The Genius in All of Us: New Insights Into Genetics, Talent, and IQ (43 page)

“The average person is able to carry a tune almost as proficiently as professional singers. This result is consistent with the idea that singing is a basic skill that develops in the majority of individuals, enabling them to engage in musical activities. In short, singing appears to be as natural as speaking.”
(Dalla Bella et al., 2007.)

  What about “tone-deaf” people who can’t carry a tune?

So-called tone deafness is a little-studied and much-misunderstood subject now getting closer attention. Four percent of the general population has tone deafness (Kalmus and Fry, 1980), which until recently was thought to be mainly a perceptual deficit—affected individuals supposedly could not hear the difference in tones; they did not have and could not develop relative pitch, and therefore could not appreciate or produce music.

New evidence has forced an entirely new conclusion. Studies now show that virtually everyone can distinguish tonal differences and appreciate music (Dalla Bella et al., 2007). And while a tiny percentage of people truly cannot hear tonal differences due to some specific brain damage, “present findings suggest that tone-deafness may emerge as a pure output disorder … that poor singing may occur in the presence of normal perception. This possibility finds support in a recent study conducted with poor singers who exhibited pitch production deficits but normal pitch discrimination” (Bradshaw & McHenry, 2005).

In other words, the vast majority of people who call themselves tone-deaf (or who are mocked as such by friends and spouses) actually hear and perceive music perfectly well and simply have a problem generating with their vocal chords the tones they hear in their brain.

Sources cited in the text above:

Dickinson, Amy. “Little Musicians.”
Time
, December 13, 1999.

Brown, Kathryn. “Striking the Right Note.”
New Scientist
, December 4, 1999.

Dingfelder, S. “Most people show elements of absolute pitch.”
Monitor on Psychology
36, no. 2 (February 2005): 33.

Abrams, Michael. “The Biology of … Perfect Pitch: Can Your Child Learn Some of Mozart’s Magic?”
Discover
, December 1, 2001.

Deutsch, Diana. “Tone Language Speakers Possess Absolute Pitch.” Presentation at the 138th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, November 4, 1999.

Lee, Karen. “An Overview of Absolute Pitch.” Published online at
https://web space.utexas.edu/kal463/www/abspitch.html
, November 16, 2005.

Dalla Bella, Simone, Jean-François Giguère, and Isabelle Peretz. “Singing proficiency in the general population.”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
1212 (February 2007): 1182–89.

Kalmus, H., and D. B. Fry. “On tune deafness (dysmelodia): frequency, development, genetics and musical background.”
Annals of Human Genetics
43, no. 4 (May 1980): 369–82.

Bradshaw, E., and M. A. McHenry. “Pitch discrimination and pitch matching abilities of adults who sing inaccurately.”
Journal of Voice
19, no. 3 (September 2005): 431–39.

    
Yo-Yo worshipped his sister and father and desperately wanted to impress both
:
Ma,
My Son, Yo-Yo
, p. 27.

    
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
.

Winner writes:

Gifted children have a deep intrinsic motivation to master the domain in which they have high ability, and are almost manic in their energy level. Often one cannot tear these children away, whether from an instrument, a computer, a sketch pad, a math book. They have a powerful interest in the domain in which they have high ability, and they can focus so intently on work in this domain that they lose sense of the outside world. These children combine an obsessive interest with an ability to learn easily in a given domain. Unless social and emotional factors interfere, this combination leads to high achievement. This intrinsic drive is part and parcel of an exceptional, inborn giftedness. (Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69.)

   Winner insists that this rage to master is innate, but only because she can’t deduce an external cause. There’s no proof offered at all, other than it just seems to appear in kids’ lives (albeit only in child-centered families where parents are semi-obsessed themselves with their kids’ skills). The obvious possibility that rage to master is a psychological mechanism forming out of some family/social/cultural dynamic does not seem even to be considered. This is a shame, because Winner seems to have a keen understanding of so many other facets of giftedness, including the psychodynamics of a gifted child growing into adolescence and struggling to maintain that intrinsic motivation.

For much more on this, see endnote on: “The brain circuits that modulate a person’s level of persistence are plastic—they
can
be altered.”

    
As a general rule, high achievers have exceptional drive
.

   Joan Freeman has done much important writing on this subject. Here, she relates a raft of research that points to the importance of attitude, as opposed to early success:

In the Scottish study, childhood intelligence was not always related to how people perceived their success in life. The most reliable predictor in their early years was found to be positive self-esteem, and the most useful tools for actually climbing the career ladder were optimism and pugnacity, similar to what Moon (2002) calls Personal Talent
which she describes as teachable
. Indeed, Trost (2000), investigating prediction of giftedness in adult life, calculated that less than half of “what makes excellence” can be accounted for
by measurements and observations in childhood: for intelligence not more than 30%. The key to success, he wrote, lies in the individual’s dedication. Others have suggested optimism as the key. (Italics mine.) (Freeman, “Giftedness in the long term,” pp. 384–403.)

    
Michael Jordan always seemed to hate losing (an everyday experience while growing up with his brother Larry)
.

   His friend Roy Smith reports that in junior high school if you played H.O.R.S.E. with Jordan and won, that simply meant you’d play another game, and then another and then another, until you lost. Then you could go home. (Halberstam,
Playing for Keeps
, p. 21.)

    
“There were nine players on the court just coasting,” Coley recalls
:
Halberstam,
Playing for Keeps
, p. 22.

    
“Even in pickup games,” writes Halberstam, “he had become unusually purposeful
.
”

   The special signature of Jordan’s psychology, writes David Halberstam, was that he could turn anything into a personal slight that demanded personal revenge. (Halberstam,
Playing for Keeps
, p. 98.)

    
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.

   The researchers first measured the subjects’ beliefs and then tracked them for two years through seventh and eighth grades. Blackwell, Trzesniewski, and Dweck write:

Nearly two years later, students who endorsed a strong incremental theory of intelligence at the beginning of junior high school were outperforming those who held more of an entity theory in the key subject of mathematics, controlling for prior achievement. Moreover, their motivational patterns mediated this relation such that students with an incremental orientation had more positive motivational beliefs, which in turn were related to increasing grades …

This research confirms that adolescents who endorse more of an incremental theory of malleable intelligence also endorse stronger learning goals, hold more positive beliefs about effort, and make fewer ability-based, “helpless”
attributions, with the result that they choose more positive, effort-based strategies in response to failure, boosting mathematics achievement over the junior high school transition. Furthermore, this motivational framework at the beginning of junior high school was related to the trajectories of students’ math achievement over the two years of junior high school: students who endorsed a more incremental theory framework increased in math grades relative to those who endorsed a more entity theory framework, showing that the impact of this initial framework remained predictive over time … Within a single semester, the incremental theory intervention appears to have succeeded in halting the decline in mathematics achievement.

Further, these findings support the idea that the diverging achievement patterns emerge only during a challenging transition. Prior to junior high school, students who endorsed more of an entity theory seemed to be doing fine. As noted in previous research, motivational beliefs may not have an effect until challenge is present and success is difficult.
Thus, in a supportive, less failure-prone environment such as elementary school, vulnerable students may be buffered against the consequences of a belief in fixed intelligence. However, when they encounter the challenges of middle school, these students are less equipped to surmount them
. (Italics mine.) (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, and Dweck, “Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition,”; see also Bronson, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids.”)