The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (13 page)

Perhaps the most interesting longitudinal study on giftedness comes from IQ inventor and staunch innate-intelligence advocate Lewis Terman (last mentioned in
chapter 2
). In the early 1920s, Terman began a massive, decades-long study of child achievers, which he pointedly called “Genetic Studies of Genius.”
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.” Alas, as Terman’s exceptional kids matured, they seemed less and less exceptional. They did grow up to be healthier and more successful than the average American, but very few ultimately emerged as geniuses or superachievers.
None went on to earn the Nobel Prize—as two children
rejected
from Terman’s original group did
. None became world-class musicians—as two other Terman rejects, Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin, did. All in all, Terman’s epic studies in genius turned out to be studies in disappointment.

The frustration was especially keen when it came to the very top of Terman’s group—the 5 percent who had scored 180 or better on the IQ test.
“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.”

A few years later, Feldman concluded his own separate study of six child prodigies in music, art, chess, and math. None of his subjects grew up to become extraordinary adult achievers. In her research, Ellen Winner had found exactly the same thing.
“Most gifted children, even most child prodigies, do not go on to become adult creators
,” she reported.

Why?

First off, it turns out that the skill sets are very different. The attributes necessary for high child achievement are simply not the same as those that drive adult achievement, so one would not automatically flow from the other. “A high IQ six-year-old who can multiply three-digit numbers in her head, or solve algebraic equations, wins acclaim,” explains Winner. “But as a young adult, she must come up with some new way to solve some unsolved mathematical problem, or must discover some new problems or areas to investigate. Otherwise, she will not make her mark in the domain of mathematics … The situation is the same in art or music.
Technical perfection wins the prodigy adoration, but if the prodigy does not eventually go beyond this, he or she sinks into oblivion
.”

The second reason is even more interesting: child achievers are frequently hobbled by the psychology of their own success. Children who grow up surrounded by praise for being technically proficient at a specific task often develop a natural aversion to stepping outside their comfort zone. Instead of falling into a pattern of taking risks and regularly pushing themselves just beyond their limit, they develop a terrible fear of new challenges and of any sort of flaw or failure. Ironically, this leads them away from the very building blocks of adult success.
“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.”

Underneath all this is the core reality that talented children and their parents frequently do not notice the development of their own skills during infancy and toddlerhood. This is perfectly understandable—obviously, tiny children themselves can’t notice such things, and for parents to take note of such a nuanced process in fine detail could be construed as odd and obsessive—but it can also lead to a grave logical error: failure to see it as a process may inspire the conclusion that a collection of skills is really an innate gift. “Mommy, I don’t know,” the toddler Yo-Yo Ma replied to his mother, Marina, when she asked how he could sense an out-of-tune note. “I just
know
.”
What was the true source of Yo-Yo’s uncanny ability? In her memoir, his mother chalks it up to genetics—but then she details how, from the very moment of his birth, Yo-Yo was exposed to music in the most profound and exquisite way
. Both Marina, a trained opera singer, and her husband, Hiao-Tsiun, a teacher/composer/conductor, had immigrated to Paris as young adults to study, play, compose, and teach music. Having traded comfort and status in China for immigrant poverty in France, the Ma family breathed, ate, and slept music. Their tiny two-room Paris apartment was arranged thusly:

Mother and children slept in one room; the other, a smaller bedroom-studio, was used by Hiao-Tsiun. Amazingly he had squeezed into that room his piano, a collection of children’s string instruments, and his cot. His precious manuscripts and music scores, meticulously arranged by him for children, were jammed into an old armoire and piled up on the piano top. Every corner was bulging with his papers.

Hiao-Tsiun studied at the conservatory by day and gave lessons in the evening, all the while clinging to his deeply personal dream of creating a children’s orchestra. Like Leopold Mozart, he designed elaborate pedagogical techniques specifically for children and was eager to put them to use. Yo-Yo’s older sister, Yeou-Cheng, was (like Nannerl Mozart) started on piano and violin at a very early age—around the time Yo-Yo was born. By the time Yo-Yo was ready to start piano at age three, his sister was already a budding prodigy.
“From the cradle, Yo-Yo was surrounded by a world of music,” his mother recalls. “He heard hundreds of classical selections on records, or played by his father or his sister. Bach and Mozart were engraved on his mind
.”

Engraved on his mind:
according to neuroscientists and music psychologists, this is quite literally true. We know now that music activates neurons in many regions of the brain simultaneously and that every meaningful listening experience inspires the formation of multiple-trace memories, which, in turn, inform the encoding of all future musical memories.
“Melodic ‘calculation centers’ in the dorsal temporal lobes appear to be paying attention to interval size and distances between pitches as we listen to music
, creating a pitch-free template of the very melodic values we will need in order to recognize songs in transposition,” explains McGill University’s Daniel Levitin.
Levitin also concurs with University of California, San Diego’s Diana Deutsch and others in deducing that every human being is likely born with the capacity for absolute pitch, but that it gets activated only in those who are exposed to enough tonal imprinting at a very early age
.

In addition to the neural mechanics, there were also powerful psychological forces in Yo-Yo Ma’s life that helped shape him into an obsessively determined musician at the youngest possible age.
Yo-Yo worshipped his sister and father and desperately wanted to impress both
. From very early on, he responded to his stern father—who had vowed to “make a musician of him” at age two—with a blend of admiration, duty, and extreme stubbornness. Yo-Yo would hover in the doorway while his sister practiced and, when asked, critique her performances note by note. In his own performances Yo-Yo was determined to have it his way. Sometimes, he refused to perform for his parents as instructed; other times, he would play more than he was supposed to.

He also needed to chart his own course instrumentally. “I don’t like the sound violins make,” Yo-Yo informed his father at age four. “I want a big instrument.”

“Once you start playing with a big instrument, you cannot switch back to the violin,” Hiao-Tsiun responded firmly to his four-year-old son. “Don’t tell me a month from now that you have changed your mind.”

“I will play it,” Yo-Yo insisted. “I won’t change my mind.”

And he did not. In retrospect, his early life contained all the known ingredients for the brewing of extraordinary achievement: an early and intensively conditioned musical brain, world-class teaching resources, and a desperate personal desire that researchers universally agree is
the
key to precocious success.
Ellen Winner calls it “the rage to master,” a fervent, never-let-go willfulness and focus that drives a child into an early version of Ericsson’s deliberate practice
.

As a general rule, high achievers have exceptional drive
. From Olympic athletes to Nobel physicists, from long-winded U.S. senators to the shyest poet laureate, you simply don’t see remarkable achievement without it. The question is, why does this obsessive need appear at different ages in different people, and why does it not appear in some people at all? If it was simply a matter of genetics, as Lewis Terman proposed, we would indeed see the pattern of lives he imagined with his Genetic Studies of Genius project. Instead, intense ambition evolves out of complex, real-world dynamics, settling into people’s psyches at different ages and circumstances—sometimes from extreme adversity, sometimes as a proxy for revenge, sometimes as a way of proving oneself to a beloved/feared parent or sibling, and so on. The collection of potential catalysts for intense ambition may never be entirely understood and will surely never be easily reproducible. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand the mechanism better, or apply its lessons.

Michael Jordan always seemed to hate losing (an everyday experience while growing up with his brother Larry)
, but his willingness to do absolutely anything to improve his skills didn’t appear until after his rejection from the varsity squad in tenth grade. At that point, according to his friend Roy Smith, his competitiveness went into overdrive. Laney High assistant coach Ron Coley remembers his very first sighting of Jordan, near the end of a JV basketball game that year.
“There were nine players on the court just coasting,” Coley recalls
, “but there was one kid playing his heart out. The way he was playing, I thought his team was down one point with two minutes to play. So I looked up at the clock and his team was down twenty points with one minute to play. It was Michael.”

For the remainder of his basketball career, no one within Jordan’s orbit ever practiced or played as hard. “All top athletes are driven,” writes David Halberstam, “and no one made the [University of North] Carolina roster unless he was by far the hardest-working kid in his neighborhood, his high school and finally his high school conference, but Jordan was self-evidently the most driven of all.” In a college program famous for its loyalty and dedication, Jordan impressed Carolina coach Dean Smith with his extra level of ferocity. In fact, he seemed to get more intense with each passing year. As he returned for his sophomore year, fellow players noticed yet another bump in both confidence and zeal.
“Even in pickup games,” writes Halberstam, “he had become unusually purposeful
. There was a tendency in games like this, when there were no coaches around, for players to resort to what they did best, to reinforce their strengths and avoid going to any part of their game that was essentially weak. But Jordan [was] constantly working on the weaker part of his game trying to bring it up. It [was] one more sign of his desire to be the best.” Coach Smith found that, in practice, Jordan was now winning all the one-on-one games and all the five-on-five games. So he started stacking the deck—giving Jordan weaker and weaker teammates to make him work even harder to win. That seemed to spur him on to even further greatness. After his junior year, Smith realized there was nothing else he could do for him, and he pushed Jordan to leave college ball for the NBA.

One common characteristic in all successful adults is that, at some point in their lives, they come to realize how much the process of improvement is within their own control. That’s also what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck observed in a series of grade-school studies in the 1990s. In her central experiment, Dweck (who was then at Columbia) asked four hundred seventh graders to complete a relatively easy set of puzzles and then randomly separated them into two groups. Individually, each student in the first group was complimented for his or her innate intelligence with the line, “You must be smart at this!”

Each student in the second group was praised for his or her effort: “You must have worked really hard!”

Then each child was offered a chance to take one of two follow-up tests: either another easy set of puzzles or a much harder set of puzzles that teachers promised would be a great learning experience.

The results:

• More than half of the kids praised for their inborn intelligence chose the easy follow-up puzzle.
  

• A staggering 90 percent of the kids praised for their hard work chose the more difficult puzzles.
  

Other Dweck experiments pointed in the same direction, demonstrating irrefutably that people who believe in inborn intelligence and talents are less intellectually adventurous and less successful in school
. By contrast, people with an “incremental” theory of intelligence—believing that intelligence is malleable and can be increased through effort—are much more intellectually ambitious and successful.