greatness without first showing any profound abilities as children—a list that includes Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Kant, da Vinci, and Einstein
.

Only one paradigm—talent as process—can make sense of all these great achievements from such radically different life stages. All individuals have distinct biologies, but no one has a predestined biological fate. Every individual is built with the capacity, as Patrick Bateson says, “to develop in a number of distinctly different ways.” To discover your own potential, add water, love, perseverance, and lots and lots of time.

Unfortunately, some talent researchers still insist on categorizing causes as either nature or nurture, describing them as additive (G+E) rather than interactive (GxE), and presenting core abilities as innate and immutable—when contemporary science so plainly points to a more interactive dynamic.

It is a difficult legacy to shed, given what seems like such clear evidence for innate talent right in front of our eyes. Without question, child prodigies exist and always have. The eighteenth-century English jurist
Jeremy Bentham began studying Latin at age three
and entered Oxford University at age twelve. The mathematician
John von Neumann could divide eight-digit numbers in his head by age six
. Hungary’s Judit Polgár became a chess grandmaster at age fifteen.
Seattle’s Adora Svitak began writing stories at age five and published her first book at age seven
. Over many centuries, we have reliable records of young children demonstrating extraordinary abilities in math, music, language, spatial intelligence, and the visual arts.

Where do these extraordinary abilities come from? Because they appear so early (parents often say “out of nowhere”) and are often so bewitching, the most common instinct from parents and researchers alike is to answer the big mystery with a simple idea: such talent is an inborn gift. In the 1990s, Anders Ericsson and others challenged that long-held view by bringing the talent-formation process partially into the light, documenting a new “science of high ability.” In the face of Ericsson’s paradigm-challenging data, though, other researchers pushed back. Boston College’s
Ellen Winner responded in 2000 that “Ericsson’s research demonstrates the importance of hard work but does not rule out the role of innate ability … [We] conclude that intensive training is necessary for the acquisition of expertise, but
not
that it is sufficient
.” An exceptional “inborn giftedness” must also be present, she argued.

“Necessary but not sufficient” became a common reaction to Ericsson as many professionals clung to the unsustainable notion of innate gifts
. This critique overlooked the possibility of an entirely new model that recognized training and biology as one interconnected, dynamic force.

Driving Winner’s argument were two core beliefs:

1. Some extraordinary abilities appear earlier than they could possibly be developed.
   

2. There is evidence for what she called “atypical brain organization” in gifted children, occurring “as a result of genetics, the in-utero environment, or after-birth trauma.”
   

Her first point has, historically, been the most popular driver of the giftedness paradigm: since one cannot see talent being developed, it must simply exist. But is this thinking still justified, given what we’ve learned? As noted in earlier chapters, studies have now shown conclusively that mind-set, nutrition, parenting, peers, media culture, time, focus, and motivation all profoundly affect the development of abilities. All of these factors are in play from the first day of a child’s life (or earlier). We need look no further than Hart and Risley’s spoken-word study to understand how early life experience dramatically affects the trajectory of a very young child.
We also know for sure that early musical exposure can work the same way
. The same experience has been documented with chess players. Like any taxi driver’s brain, a young child’s brain adapts to demands. The process is very slow and impossible to see from the outside, but it still happens.
Imperceptibly, like water evaporating into a rain cloud, tiny events pave the way for development in one direction or another
.

As to Winner’s second point, it is indisputably true that some people with extraordinary abilities have distinct physiological differences in their brains.
For example, Winner points out that mathematically and musically “gifted” individuals tend to use both lobes of the brain for tasks usually dominated by the left hemisphere in individuals with normal abilities
, and that
artists, inventors, and musicians tend to have a higher proportion of language disorders
. But does it follow that these differences are innate? Winner’s list of three possible causes—genetics, in utero environment, and after-birth trauma—actually all turn out to be dynamic actors in every person’s development.
Consider that “genetics” actually means “genetic expression” and that the uterine environment and after-birth events are both highly developmental
, and the notion of “innate” quickly dissolves away. Further, there’s no logical reason why her list should be limited to three possible causes. If she’s allowing for after-birth trauma, why not also allow for other infant and toddler life experiences?

The very rare phenomenon of spectacular savants like Kim Peek (the “real Rain Man”) points even more clearly to developmental dynamics than hardwired abilities. Peek is severely cognitively disabled, cannot button his own shirt, and tests very poorly on a standard IQ test, but has memorized many thousands of books word for word.
He is one of an estimated one hundred living prodigious savants who have both severe impairments and extraordinary abilities
.
The group also includes Daniel Tammet
, who lives with autism but who can recite pi to 22,514 digits and was able to add Icelandic to his other nine languages in just nine days; Leslie Lemke, who couldn’t stand until twelve years of age or walk until fifteen—but one night at age sixteen began playing every note of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 after hearing it just once on television; and Alonzo Clemons, who, ever since a childhood head injury, has been unable to feed himself or tie his own shoes but can sculpt an animal in exquisite detail after seeing a fleeting image of it.

University of Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert, perhaps the world’s leading expert on what he calls “savant syndrome,” points out that these are actually extreme examples of a more universal phenomenon.
He estimates that approximately one in ten persons with autism has some savant skills
.
The syndrome, he explains, occurs when the brain’s left hemisphere is severely damaged, inviting the right hemisphere (which is responsible for things like music and art) to compensate heavily for the loss
.

It is critical to note that the damage does not create the ability; rather, it creates the opportunity for the ability to develop. This, says Treffert, “promote[s] the idea of the brain’s plasticity, and the brain’s ability to recruit other areas to be put to use.”

In fact, it has prompted Treffert to wonder aloud, “Might there be a little Rain Man in each of us?”

In the case of the prodigious savant, it appears to me, there is a marvelous coalescence of idiosyncratic brain circuitry [combined with] obsessive traits of concentration & repetition and tremendous encouragement & reinforcement from family, caretakers and teachers
. Does some of that same possibility, a little Rain Man as it were, perhaps reside within each of us? I think that it does.

Other savant researchers heartily agree. In 2003, the University of Sydney’s Allan W. Snyder and colleagues used magnetic pulses to temporarily impair the left frontotemporal lobe in healthy persons, resulting in some temporary savant-like tendencies—drawing animals with more detail, for example, and proofreading with more accuracy. Shutting off portions of their brain did not suddenly transform them into amazing artists or brilliant thinkers; rather, it altered their way of thinking and observing, shifting attention away from meaning and understanding and toward detail. Such an effect, Snyder and colleagues noted, can be achieved through other means.
“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.”

Even very ordinary brains are capable of extraordinary things when provoked.