December 2, 2013 • 40 mins
In the 1920s, Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman developed the IQ test to aid in his study of exceptionally smart kids, or child prodigies. Cristen and Caroline discuss the science of child prodigies, why so many of them are boys and how prodigies fare as they grow up.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told You. From House toupports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and Caroline a little with something about me.
I usually start out my day listening to Morning Edition
on NPR, as you I am. I am an NPR listener,
(00:27):
I'm an NPR fan. And a little while ago a
story caught my attention because it was on Child Prodigies
and the subject of the story was this young woman
who started composing these gorgeous piano pieces when she was
(00:48):
three years old. Three man as someone who started playing
the piano when she was twenties six, I'm quite oppressed. Yeah,
And she had already recorded a few albums, she had
played Carnegie Hall she was twelve, and she even played
an impromptu peace for the host. He asked. He set
(01:08):
the scene of going having to show up at the
NPR studios really really early in the morning to record
Morning Edition. How quiet and kind of gloomy it is there,
And so he asked if she could play piece inspired
by that, and she did and it was beautiful, and
I thought, there, you know, it's interesting to hear about
this young woman being focused on as a child prodigy,
(01:30):
because I feel like a lot of times it's always
the boy prodigy, right, And you don't even realize when
you're reading all of these articles and things about prodigies
that it is all boys. It's very very male focused, right.
And so some commonly cited prodigies that a lot of
people bring up in these articles include Mozart, who began
(01:54):
playing the piano with three, picked up the violin at four,
wrote his first symphony by eight, and read his first
opera by twelve N B D New Big Deal Um.
There's also William James Sidis, who could read at eighteen months,
had written four books by seven, and was fluent in
eight languages at the same time. Gave a lecture at
Harvard at nine and entered Harvard at eleven, and his
(02:16):
background was in the field of math and cosmology. And
for lovecraft fans out there, yes, HP Lovecraft, one of
the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century, learned
to read at two and was writing complex poetry by six.
I would like to note, though, that I was also
writing poetry around the same time, and my first poem
(02:38):
was called I Had a Little Ladybug I'm not even lying,
and my mother told me it was beautiful. That's a
horribul So I didn't start writing poetry until around puberty
when everything was the worst. Yeah, yeah, the dark, angsty poems.
You know, Caroline, we should just do an episode of
bringing in our teenage poetry so time. No, well, you know,
(03:01):
when Geo City has wiped out its entire archive, my
poetry was lost to the ages. No. Yeah, Well. Some
other prodigies include Kim On young, who's a Korean professor now,
but at three years old he went to college as
a physics student and no big deal, was invited to
(03:21):
the US by NASA to study as he got his
pH d in the US. Yeah, I want to say
at one point, and maybe he still does hold the
Guinness World Record for being the smartest person on the planet.
I mean, you'd have to be pretty smart to study
physics at three, But that's that's just me. Well, what
about Picasso? He had a total grasp of the fundamentals
(03:44):
of art before the age of twelve. But again, these lists,
like you said, are so dominated by guys. And we
have nothing against boy geniuses, not not at all. But
when I came upon not one, but two countdowns that
shaller remain nameless, that contained between both of them a
single female prodigy. You start to wonder what's going on
(04:09):
with this, And as we'll get into in the podcast,
there are some compelling patterns within or among i should say,
prodigies that does skew towards certain peculiarities with the male brain,
right and Lynn Goldsmith addressing the lack of girls from
(04:29):
these lists, she cited a study that describes an uncomfortably
large number of historical cases of exceedingly gifted women scientists
and mathematicians who found that they had to fight for
the simple privilege of instruction in their chosen fields. And
this is something that we kind of touched on in
our stem episodes because the fact that you have to
(04:50):
fight to even study something really affects whether you can
develop the skills and abilities in those areas. Yeah, and
this is a subject for an their podcast, but it
often relates to perhaps our concept of the genius as
being male. But when we look at some of these
(05:12):
incredible lady minds, we can't leave out seventeenth century naturalist
and philosopher and Conway. By the time she was twelve,
she had already learned several languages and had begun serious
study of science and philosophy under her older brother. She
continued these studies throughout her lifetime, and in her early
forties she wrote a treatise entitled Principles of the Most
(05:34):
Ancient and Modern Philosophy, which ended up influencing to to
make a long story short, influencing a lot of mathematical
minds at the time. And speaking of math, when we
look at the story of Maria Agnesi, who became known
for the math studies that she completed while still in
her twenties, we see why there might have been more
(05:57):
impediments to women being recognized as geniuses to being able
to pursue those scholarly interests that they would naturally have
as these prodigies um Her father, who was also a
math professor at the University of Bologna, first noticed her
intellectual precocity, and he hired a fellow mathematician to service
(06:21):
her tutor. But on top of having to study all
this math that she was really great at, she also
had to oversee the education and care of her twenty
younger siblings. Uh, there's so much ah with that. But
but she still was able to publish a collection of
a hundred and ninety essays on philosophy, logic mechanics, elasticity,
(06:44):
celestial mechanics, and of course Newton's theory of universal gravitation
at the age of twenty. So absolutely this woman is
a prodigy if she is able to care for twenty children.
She reminds me of Lillian Gilbreath, the mother or modern management,
who we talked about in our engineering podcast, who did
all of this amazing work with an engineering and also
(07:07):
had twelve kids. Moving into a female prodigy of the
more modern era is Schicuntla Devi, who was born in
She is a mental calculator, able to perform exceedingly complex
arithmetic calculations with lightning speed. And you know, if you've
ever read any Oliver Stacks, you know about these incredible
(07:28):
brains who can make these computations at lightning speed. But
what's so awesome about Debby is she's the only case
of a girl calculator described in literature. So who knows
how many there have been, but she is the one
that the history books shall remember well. Speaking of being
a human calculator, you do see just with those three prodigies.
(07:51):
Right there, this pattern that you'll see among other prodigies
of being really drawn to man and science, two very
rules oriented disciplines. Um, But first, can we take a
moment away from the numbers and talk just a tiny
bit about words and what prodigy really means, because it
(08:14):
didn't just start out as a child who could do
something exceptional with their baby brains. Right. The origins of
the word lie with the Latin word prodigum, which means
prophetic sign or omen, and in the late fifteenth century
the word prodigy was used to refer to a sign portent,
something extraordinary from which omens are drawn. But then by
(08:36):
the sixteen fifties that meaning of the child with exceptional
abilities is first recorded. But moving to today, when we
hear about child prodigies, gifted children, savants, the lines between
them are often murky, but they are distinct things, and
we're focusing specifically in this episode on prodigies. And even
(09:01):
though prodigies and savants are marked by their remarkable capabilities
in specific domains like music, art, math, chess, in particular,
savant syndrome is more of a marker of an overall disability. Right,
uh noted researcher Daryld Trefford uh talks about savant syndrome
(09:22):
as islands of genius and ability in persons with certain
limitations or disability, like kids with autism, spectrum disorders, or
other central nervous system injuries, diseases or disorders. So it's
kind of like you're a genius despite the fact that
you have a disability. And so the approach to savants
is often clinical. We need to fix their deficits. Whereas
(09:45):
when you look at the definition of prodigy coming from
David Feldman, who's a psychologist at University, a prodigy is
a child, typically under ten, who performs at the level
of a highly trained adult in a very demanding field
or endeavor. The approach to prodigies is for more of
a psychological perspective. We assume they're blessed and we want
(10:06):
to foster their incredible abilities. Yeah, And whereas gifted kids
do perform at a high level academically, prodigies are above
and beyond and it's usually focused in one area. Um,
but where did the modern interests and gifted children and
prodigies come from? Its fascinating because we have to talk
(10:29):
about this. Stanford psychologist named Louis Terman who coined the
term gifted to describe these kids who he felt like,
we're a lot like himself. Um and and really what
he wanted to do with his research on gifted kids
and prodigies was to crush the stereotype of the brainy,
(10:50):
bookish kid as just a frail oddball who couldn't get
along with other people, right, because he himself had grown
up on a farm with a lot of hardy siblings,
but he himself was was kind of bookish, and he
was sick of the stereotype that he was somehow weaker
just because he used his brains over his brawn. And
so when he came to Stanford in nineteen ten, he
(11:11):
was eager to measure intelligence and get to work in
that field. And so he adopted Benet's intelligence test for
US kids, calling at the Stanford Binet Test, and he
called this level of intelligence that he was trying to
capture the intelligence quotient i Q. And in nineteen sixteen,
when he released the book The Measurement of Intelligence, it
(11:34):
ushered in widespread i Q testing. But there is a
dark underbelly to these i Q tests because womp womp
Terman was also kind of a fan of eugenics. Yeah,
this was a major push behind his effort to identify
these gifted kids because he and his group of intelligence
(11:56):
tester testers envisioned i Q scores dictating what kind of
education and jobs a person could get. So whatever you're
a queue was, you would be a leader or you
would be institutionalized and discouraged from having children. Yeah. In
other words, Termin was pro sterilization for people who did
(12:17):
not consider that's smart um. But through i Q testing,
Termin identified more than a thousand subjects between the ages
of three and twenty eight with high i q s
for his grand study called the Genetic Study of Genius,
which has since been renamed the Term and Study of
Gifted Children. And he tracked these kids as long as
(12:42):
he lived, and some of these kids, who are obviously
now adults, are still being tracked to see what the
correlations are between having these high i q s. And
he also collected their personal information from them obviously, and
how they performed in life in terms of marriage, in
terms of jobs, uh, whether or not they got any
professional awards, things like that. And while this incredible study
(13:06):
basically helped establish methods for longitudinal studies and gave a
great snapshot of lives affected by World War one, World
War two, the Depression, all of this stuff. There were
some things that were undermining his study. That included his
personal relationships with the kids, the fact that the group
was overwhelmingly white, urban and middle class, and the gender
(13:27):
imbalance eight hundred and fifty six boys versus six hundred
seventy two girls, not to mention that there was no
comparison group. And even Terman himself was confused by the
gender imbalance because he, you know, he had asked for
he had enlisted teachers basically to help him identify the
top students in the class, and so he was surprised
too that they were more boys. Yeah, but I mean
(13:49):
it's when you look at that sample population, they're almost
all exclusively too, from California, for instance. So it's more,
how do kids in California who were brought up with
significant financial means fair? And they fair all right? Um,
two thirds of the men and women earned bachelor's degrees,
(14:10):
which is at ten times the national rate, and that
was happening during the Great Depression. On top of that,
and for instance, they collectively earned three d and fifty patents.
Although this was something that was pointed out in a
few articles. None of the kids in that Genius study
went on to become Nobel Prize winners. And actually I
(14:31):
think three two or three of the boys who signed
up for it but were later turned away went on
to win Nobel Prizes in physics. Boom, there you go. Um.
One interesting thing gender related from this term and study
is that the women in Termans study had fewer children
(14:52):
and bore them later in life than others of their generation.
More went to college and grad school, and more had careers,
and more remained unmarried, and the sort of foreshadows later trends.
So these California termites as they called themselves, were sort
of ahead of the curve. And despite the methodological flaws
in terman study, he was able to highlight shared characteristics
(15:16):
among the termites that you would still see today with
child prodigies. And there are three big factors that stood out. Obviously,
these kids have high i q s, but there's also
a lot of parental encouragement going on and confidence rather
than just having a high i Q. Right, And when
you look into the definition of prodigy that we get
(15:40):
with help from Terman, but also people like Feldman Um.
The definition of prodigy puts an emphasis on performance as
a criterion for calling someone a prodigy, as opposed to
things like i Q testing just looking at their i
Q prodigiousness as a distinctly human phenomenon. So, Kristen, you
just mentioned parental encouragement, so tied up and being a
(16:02):
prodigy is that it can only occur with the support
and assistance of other human beings. And so when you
look at parents roles, they're often involved in the same
or related field as their child prodigies. For example, Picasso
and Mozart's parents were in the same fields as their
prodigious children. And these parents are often older when they
(16:23):
have kids and are generally willing to devote major chunks
of time and energy to develop their children's talents. And
so behind this is the whole idea that like, okay, well,
you might be a frigant genius, but if nobody helps
foster your abilities, you're not going to flourish. And when
it comes to fostering abilities, there's also this emphasis on
the specific realms within which prodigious behavior appears, as opposed
(16:47):
to again, psychometric intelligence, which aims to assess general intellectual ability.
You have kids who are incredible at math, incredible at chess,
who are creating the incredible complex paintings, and they tend
to be unusually focused, determined, and highly motivated to reach
(17:09):
the highest levels of their fields. One father of a
prodigy described his son's passion for math as a rage
to master. Yeah, in order to punish him, they would
tell him that he had to go play outside, because
that's all the kid wanted to do was read and
do math problems. Interesting, It's like an addict feeding their
(17:32):
math addiction. Well. Some other common characteristics of prodigies include
great confidence in their abilities, along with a naive sense
of these abilities in relation to those of others. There's
often a surprise that these kids experience that others don't
have their same abilities. They're like, you weren't three when
you want a Nobel prize? Yeah, exactly, And I would
(17:55):
never want to play a chess prodigy. They would be
sorely disappointed. Yeah, I would just start giggling nervously and
walk away. But when you look at the science behind prodigies,
asking the question of what exactly is going on in
these kids brains what sets them apart. Scientists still aren't sure. Yeah,
(18:16):
it is still a little murky. And while we talked
about how you can't have a prodigy without a supportive parent,
most of the arguments talking about the science of prodigies
focuses on nature over nurture, Because yes, you might have
a supportive parent who make sure that you do all
your studying and you have the money to go to
college at the age of five, But if you don't
(18:36):
already have some of that structural foundation in place already
that you know, becoming a prodigy isn't going to happen anyway. Yeah,
and Ellen Winner, who was a psychologist who has studied
and written about prodigies, told NPR quote, I believe that
anything that shows up so early without training has got
(18:57):
to be either a genetic or some other bio logical basis.
But at the same time, it's still not clear whether
her hunch is right, whether that prodigy brain is any
different from the brain of other kids, partially because they
simply have not done a lot of neurological research on
these exceptional children. Because like we talked about earlier, it's
(19:19):
the savants who have a lot of the scientific research,
because that's like, we need to fix these kids. It's
more of a psychologist's full philosophical debate over over prodigies. Almost, yeah,
I mean because also with the savants, if they can
find the areas of the brains that are working in overdrive,
then maybe they can apply that to help other areas
(19:41):
of the brain catch up, whereas prodigies will be fine
most likely. Yeah, And so looking at brain differences, there
is the possibility that gifted children, for instance, have greater
specialization in brain areas that control motor behavior and increased
communication between the two hemispheres, although nobody's quite sure whether
prodigies are born with superior motor skills or if they
(20:03):
developed them through intense practice. Well, and there are also
issues of genetics that come up a lot because the
kids from term and study those termites went on to
have exceptionally bright children as well, with six scoring in
the gifted range, although again there's a nature question of
whether or not those kids were being brought up told
(20:24):
that they were bright because they have exceptionally bright parents
as well. And then there's this theory of ancestral memory,
which is something that a guy named darryld Trefford has
talked about and and he thinks that maybe something called
epigenetics is responsible for this. And epigenetics is essentially a
mechanism in which environmental influences will make small changes in
(20:49):
our d N a that helped to control the systems
that switch genes off and on and pass those changes down.
In other words, DNA in our acts with the environment
to improve our mental functioning. Yeah, there's the commonly cited
um story of Yehudi Menuhin, who is a violinist, and
(21:12):
his family story is really interesting. He comes from a
long line of extremely musical, extremely spiritual uh Jewish Men
who incorporated music into their religious practices, and so he's
used as an example of this ancestral memory theory because
(21:32):
even though his family immigrated to the US and distanced
themselves from their extremely traditional and religious ancestors, there was
something in him, as people talk about being in other prodigies,
that that drew him to music from a very young
age to become this incredible, amazing, talented prodigy. And that
(21:56):
sounds very similar to this idea of prodigies being quote
unquote re tuned to grasp and master particular areas. And
this is something put forward by that toughs psychologist Feldman
Um who thinks that maybe they are equipped with a
readiness to absorb and also express knowledge, and that would
explain how and why prodigies are drawn to very domain
(22:18):
specific skills. You know, there we talked about how they're
extreme specialists finally attuned to a particular field of knowledge,
rather than having these kids just be amazing across the board.
And then finally there's this theory put forward by Larissa
Shavivna and Martha Morlock of the increased sensitivity. They think
(22:39):
that there are these sensitive periods that occur when basically
your mental development can accelerate really rapidly, and and part
of what makes that process so rapid is the actualization
of the intellectual potential and the growth of those cognitive
(23:00):
resources at the same time. And it manifests as a
child's passionate pursuit of consuming interest. But you can almost
think of it as like really rapidly building a lego ladder,
but of knowledge and memory, a lego ladder of knowledge. Um.
But but speaking you mentioned memory, there is obviously two
ties with exceptional working memory in these kids. This is
(23:23):
something that studies do seem to bear out in terms
of prodigies having brains that have just a finer tuned
ability to hold information in the memory while being able
to manipulate and process other incoming information. Because when we
when we think about our working memory, and how telephone numbers,
(23:46):
for instance, are split up those three digits and in
the four digits to help us hold them in our brains,
and even then sometimes I have trouble remembering them, whereas
prodigies can see a whole string of numbers and many
manipulate them at the same time. Right, And that basically
you have all of this stuff stored up in the
(24:07):
back of your mind, but a prodigy is taking new
information that comes in and immediately being able to kind
of rummage around in the long term memory closet and
pull some stuff out and apply the new information to
the old information. And therefore, like we just talked about,
build that sort of cognitive ladder to come to new
and faster conclusions. Yeah, and research on gifted kids by
(24:31):
Camilla Benbo has also highlighted uh specializations in whether the
child is more mathematically oriented or more verbally oriented, and
how the math talent has a working memory that's really
great obviously at retaining numerical, spatial, and visual information, whereas
(24:51):
verbal kids tend to retain the words. Because I'm telling you,
if you read I had a little ladybug, I mean
just the playful puns kid, I did have some good
rhymes in there, though, oh no, I'm sure you did
um well. So the researchers talk about how this enhanced memory,
(25:13):
like let's go back to the ladder one more time.
This enhanced memory is a function of a match between
the kind of information that is needing to be recalled
and the kind of talent possessed. So in a prodigy,
it's that unique intersection of I already sort of have
this capability, this foundation of information that I've grasped onto,
whether it's math, whether it's chest, whether it's the piano,
(25:37):
and you know, and that just intersects with what they're
able to do well. Speaking of the brain of the prodigy,
and also this puzzle of why we hear about male
prodigies boy prodigies a lot more often, or at least
we have historically compared to female prodigies. We have to
(25:58):
talk about a potential link with autism spectrum disorders because
this is also some of the newer research that is
coming up with these extremely gifted children. Right in Joanne
Ruthstats and Jordan Rbach looked at eight high i Q
kids whose various abilities were all over the place, but
in common they had an extraordinary working memory. Each kid
(26:20):
scored off the charts better than the general population. But
in that study, four out of the eight prodigies had
family members who either had an autism diagnosis or had
a first or second degree relative with an autism diagnosis.
Three of the prodigies themselves had been diagnosed with autism,
and as a group, they all showed higher levels of
(26:41):
autistic traits than a control group. And people have pointed
out to how autistic like traits stand out in prodigies,
like that attention to detail, that rage to master. The
kids scored higher on this and people diagnosed with Asperger's
in fact, which is a high functioning form of autism.
And on top of that, both prodigies and kids on
(27:04):
the autism spectrum are more likely to be male, and
both are associated to with difficult pregnancies. Very interesting. Yeah Well,
Time magazine and pointed out that prodigies appear to benefit
from certain autistic tendencies while avoiding the shortfalls of others.
So think of a savant versus the prodigy um and
the researchers Rustats and Herbak wrote one possible explanation for
(27:27):
the child prodigies lack of deficits is that while the
child prodigies may have a form of autism, a biological
modifier suppresses many of the typical signs of autism, but
leaves attention to detail, a quality that enhances their prodigiousness
undiminished or even enhanced. So, in other words, prodigies genetic
(27:48):
traits don't compromise their social skills or lead them to
suffer from disabilities that typically typically accompany autism spectrum disorders. Yeah,
for instance, when you look at a kid like Jacob Barnett,
who might stump from earlier because his name is popped
up in the media a lot in the past couple
of years because he was diagnosed with autism at two
and his mom eventually took him out of special lett.
(28:10):
I think when he was in elementary school because the
teachers told her that he would really just never even
be able to tie his shoes. But now he's fourteen
and have having been allowed to kind of guide his
own studies. He's now studying condensed matter of physics in college.
(28:31):
And I watched part of a ted X talk that
he gave about math and about how when he first
applied to college he had to wait a semester because
the administrators weren't sure whether or not he was really ready.
And he was like, you know what I did. I
just started studying this theorem that some people are saying,
(28:52):
if I solve it, I could be up for the
Nobel Prize. No big deal, No big deal. But I
mean clearly he's I mean he's giving a TEDEX talk.
I mean that he's he's socialized very well and is
performing far above what special ed teachers thought that he
would be able to. And talking about her son's just
(29:13):
incredible abilities, Barnett's mom talks about how, you know, he
wasn't speaking, There was just no getting through to him.
She was afraid she would lose him, almost But it
was a matter, in her opinion, as his mother, of
getting him in front of something that just absolutely captured
that incredible focus. Yeah, and surprisingly it was shadows. He
(29:36):
was fascinated by shadows and how they played on the
wall and and you know, in other environments and was
also fascinated by stars, and she just let him kind
of go with that and really start exploring and and
it brings up all of these theories about how you
have you know, those either those sensitive periods or that
(29:59):
pre tunement to just absorb all that knowledge in that
specialized field at such an accelerated pace. And there's I
feel like there's a lot of um like media questioning
as far as what happens to prodigies when they grow up.
There's less, as we've talked about, less actual research into
what happens to these kids when they become adults. One
(30:21):
suggestion is that just the prodigy, the quote unquote prodigy
disappears as the child gets older and they catch up
to adults and kids catch up with them. Yeah. I mean,
there's sort of a limitation to the kinds of fields
that prodigies are often drawn to, in that it is
very mathey or very focused on chess. It's often uh
(30:45):
fields within very specific and laid out rules, like that
the work has kind of already been done, and so
the prodigy sometimes tapers off when they have to think
more creatively and to apply their knowledge to more open
ended kinds of things, right, which is why it's so
rare to see a prodigy like writing, uh, you know,
(31:08):
writing a novel or writing a play, because a lot
of the time, something like writing a play or writing
a scientific paper calls on so many other resources in
life experiences that a three year old, however, brilliant, would
not have. Although you see so many visual art prodigies,
or specifically with painting, I feel like that's kind of
(31:28):
the hot prodigy today is the child painter. And that's
one reason why that psychologist Ellen Winner was really impressed
by the story of a child prodigy cellist who was
I think he's now in his late twenties early thirties
and is branching out from classical and trying to do
(31:50):
more experimental types of music. And she said, that's really
rare to see within a prodigy because it's almost like
that that specialized part of the brain is so specialized
they get locked in right well, and and I mean
not even just being locked into a specialty, but also
being told your entire freaking life by your parents and
(32:11):
teachers and whoever else is around you that your omite,
you're so incredible, you're so incredible, You're so gifted your genius.
I mean a lot of in interviews, a lot of
these child prodigies and gifted children grow up and they
are like, God, you guys put too much pressure on me.
I you know, I couldn't live up to a single
thing that you expected of me. There was one kid
who was a math prodigy and he is an adult
(32:33):
working at McDonald's. You know. I mean a lot of
these kids are just like, there was way too much
pressure when when I was no longer the hot thing,
you know, I just felt like I was a failure. Yeah.
There's a young artist right now who first made her
name a couple of years ago when she was a
six year old I believe painter. And now she came
(32:55):
out with a new exhibit as a nine year old painter.
And people aren't disinterested because it becomes less fascinating the
older that they get. But for that reason, Ellen Winner says,
it's so dangerous to call children geniuses. Instead, she says,
say something along the lines of your terrifically musical, and
you're going to have a wonderful musical life. Um. And
(33:19):
I also thought it was noteworthy that in that story
on child prodigies that first got me thinking about this subject.
On NPR, the twelve year old pianists that they were
interviewing hates the word prodigy. She says, please don't call
me a prodigy. Yeah, it's it's a lot of pressure
(33:39):
I can't imagine. Well, and especially these days, if you're
a prodigy, you are going to be immediately blasted out
onto the internet too. That's going to become your identity,
probably forever. But I do still wonder though, with that
gender aspect, with overall the names of prodigies usually being
(34:02):
more boy names than girl names, if it does link
over to that relationship, possibly with autism and maybe how
autism affects the male brain more or differently. I mean,
so if we look at one and eight kids has autism,
but that number is one in fifty four for boys,
(34:23):
were naturally going to find more boys with autism, And
if autism is linked to being a prodigy, I would
think those numbers would translate over. But I also think
that researcher Goldsmith, who we mentioned at the top of
the podcast, has there's something to her theory that hey,
if women aren't welcome in a field, you're not going
to be able to even ever recognize their genius in
(34:45):
it exactly because autism obviously can't explain that gap entirely,
because not all prodigies are autistic, and not all autistic
kids are prodigies, And so I have a feeling that
the nature side of that argument is maybe more to blame,
because I do I do you think there's something to
(35:07):
this theory that we think of geniuses as men? Mhm.
Podcast for another time, Podcast for another time. Maybe our
listeners have the answer. Oh, if there are any prodigies listening,
please right into us, or parents of prodigies. If you
are a parent too, do you think about whether or
not your child is a prodigy? I thought about this
(35:28):
while reading up on all of these children, and I
can see how if you're a parent and all of
a sudden your child starts playing the piano magnificently, and
you might get so overzealous, But it seems like there's
also a lot of responsibility for the parent as well. Yeah,
but what about you, Caroline, would you want a child
(35:49):
prodigy of your own? Of my very own? That does
seem like a really big responsibility. I would in no
way be able to teach or tutor a child in math.
So I guess I would I would like a prodigy dog.
A prodigy dog like it had a pre tunement for
(36:10):
not wedding the carpet and a pretunement for fetching you treats.
That's right, Yeah, the dog catches me the treats. I
think we're onto something. So follow up episodes on boy
geniuses and prodigy dogs. Correct great? Well with that, we
want to hear from you mathematicians, pianists. Who's listening less? No,
(36:36):
mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
send your emails. You can also tweet us at mom
Stuff podcast and find us on Facebook and messages there
as well. And we have a couple of messages to
share with you when we come right back from a
quick break. And now back to our letters. Well, we
have a couple of letters here from some women and engineering.
(36:59):
All right, Uh, this is obviously in response to our
episode on women in engineering. Yeah, yeah, who's the prodigy now?
And this letter is unsigned, so I'll just dive right in.
As a recent female graduate with a degree in biochemical engineering,
I think that the STEMS series is awesome. I was
lucky enough to have family members in the engineering field
(37:21):
to encourage me to pursue an engineering degree since I
chose biomedical. The male to female ratio is pretty good
at my school, but now that I'm in the real world,
I am one of three women in my department. I
don't find this intimidating, though. I find it empowering that
I am just as capable as all of the men
in the room, and I love the field that I'm
working in. As for the industrial engineering being a quote
(37:43):
unquote joke engineer, at least at my school, that didn't
originate from the amount of women in the field, but
from the fact that they only take half engineering classes
and half business classes, which when you compare the workloads,
seems much easier. Although this may be true, I think
there are also many in engineers who don't have a
skill set to work in a more people oriented setting,
(38:04):
so the two are very hard to compare. So thanks
for that insight, UM. I have a letter here from Sherry,
who followed her father's footsteps into engineering. Sherry says engineering
work can be interesting, challenging, and project oriented, and many
jobs are just eight am to five pm on week days,
and she says it's usually a more family friendly career
(38:24):
path compared to others. Plus, demand for engineers tends to
be stronger than in most other professions. In my experience,
I found that male attitudes, especially in undergrad tended to
be very positive towards women being in engineering. The guys
love that they could discuss science and math with a girl,
and they seemed to wish they were more in engineering.
I must confess, though, that my experience and undergrad as
an engineering student was miserable, suffering from the impostor syndrome
(38:47):
and from a desire to have good enough grades for
law school. I studied very hard and had very little
social life. I can remember studying on many a Friday night.
In the end, those miserable four years were definitely worth it, though,
because I am very happy with my career now. I
think many women don't realize that engineering is a valuable
stepping stone toward other careers like management, law, and even
(39:07):
sales and marketing. You have to be able to understand
the product in order to spell it. More and more
folks on Wall Street have backgrounds in physics, math and
engineering too, so even if you aren't passionate about engineering itself,
it can set you on a path to and open
doors for other fulfilling careers. So thank you Sherry for
sharing your story, and thanks again to everyone who's written in.
(39:28):
Mom Stuff at discovery dot com is where you can
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(39:49):
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(40:30):
dot com slash stuff Mom
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told You. From House toupports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and Caroline a little with something about me.
I usually start out my day listening to Morning Edition
on NPR, as you I am. I am an NPR listener,
(00:27):
I'm an NPR fan. And a little while ago a
story caught my attention because it was on Child Prodigies
and the subject of the story was this young woman
who started composing these gorgeous piano pieces when she was
(00:48):
three years old. Three man as someone who started playing
the piano when she was twenties six, I'm quite oppressed. Yeah,
And she had already recorded a few albums, she had
played Carnegie Hall she was twelve, and she even played
an impromptu peace for the host. He asked. He set
(01:08):
the scene of going having to show up at the
NPR studios really really early in the morning to record
Morning Edition. How quiet and kind of gloomy it is there,
And so he asked if she could play piece inspired
by that, and she did and it was beautiful, and
I thought, there, you know, it's interesting to hear about
this young woman being focused on as a child prodigy,
(01:30):
because I feel like a lot of times it's always
the boy prodigy, right, And you don't even realize when
you're reading all of these articles and things about prodigies
that it is all boys. It's very very male focused, right.
And so some commonly cited prodigies that a lot of
people bring up in these articles include Mozart, who began
(01:54):
playing the piano with three, picked up the violin at four,
wrote his first symphony by eight, and read his first
opera by twelve N B D New Big Deal Um.
There's also William James Sidis, who could read at eighteen months,
had written four books by seven, and was fluent in
eight languages at the same time. Gave a lecture at
Harvard at nine and entered Harvard at eleven, and his
(02:16):
background was in the field of math and cosmology. And
for lovecraft fans out there, yes, HP Lovecraft, one of
the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century, learned
to read at two and was writing complex poetry by six.
I would like to note, though, that I was also
writing poetry around the same time, and my first poem
(02:38):
was called I Had a Little Ladybug I'm not even lying,
and my mother told me it was beautiful. That's a
horribul So I didn't start writing poetry until around puberty
when everything was the worst. Yeah, yeah, the dark, angsty poems.
You know, Caroline, we should just do an episode of
bringing in our teenage poetry so time. No, well, you know,
(03:01):
when Geo City has wiped out its entire archive, my
poetry was lost to the ages. No. Yeah, Well. Some
other prodigies include Kim On young, who's a Korean professor now,
but at three years old he went to college as
a physics student and no big deal, was invited to
(03:21):
the US by NASA to study as he got his
pH d in the US. Yeah, I want to say
at one point, and maybe he still does hold the
Guinness World Record for being the smartest person on the planet.
I mean, you'd have to be pretty smart to study
physics at three, But that's that's just me. Well, what
about Picasso? He had a total grasp of the fundamentals
(03:44):
of art before the age of twelve. But again, these lists,
like you said, are so dominated by guys. And we
have nothing against boy geniuses, not not at all. But
when I came upon not one, but two countdowns that
shaller remain nameless, that contained between both of them a
single female prodigy. You start to wonder what's going on
(04:09):
with this, And as we'll get into in the podcast,
there are some compelling patterns within or among i should say,
prodigies that does skew towards certain peculiarities with the male brain,
right and Lynn Goldsmith addressing the lack of girls from
(04:29):
these lists, she cited a study that describes an uncomfortably
large number of historical cases of exceedingly gifted women scientists
and mathematicians who found that they had to fight for
the simple privilege of instruction in their chosen fields. And
this is something that we kind of touched on in
our stem episodes because the fact that you have to
(04:50):
fight to even study something really affects whether you can
develop the skills and abilities in those areas. Yeah, and
this is a subject for an their podcast, but it
often relates to perhaps our concept of the genius as
being male. But when we look at some of these
(05:12):
incredible lady minds, we can't leave out seventeenth century naturalist
and philosopher and Conway. By the time she was twelve,
she had already learned several languages and had begun serious
study of science and philosophy under her older brother. She
continued these studies throughout her lifetime, and in her early
forties she wrote a treatise entitled Principles of the Most
(05:34):
Ancient and Modern Philosophy, which ended up influencing to to
make a long story short, influencing a lot of mathematical
minds at the time. And speaking of math, when we
look at the story of Maria Agnesi, who became known
for the math studies that she completed while still in
her twenties, we see why there might have been more
(05:57):
impediments to women being recognized as geniuses to being able
to pursue those scholarly interests that they would naturally have
as these prodigies um Her father, who was also a
math professor at the University of Bologna, first noticed her
intellectual precocity, and he hired a fellow mathematician to service
(06:21):
her tutor. But on top of having to study all
this math that she was really great at, she also
had to oversee the education and care of her twenty
younger siblings. Uh, there's so much ah with that. But
but she still was able to publish a collection of
a hundred and ninety essays on philosophy, logic mechanics, elasticity,
(06:44):
celestial mechanics, and of course Newton's theory of universal gravitation
at the age of twenty. So absolutely this woman is
a prodigy if she is able to care for twenty children.
She reminds me of Lillian Gilbreath, the mother or modern management,
who we talked about in our engineering podcast, who did
all of this amazing work with an engineering and also
(07:07):
had twelve kids. Moving into a female prodigy of the
more modern era is Schicuntla Devi, who was born in
She is a mental calculator, able to perform exceedingly complex
arithmetic calculations with lightning speed. And you know, if you've
ever read any Oliver Stacks, you know about these incredible
(07:28):
brains who can make these computations at lightning speed. But
what's so awesome about Debby is she's the only case
of a girl calculator described in literature. So who knows
how many there have been, but she is the one
that the history books shall remember well. Speaking of being
a human calculator, you do see just with those three prodigies.
(07:51):
Right there, this pattern that you'll see among other prodigies
of being really drawn to man and science, two very
rules oriented disciplines. Um, But first, can we take a
moment away from the numbers and talk just a tiny
bit about words and what prodigy really means, because it
(08:14):
didn't just start out as a child who could do
something exceptional with their baby brains. Right. The origins of
the word lie with the Latin word prodigum, which means
prophetic sign or omen, and in the late fifteenth century
the word prodigy was used to refer to a sign portent,
something extraordinary from which omens are drawn. But then by
(08:36):
the sixteen fifties that meaning of the child with exceptional
abilities is first recorded. But moving to today, when we
hear about child prodigies, gifted children, savants, the lines between
them are often murky, but they are distinct things, and
we're focusing specifically in this episode on prodigies. And even
(09:01):
though prodigies and savants are marked by their remarkable capabilities
in specific domains like music, art, math, chess, in particular,
savant syndrome is more of a marker of an overall disability. Right,
uh noted researcher Daryld Trefford uh talks about savant syndrome
(09:22):
as islands of genius and ability in persons with certain
limitations or disability, like kids with autism, spectrum disorders, or
other central nervous system injuries, diseases or disorders. So it's
kind of like you're a genius despite the fact that
you have a disability. And so the approach to savants
is often clinical. We need to fix their deficits. Whereas
(09:45):
when you look at the definition of prodigy coming from
David Feldman, who's a psychologist at University, a prodigy is
a child, typically under ten, who performs at the level
of a highly trained adult in a very demanding field
or endeavor. The approach to prodigies is for more of
a psychological perspective. We assume they're blessed and we want
(10:06):
to foster their incredible abilities. Yeah, And whereas gifted kids
do perform at a high level academically, prodigies are above
and beyond and it's usually focused in one area. Um,
but where did the modern interests and gifted children and
prodigies come from? Its fascinating because we have to talk
(10:29):
about this. Stanford psychologist named Louis Terman who coined the
term gifted to describe these kids who he felt like,
we're a lot like himself. Um and and really what
he wanted to do with his research on gifted kids
and prodigies was to crush the stereotype of the brainy,
(10:50):
bookish kid as just a frail oddball who couldn't get
along with other people, right, because he himself had grown
up on a farm with a lot of hardy siblings,
but he himself was was kind of bookish, and he
was sick of the stereotype that he was somehow weaker
just because he used his brains over his brawn. And
so when he came to Stanford in nineteen ten, he
(11:11):
was eager to measure intelligence and get to work in
that field. And so he adopted Benet's intelligence test for
US kids, calling at the Stanford Binet Test, and he
called this level of intelligence that he was trying to
capture the intelligence quotient i Q. And in nineteen sixteen,
when he released the book The Measurement of Intelligence, it
(11:34):
ushered in widespread i Q testing. But there is a
dark underbelly to these i Q tests because womp womp
Terman was also kind of a fan of eugenics. Yeah,
this was a major push behind his effort to identify
these gifted kids because he and his group of intelligence
(11:56):
tester testers envisioned i Q scores dictating what kind of
education and jobs a person could get. So whatever you're
a queue was, you would be a leader or you
would be institutionalized and discouraged from having children. Yeah. In
other words, Termin was pro sterilization for people who did
(12:17):
not consider that's smart um. But through i Q testing,
Termin identified more than a thousand subjects between the ages
of three and twenty eight with high i q s
for his grand study called the Genetic Study of Genius,
which has since been renamed the Term and Study of
Gifted Children. And he tracked these kids as long as
(12:42):
he lived, and some of these kids, who are obviously
now adults, are still being tracked to see what the
correlations are between having these high i q s. And
he also collected their personal information from them obviously, and
how they performed in life in terms of marriage, in
terms of jobs, uh, whether or not they got any
professional awards, things like that. And while this incredible study
(13:06):
basically helped establish methods for longitudinal studies and gave a
great snapshot of lives affected by World War one, World
War two, the Depression, all of this stuff. There were
some things that were undermining his study. That included his
personal relationships with the kids, the fact that the group
was overwhelmingly white, urban and middle class, and the gender
(13:27):
imbalance eight hundred and fifty six boys versus six hundred
seventy two girls, not to mention that there was no
comparison group. And even Terman himself was confused by the
gender imbalance because he, you know, he had asked for
he had enlisted teachers basically to help him identify the
top students in the class, and so he was surprised
too that they were more boys. Yeah, but I mean
(13:49):
it's when you look at that sample population, they're almost
all exclusively too, from California, for instance. So it's more,
how do kids in California who were brought up with
significant financial means fair? And they fair all right? Um,
two thirds of the men and women earned bachelor's degrees,
(14:10):
which is at ten times the national rate, and that
was happening during the Great Depression. On top of that,
and for instance, they collectively earned three d and fifty patents.
Although this was something that was pointed out in a
few articles. None of the kids in that Genius study
went on to become Nobel Prize winners. And actually I
(14:31):
think three two or three of the boys who signed
up for it but were later turned away went on
to win Nobel Prizes in physics. Boom, there you go. Um.
One interesting thing gender related from this term and study
is that the women in Termans study had fewer children
(14:52):
and bore them later in life than others of their generation.
More went to college and grad school, and more had careers,
and more remained unmarried, and the sort of foreshadows later trends.
So these California termites as they called themselves, were sort
of ahead of the curve. And despite the methodological flaws
in terman study, he was able to highlight shared characteristics
(15:16):
among the termites that you would still see today with
child prodigies. And there are three big factors that stood out. Obviously,
these kids have high i q s, but there's also
a lot of parental encouragement going on and confidence rather
than just having a high i Q. Right, And when
you look into the definition of prodigy that we get
(15:40):
with help from Terman, but also people like Feldman Um.
The definition of prodigy puts an emphasis on performance as
a criterion for calling someone a prodigy, as opposed to
things like i Q testing just looking at their i
Q prodigiousness as a distinctly human phenomenon. So, Kristen, you
just mentioned parental encouragement, so tied up and being a
(16:02):
prodigy is that it can only occur with the support
and assistance of other human beings. And so when you
look at parents roles, they're often involved in the same
or related field as their child prodigies. For example, Picasso
and Mozart's parents were in the same fields as their
prodigious children. And these parents are often older when they
(16:23):
have kids and are generally willing to devote major chunks
of time and energy to develop their children's talents. And
so behind this is the whole idea that like, okay, well,
you might be a frigant genius, but if nobody helps
foster your abilities, you're not going to flourish. And when
it comes to fostering abilities, there's also this emphasis on
the specific realms within which prodigious behavior appears, as opposed
(16:47):
to again, psychometric intelligence, which aims to assess general intellectual ability.
You have kids who are incredible at math, incredible at chess,
who are creating the incredible complex paintings, and they tend
to be unusually focused, determined, and highly motivated to reach
(17:09):
the highest levels of their fields. One father of a
prodigy described his son's passion for math as a rage
to master. Yeah, in order to punish him, they would
tell him that he had to go play outside, because
that's all the kid wanted to do was read and
do math problems. Interesting, It's like an addict feeding their
(17:32):
math addiction. Well. Some other common characteristics of prodigies include
great confidence in their abilities, along with a naive sense
of these abilities in relation to those of others. There's
often a surprise that these kids experience that others don't
have their same abilities. They're like, you weren't three when
you want a Nobel prize? Yeah, exactly, And I would
(17:55):
never want to play a chess prodigy. They would be
sorely disappointed. Yeah, I would just start giggling nervously and
walk away. But when you look at the science behind prodigies,
asking the question of what exactly is going on in
these kids brains what sets them apart. Scientists still aren't sure. Yeah,
(18:16):
it is still a little murky. And while we talked
about how you can't have a prodigy without a supportive parent,
most of the arguments talking about the science of prodigies
focuses on nature over nurture, Because yes, you might have
a supportive parent who make sure that you do all
your studying and you have the money to go to
college at the age of five, But if you don't
(18:36):
already have some of that structural foundation in place already
that you know, becoming a prodigy isn't going to happen anyway. Yeah,
and Ellen Winner, who was a psychologist who has studied
and written about prodigies, told NPR quote, I believe that
anything that shows up so early without training has got
(18:57):
to be either a genetic or some other bio logical basis.
But at the same time, it's still not clear whether
her hunch is right, whether that prodigy brain is any
different from the brain of other kids, partially because they
simply have not done a lot of neurological research on
these exceptional children. Because like we talked about earlier, it's
(19:19):
the savants who have a lot of the scientific research,
because that's like, we need to fix these kids. It's
more of a psychologist's full philosophical debate over over prodigies. Almost, yeah,
I mean because also with the savants, if they can
find the areas of the brains that are working in overdrive,
then maybe they can apply that to help other areas
(19:41):
of the brain catch up, whereas prodigies will be fine
most likely. Yeah, And so looking at brain differences, there
is the possibility that gifted children, for instance, have greater
specialization in brain areas that control motor behavior and increased
communication between the two hemispheres, although nobody's quite sure whether
prodigies are born with superior motor skills or if they
(20:03):
developed them through intense practice. Well, and there are also
issues of genetics that come up a lot because the
kids from term and study those termites went on to
have exceptionally bright children as well, with six scoring in
the gifted range, although again there's a nature question of
whether or not those kids were being brought up told
(20:24):
that they were bright because they have exceptionally bright parents
as well. And then there's this theory of ancestral memory,
which is something that a guy named darryld Trefford has
talked about and and he thinks that maybe something called
epigenetics is responsible for this. And epigenetics is essentially a
mechanism in which environmental influences will make small changes in
(20:49):
our d N a that helped to control the systems
that switch genes off and on and pass those changes down.
In other words, DNA in our acts with the environment
to improve our mental functioning. Yeah, there's the commonly cited
um story of Yehudi Menuhin, who is a violinist, and
(21:12):
his family story is really interesting. He comes from a
long line of extremely musical, extremely spiritual uh Jewish Men
who incorporated music into their religious practices, and so he's
used as an example of this ancestral memory theory because
(21:32):
even though his family immigrated to the US and distanced
themselves from their extremely traditional and religious ancestors, there was
something in him, as people talk about being in other prodigies,
that that drew him to music from a very young
age to become this incredible, amazing, talented prodigy. And that
(21:56):
sounds very similar to this idea of prodigies being quote
unquote re tuned to grasp and master particular areas. And
this is something put forward by that toughs psychologist Feldman
Um who thinks that maybe they are equipped with a
readiness to absorb and also express knowledge, and that would
explain how and why prodigies are drawn to very domain
(22:18):
specific skills. You know, there we talked about how they're
extreme specialists finally attuned to a particular field of knowledge,
rather than having these kids just be amazing across the board.
And then finally there's this theory put forward by Larissa
Shavivna and Martha Morlock of the increased sensitivity. They think
(22:39):
that there are these sensitive periods that occur when basically
your mental development can accelerate really rapidly, and and part
of what makes that process so rapid is the actualization
of the intellectual potential and the growth of those cognitive
(23:00):
resources at the same time. And it manifests as a
child's passionate pursuit of consuming interest. But you can almost
think of it as like really rapidly building a lego ladder,
but of knowledge and memory, a lego ladder of knowledge. Um.
But but speaking you mentioned memory, there is obviously two
ties with exceptional working memory in these kids. This is
(23:23):
something that studies do seem to bear out in terms
of prodigies having brains that have just a finer tuned
ability to hold information in the memory while being able
to manipulate and process other incoming information. Because when we
when we think about our working memory, and how telephone numbers,
(23:46):
for instance, are split up those three digits and in
the four digits to help us hold them in our brains,
and even then sometimes I have trouble remembering them, whereas
prodigies can see a whole string of numbers and many
manipulate them at the same time. Right, And that basically
you have all of this stuff stored up in the
(24:07):
back of your mind, but a prodigy is taking new
information that comes in and immediately being able to kind
of rummage around in the long term memory closet and
pull some stuff out and apply the new information to
the old information. And therefore, like we just talked about,
build that sort of cognitive ladder to come to new
and faster conclusions. Yeah, and research on gifted kids by
(24:31):
Camilla Benbo has also highlighted uh specializations in whether the
child is more mathematically oriented or more verbally oriented, and
how the math talent has a working memory that's really
great obviously at retaining numerical, spatial, and visual information, whereas
(24:51):
verbal kids tend to retain the words. Because I'm telling you,
if you read I had a little ladybug, I mean
just the playful puns kid, I did have some good
rhymes in there, though, oh no, I'm sure you did
um well. So the researchers talk about how this enhanced memory,
(25:13):
like let's go back to the ladder one more time.
This enhanced memory is a function of a match between
the kind of information that is needing to be recalled
and the kind of talent possessed. So in a prodigy,
it's that unique intersection of I already sort of have
this capability, this foundation of information that I've grasped onto,
whether it's math, whether it's chest, whether it's the piano,
(25:37):
and you know, and that just intersects with what they're
able to do well. Speaking of the brain of the prodigy,
and also this puzzle of why we hear about male
prodigies boy prodigies a lot more often, or at least
we have historically compared to female prodigies. We have to
(25:58):
talk about a potential link with autism spectrum disorders because
this is also some of the newer research that is
coming up with these extremely gifted children. Right in Joanne
Ruthstats and Jordan Rbach looked at eight high i Q
kids whose various abilities were all over the place, but
in common they had an extraordinary working memory. Each kid
(26:20):
scored off the charts better than the general population. But
in that study, four out of the eight prodigies had
family members who either had an autism diagnosis or had
a first or second degree relative with an autism diagnosis.
Three of the prodigies themselves had been diagnosed with autism,
and as a group, they all showed higher levels of
(26:41):
autistic traits than a control group. And people have pointed
out to how autistic like traits stand out in prodigies,
like that attention to detail, that rage to master. The
kids scored higher on this and people diagnosed with Asperger's
in fact, which is a high functioning form of autism.
And on top of that, both prodigies and kids on
(27:04):
the autism spectrum are more likely to be male, and
both are associated to with difficult pregnancies. Very interesting. Yeah Well,
Time magazine and pointed out that prodigies appear to benefit
from certain autistic tendencies while avoiding the shortfalls of others.
So think of a savant versus the prodigy um and
the researchers Rustats and Herbak wrote one possible explanation for
(27:27):
the child prodigies lack of deficits is that while the
child prodigies may have a form of autism, a biological
modifier suppresses many of the typical signs of autism, but
leaves attention to detail, a quality that enhances their prodigiousness
undiminished or even enhanced. So, in other words, prodigies genetic
(27:48):
traits don't compromise their social skills or lead them to
suffer from disabilities that typically typically accompany autism spectrum disorders. Yeah,
for instance, when you look at a kid like Jacob Barnett,
who might stump from earlier because his name is popped
up in the media a lot in the past couple
of years because he was diagnosed with autism at two
and his mom eventually took him out of special lett.
(28:10):
I think when he was in elementary school because the
teachers told her that he would really just never even
be able to tie his shoes. But now he's fourteen
and have having been allowed to kind of guide his
own studies. He's now studying condensed matter of physics in college.
(28:31):
And I watched part of a ted X talk that
he gave about math and about how when he first
applied to college he had to wait a semester because
the administrators weren't sure whether or not he was really ready.
And he was like, you know what I did. I
just started studying this theorem that some people are saying,
(28:52):
if I solve it, I could be up for the
Nobel Prize. No big deal, No big deal. But I
mean clearly he's I mean he's giving a TEDEX talk.
I mean that he's he's socialized very well and is
performing far above what special ed teachers thought that he
would be able to. And talking about her son's just
(29:13):
incredible abilities, Barnett's mom talks about how, you know, he
wasn't speaking, There was just no getting through to him.
She was afraid she would lose him, almost But it
was a matter, in her opinion, as his mother, of
getting him in front of something that just absolutely captured
that incredible focus. Yeah, and surprisingly it was shadows. He
(29:36):
was fascinated by shadows and how they played on the
wall and and you know, in other environments and was
also fascinated by stars, and she just let him kind
of go with that and really start exploring and and
it brings up all of these theories about how you
have you know, those either those sensitive periods or that
(29:59):
pre tunement to just absorb all that knowledge in that
specialized field at such an accelerated pace. And there's I
feel like there's a lot of um like media questioning
as far as what happens to prodigies when they grow up.
There's less, as we've talked about, less actual research into
what happens to these kids when they become adults. One
(30:21):
suggestion is that just the prodigy, the quote unquote prodigy
disappears as the child gets older and they catch up
to adults and kids catch up with them. Yeah. I mean,
there's sort of a limitation to the kinds of fields
that prodigies are often drawn to, in that it is
very mathey or very focused on chess. It's often uh
(30:45):
fields within very specific and laid out rules, like that
the work has kind of already been done, and so
the prodigy sometimes tapers off when they have to think
more creatively and to apply their knowledge to more open
ended kinds of things, right, which is why it's so
rare to see a prodigy like writing, uh, you know,
(31:08):
writing a novel or writing a play, because a lot
of the time, something like writing a play or writing
a scientific paper calls on so many other resources in
life experiences that a three year old, however, brilliant, would
not have. Although you see so many visual art prodigies,
or specifically with painting, I feel like that's kind of
(31:28):
the hot prodigy today is the child painter. And that's
one reason why that psychologist Ellen Winner was really impressed
by the story of a child prodigy cellist who was
I think he's now in his late twenties early thirties
and is branching out from classical and trying to do
(31:50):
more experimental types of music. And she said, that's really
rare to see within a prodigy because it's almost like
that that specialized part of the brain is so specialized
they get locked in right well, and and I mean
not even just being locked into a specialty, but also
being told your entire freaking life by your parents and
(32:11):
teachers and whoever else is around you that your omite,
you're so incredible, you're so incredible, You're so gifted your genius.
I mean a lot of in interviews, a lot of
these child prodigies and gifted children grow up and they
are like, God, you guys put too much pressure on me.
I you know, I couldn't live up to a single
thing that you expected of me. There was one kid
who was a math prodigy and he is an adult
(32:33):
working at McDonald's. You know. I mean a lot of
these kids are just like, there was way too much
pressure when when I was no longer the hot thing,
you know, I just felt like I was a failure. Yeah.
There's a young artist right now who first made her
name a couple of years ago when she was a
six year old I believe painter. And now she came
(32:55):
out with a new exhibit as a nine year old painter.
And people aren't disinterested because it becomes less fascinating the
older that they get. But for that reason, Ellen Winner says,
it's so dangerous to call children geniuses. Instead, she says,
say something along the lines of your terrifically musical, and
you're going to have a wonderful musical life. Um. And
(33:19):
I also thought it was noteworthy that in that story
on child prodigies that first got me thinking about this subject.
On NPR, the twelve year old pianists that they were
interviewing hates the word prodigy. She says, please don't call
me a prodigy. Yeah, it's it's a lot of pressure
(33:39):
I can't imagine. Well, and especially these days, if you're
a prodigy, you are going to be immediately blasted out
onto the internet too. That's going to become your identity,
probably forever. But I do still wonder though, with that
gender aspect, with overall the names of prodigies usually being
(34:02):
more boy names than girl names, if it does link
over to that relationship, possibly with autism and maybe how
autism affects the male brain more or differently. I mean,
so if we look at one and eight kids has autism,
but that number is one in fifty four for boys,
(34:23):
were naturally going to find more boys with autism, And
if autism is linked to being a prodigy, I would
think those numbers would translate over. But I also think
that researcher Goldsmith, who we mentioned at the top of
the podcast, has there's something to her theory that hey,
if women aren't welcome in a field, you're not going
to be able to even ever recognize their genius in
(34:45):
it exactly because autism obviously can't explain that gap entirely,
because not all prodigies are autistic, and not all autistic
kids are prodigies, And so I have a feeling that
the nature side of that argument is maybe more to blame,
because I do I do you think there's something to
(35:07):
this theory that we think of geniuses as men? Mhm.
Podcast for another time, Podcast for another time. Maybe our
listeners have the answer. Oh, if there are any prodigies listening,
please right into us, or parents of prodigies. If you
are a parent too, do you think about whether or
not your child is a prodigy? I thought about this
(35:28):
while reading up on all of these children, and I
can see how if you're a parent and all of
a sudden your child starts playing the piano magnificently, and
you might get so overzealous, But it seems like there's
also a lot of responsibility for the parent as well. Yeah,
but what about you, Caroline, would you want a child
(35:49):
prodigy of your own? Of my very own? That does
seem like a really big responsibility. I would in no
way be able to teach or tutor a child in math.
So I guess I would I would like a prodigy dog.
A prodigy dog like it had a pre tunement for
(36:10):
not wedding the carpet and a pretunement for fetching you treats.
That's right, Yeah, the dog catches me the treats. I
think we're onto something. So follow up episodes on boy
geniuses and prodigy dogs. Correct great? Well with that, we
want to hear from you mathematicians, pianists. Who's listening less? No,
(36:36):
mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where you can
send your emails. You can also tweet us at mom
Stuff podcast and find us on Facebook and messages there
as well. And we have a couple of messages to
share with you when we come right back from a
quick break. And now back to our letters. Well, we
have a couple of letters here from some women and engineering.
(36:59):
All right, Uh, this is obviously in response to our
episode on women in engineering. Yeah, yeah, who's the prodigy now?
And this letter is unsigned, so I'll just dive right in.
As a recent female graduate with a degree in biochemical engineering,
I think that the STEMS series is awesome. I was
lucky enough to have family members in the engineering field
(37:21):
to encourage me to pursue an engineering degree since I
chose biomedical. The male to female ratio is pretty good
at my school, but now that I'm in the real world,
I am one of three women in my department. I
don't find this intimidating, though. I find it empowering that
I am just as capable as all of the men
in the room, and I love the field that I'm
working in. As for the industrial engineering being a quote
(37:43):
unquote joke engineer, at least at my school, that didn't
originate from the amount of women in the field, but
from the fact that they only take half engineering classes
and half business classes, which when you compare the workloads,
seems much easier. Although this may be true, I think
there are also many in engineers who don't have a
skill set to work in a more people oriented setting,
(38:04):
so the two are very hard to compare. So thanks
for that insight, UM. I have a letter here from Sherry,
who followed her father's footsteps into engineering. Sherry says engineering
work can be interesting, challenging, and project oriented, and many
jobs are just eight am to five pm on week days,
and she says it's usually a more family friendly career
(38:24):
path compared to others. Plus, demand for engineers tends to
be stronger than in most other professions. In my experience,
I found that male attitudes, especially in undergrad tended to
be very positive towards women being in engineering. The guys
love that they could discuss science and math with a girl,
and they seemed to wish they were more in engineering.
I must confess, though, that my experience and undergrad as
an engineering student was miserable, suffering from the impostor syndrome
(38:47):
and from a desire to have good enough grades for
law school. I studied very hard and had very little
social life. I can remember studying on many a Friday night.
In the end, those miserable four years were definitely worth it, though,
because I am very happy with my career now. I
think many women don't realize that engineering is a valuable
stepping stone toward other careers like management, law, and even
(39:07):
sales and marketing. You have to be able to understand
the product in order to spell it. More and more
folks on Wall Street have backgrounds in physics, math and
engineering too, so even if you aren't passionate about engineering itself,
it can set you on a path to and open
doors for other fulfilling careers. So thank you Sherry for
sharing your story, and thanks again to everyone who's written in.
(39:28):
Mom Stuff at discovery dot com is where you can
send your letters. You can also tweet us at mom
Stuff Podcasts and message us on Facebook, and you can
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(39:49):
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(40:30):
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