The Mind of the Prodigy
Posted: 07/09/2012 8:32 pm
Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D..
Cognitive psychologist, NYU; Co-founder, The Creativity Post
Prodigies dazzle us with their virtuoso violin concertos, seemingly prescient chess moves, and vivid paintings. While their work would be enough to impress us if they were 40, prodigies typically reach adult levels of performance in rule-based domains such as chess, art, and music before the age of 10.
Their performances are hard to explain from a purely deliberate-practice perspective. While it’s true that many prodigies receive support, resources, and encouragement from parents and coaches early on, their support is typically the result of a demonstrated “rage to learn,” as prodigy expert Martha J. Morelock refers to the phenomenon. The reason why they are so driven to deliberately practice in their domain requires explaining.
A new study in the journal Intelligence sheds some new light on prodigies. Psychologist Joanne Ruthsatz and violin virtuoso Jourdan Urbach adminstered the latest edition of the Stanford-Binet IQ test to nine prominent child prodigies who have all been featured on national and international television programs. Most of the children reached professional-level performance in their domain by the age of 10, and their chosen domains were notably rule-based. There was one art prodigy, one math prodigy, four musical prodigies, one prodigy who switched from music to gastronomy, and another prodigy who switched from music to art. Here’s an example to give you a flavor of the rapid development of some of these children:
The third child prodigy was 18 years old at the time of testing. He is the oldest child of two. His mother reported that he had advanced physical skills and was crawling by four months old and walking purposefully by 10 months of age. At 18 months, he was speaking in complete sentences, and by 22 months he was reading 1st and 2nd grade readers cover-to-cover, sounding out unfamiliar words.
At 28 months, the prodigy’s parents gave him a small violin. His mother reports that he demonstrated extraordinary facility with the bow, and unusual agility with his left hand (fingering hand) from the time he began playing. He completed in a month or two tasks that usually take children two years to learn. By four, he had learned all of the Suzuki volumes of classical music. In doing so, he was aided by his prodigious ability in reading music and his almost photographic memory for music. He could hear a song and play it back almost immediately. By five, he was winning regional competitions against much older students, and soon thereafter he made his professional Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall debuts as a soloist with major orchestras. At seven, he was recognized by the great virtuosos of our time and a pedagogue considered a star maker of violin prodigies took him on as her youngest student. He attended Juilliard’s Pre-College. He began to tour nationally by age 13 with a huge repertoire, including several different concerti and concert pieces that he had committed to memory.
Testing results
Total IQ Score = 129; Fluid reasoning = 106; Knowledge = 126; Quantitative Reasoning = 119; Visual Spatial Abilities = 126; Working Memory = 141
Full article here.
If being a prodigy was a matter of mind preformance at birth, how do you explain, Susan Polgar, that you and your two sisters were all three chess geniuses in your childhood?
Here is the choice: because you were all three born with a super special brain or because your father Laszlo educated you a certain way (the “Polgar experiment”)
I am a violinist myself, and I can tell you that everybody I know who is super talented has had a very special education. That most geniuses have musician parents. That does include Mozart.
And finally, I have noticed that people who are great in an area are rarely great in all sorts of things. Nothing allows to say that Bobby Fischer would have been great at anything else that didn’t require pure calculation. Of course, the type of intelligence required by chess fits with IQ which is a purely logical test, and good players are super well trained at logical reasoning.
Now of course, people LOOOVE IQ and everything that is favoring nature versus nurture; the fact that we are inherently differents is always great to justify social order.