PRIMARY SOURCES
Halberstam, David. Playing for Keeps. Broadway Books, 2000.
Hulbert, Ann. “The Prodigy Puzzle.” New York Times, November 20, 2005.
Levitin, Daniel J. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Dutton, 2006.
Ma, Marina. My Son, Yo-Yo. Chinese University Press, 1996.
Terman, Lewis M. “The Discovery and Encouragement of Exceptional Talent.” Walter Van Dyke Bingham Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, March 25, 1954.
Terman, Lewis M. Genetic Studies of Genius. Stanford University Press.
Volume I: Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children (1925).
Volume II: The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses (1926).
Volume III: The Promise of Youth, Follow-up Studies of a Thousand Gifted Children (1930).
Volume IV: The Gifted Child Grows Up (1947).
Volume V: The Gifted Group at Mid-Life (1959).
Winner, Ellen. “The origins and ends of giftedness.” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 159–69.
CHAPTER NOTES
They called it “hang time.”
The fascination with Jordan’s flight became so deep that after a while, physicists felt compelled to jump in and reassure people that Jordan was not, in fact, defying gravity.
“By bringing his knees up, he’s raising his center of mass relative to his head,” explained Michael Kruger, chairman of physics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. “He does that on his way up. On the way down, of course, he lowers his legs and that lowers his center of mass which is bringing it back to where it normally is, which effectively raises his head relative to the center of mass. The head no longer follows the parabola. The head stays up there at one height. So what you get is during the entire time, the head stays at the same height. The center of mass goes up and down, through gravity and him manipulating his center of mass.
“When we look at each other, we don’t intuitively know where our center of mass is. We fixate on things, like the head. But this really is happening; the head is staying constant for an unnaturally long time because he manipulates his center of mass.” (Grathoff, “Science of Hang Time.”)
The American Association of Physics Teachers provides this explanation:
How high someone can jump depends on the force used to push on the floor when starting to jump, which in turn depends on the strength and power of the jumper’s leg muscles. The harder and more powerful the jump, the higher and longer the flight. In order to leap four feet into the air, the hang time would be 1.0 seconds. Jordan had a few tricks up his sleeve to make that hang time seem longer. When he dunked, he held onto the ball a bit longer than most players, and actually placed it in the basket on the way down. He also pulled his legs up as the jump progressed so it appeared that he was jumping higher. But it still all happened in less than one second. (American Association of Physics Teachers, “Slam Dunk Science.”)
“pure genius is something very, very rare”: Halberstam, Playing for Keeps, p. 9.
“If Michael Jordan was some kind of genius, there had been few signs of it when he was young”: Halberstam, Playing for Keeps, p 17.
Yo-Yo Ma, on the other hand, showed his stuff from very early on: Ma, My Son, Yo-Yo.
Pablo Casals called him simply “Wonder Boy”: Ma, My Son, Yo-Yo, p. 80.
researchers have discovered that child prodigies and adult superachievers are very often not the same people. For every wonder child Yo-Yo Ma who also thrives in adulthood, there is a long list of child prodigies who never become remarkable adult achievers.
“Most gifted children, even most child prodigies, do not go on to become adult creators,” says Boston College’s Ellen Winner. (Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69.)
At the same time, an equally long list of profound adult achievers manage to attain greatness without first showing any profound abilities as children—a list that includes Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Kant, da Vinci, and Einstein.
This list comes from Malcolm Gladwell, in a talk he gave to the Association for Psychological Science in 2006. (Wargo, “The myth of prodigy and why it matters.”)
San Jose State University psychologist Gregory Feist adds: “Early childhood talent in music by no means is a necessary or a sufficient condition for adult creative achievement. It is often the case that the musically most-accomplished adults do not begin to set themselves apart in any significant way until middle adolescence.” (Feist, “The Evolved Fluid Specificity of Human Creative Talent,” p. 69).
Jeremy Bentham began studying Latin at age three: Dinwiddy, Bentham, p. 11.
John von Neumann could divide eight-digit numbers in his head by age six: Myhrvold, “John von Neumann.”
Seattle’s Adora Svitak began writing stories at age five and published her first book at age seven: Bate, “‘Dora the Explorer’ shows pupils the way.”
Ellen Winner responded in 2000 that “Ericsson’s research demonstrates the importance of hard work but does not rule out the role of innate ability … [We] conclude that intensive training is necessary for the acquisition of expertise, but not that it is sufficient.”
Winner also carefully reviewed now-known key ingredients of early achievement—motivation, independence, high expectations, and family nurturance—and, one by one, hypothesized that each could theoretically be consequences of innate giftedness rather than independent environmental ingredients:
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 … This intrinsic drive is part and parcel of an exceptional, inborn giftedness.
Parents of gifted children grant their children more than the usual amount of independence. But we do not know whether granting independence leads to high achievement, or whether it is the recognition of the child’s gift that leads to the granting of independence. It is also possible that gifted children are particularly strong willed and single minded and thus demand independence.
Parents of gifted children typically have high expectations, and also model hard work and high achievement themselves. But it is logically possible that gifted children have simply inherited their gift from their parents, who also happen to be hardworking achievers.
The families of gifted children are child-centered, meaning that family life is often totally focused on the child’s needs. But the fact that parents spend a great deal of time with their gifted child does not mean that they create the gift. It is likely that parents first notice signs of exceptionality, and then respond by devoting themselves to the development of their child’s extraordinary ability. (Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness.”)
While all these statements are logically plausible, they are each challenged by the evidence, by common sense, and by their own extreme unidirectionality. To declare with confidence that intrinsic motivation is inborn is to blatantly ignore early human psychology. While it’s clear that biology contributes to personality, there’s every evidence that it is not the sole determinant. To suggest that childhood independence could be caused wholly by the actions of a child is absurd. To suggest that parents’ high expectations and modeling of hard work and high achievement could possibly have zero effect on a child because that child has simply inherited the “gift” of motivation and talent from their parents is to embrace a genetic determinism even stronger than that of Galton. And finally, to say it is “likely” that the child-centeredness of families with precocious children begins wholly after the discovery of an exceptional ability is to ignore the variety of parenting styles the world around.
“Necessary but not sufficient” became a common reaction to Ericsson as many professionals clung to the unsustainable notion of innate gifts: For example, John Cloud, “Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?” Time, February 13, 2009.
We also know for sure that early musical exposure can work the same way.
Abrams, Michael. “The Biology of … Perfect Pitch: Can Your Child Learn Some of Mozart’s Magic?” Discover, December 1, 2001.
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.
Deutsch, Diana. “Tone Language Speakers Possess Absolute Pitch.” Presentation at the 138th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, November 4, 1999.
Dingfelder, S. “Most people show elements of absolute pitch.” Monitor on Psychology 36, no. 2 (February 2005): 33.
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.
Lee, Karen. “An Overview of Absolute Pitch.” Published online at https://web space.utexas.edu/kal463/www/abspitch.html, November 16, 2005.
Imperceptibly, like water evaporating into a rain cloud, tiny events pave the way for development in one direction or another.
The sudden emergence may sometimes appear to happen, but it doesn’t really happen. “We found no rigorous evidence for the sudden emergence of superior abilities in both prodigies and gifted students,” reports Ericsson. (Ericsson et al., “Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance,” p. 34.)
For example, Winner points out that mathematically and musically “gifted” individuals tend to use both lobes of the brain for tasks usually dominated by the left hemisphere in individuals with normal abilities.
Winner’s citations:
Gordon, H. W. “Hemisphere asymmetry in the perception of musical chords.” Cortex 6 (1970): 387–98.
Gordon, H. W. “Left-hemisphere dominance of rhythmic elements in dichotically presented melodies.” Cortex 14 (1978): 58–70.
Gordon, H. W. “Degree of ear asymmetry for perception of dichotic chords and for illusory chord localization in musicians of different levels of competence.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Perception and Performance 6 (1980): 516–27.
Hassler, M., and N. Birbaumer. “Handedness, musical attributes, and dichaptic and dichotic performance in adolescents: a longitudinal study.” Developmental Neuropsychology 4, no. 2 (1988): 129–45.
O’Boyle, M. W., H. S. Gill, C. P. Benbow, and J. E. Alexander. “Concurrent finger-tapping in mathematically gifted males: evidence for enhanced right hemisphere involvement during linguistic processing.” Cortex 30 (1994): 519–26.
artists, inventors, and musicians tend to have a higher proportion of language disorders.
Winner’s citations:
Winner, E., and M. Casey. “Cognitive Profiles of Artists.” In Emerging Visions: Contemporary Approaches to the Aesthetic Process, edited by G. Cupchik and J. Laszlo. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Winner, E., M. Casey, D. DaSilva, and R. Hayes. “Spatial abilities and reading deficits in visual art students.” Empirical Studies of the Arts 9, no. 1 (1991): 51–63.
Colangelo, N., S. Assouline, B. Kerr, R. Huesman, and D. Johnson. “Mechanical Inventiveness: A Three-Phase Study.” In The Origins and Development of High Ability, edited by G. R. Bock and K. Ackrill. Wiley, 1993, pp. 106–74.
Hassler, M. “Functional cerebral asymmetric and cognitive abilities in musicians, painters, and controls.” Brain and Cognition 13 (1990): 1–17.
Consider that “genetics” actually means “genetic expression,” and that the uterine environment and after-birth events are both highly developmental.
Which is not the same as saying “under your control.”
He is one of an estimated one hundred living prodigious savants who have both severe impairments and extraordinary abilities: Treffert, “Savant Syndrome.”
From the “Savant Syndrome” FAQ page:
How common is savant syndrome?
Approximately one in ten (10%) of persons with autistic disorder have some savant skills. In other forms of development disability, mental retardation or brain injury, savant skills occur in less than 1% of such persons (approximately 1:2000 in persons with mental retardation). Since these other forms of mental disability are much more common than autistic disorder however, it turns out that approximately 50% of persons with savant syndrome have autistic disorder, and the other 50% have some other form of developmental disability, mental retardation or brain injury or disease. Thus not all savants are autistic, and not all autistic persons are savants.
What is the range of savant skills?
Savant skills exist over a spectrum of abilities. The most common savant abilities are called splinter skills. These include behaviors such as obsessive preoccupation with, and memorization of, music and sports trivia, license plate numbers, maps, historical facts, or obscure items such as vacuum cleaner motor sounds, for example. Talented savants are those persons in whom musical, artistic, mathematical or other special skills are more prominent and highly honed, usually within an area of single expertise, and are very conspicuous when viewed against their overall handicap. The term prodigious savant is reserved for those very rare persons in this already uncommon condition where the special skill or ability is so outstanding that it would be spectacular even if it were to occur in a non-handicapped person. There are probably fewer than 100 prodigious savants living worldwide at the present time who would meet this high threshold of special skill.
The group also includes Daniel Tammet: Treffert and Wallace, “Islands of Genius.”
He estimates that approximately one in ten persons with autism has some savant skills: See excerpts from the “Savant Syndrome” FAQ, above.
The syndrome, he explains, occurs when the brain’s left hemisphere is severely damaged, inviting the right hemisphere (which is responsible for things like music and art) to compensate heavily for the loss.
Niki Denison writes:
In trying to determine what causes savant syndrome, scientists turn to an increasing body of evidence that shows that when a particular part of the brain is thrown out of commission, another part attempts to compensate. Many have come to believe that in savant syndrome, the left hemisphere of the brain is damaged, so the brain adapts by drawing more heavily on the right hemisphere, which is responsible for creativity and skills in things like art and music. The left hemisphere, which is the home of language, comprehension, and logical, sequential thinking, is more vulnerable to harmful prenatal influences because it develops later and more slowly than the right hemisphere.
One theory holds that an excess of circulating testosterone can impair left-hemisphere development, causing nerve cells to migrate to the right hemisphere and overdevelop that part of the brain. Because testosterone reaches very high levels in male fetuses, this could explain why savant syndrome is six times more common in boys than in girls. (Denison, “The Rain Man in All of Us,” p. 30.)
Kim Peek, the human calculator who inspired the Dustin Hoffman character in Rain Man, is missing the corpus callosum in his brain—the portion of the brain that allows the left and right sides of the brain to talk to each other easily.
“In the case of the prodigious savant, it appears to me, there is a marvelous coalescence of idiosyncratic brain circuitry [combined with] obsessive traits of concentration & repetition and tremendous encouragement & reinforcement from family, caretakers and teachers. Does some of that same possibility, a little Rain Man as it were, perhaps reside within each of us? I think that it does”: Treffert, “Is There a Little ‘Rain Man’ in Each of Us?”
More from Treffert:
The idea that some savant capabilities—a little Rain Man—might reside in each of us rises from several observations. First, there have been instances reported of previously non-disabled, “normal” persons in whom some previously latent savant skills emerged following a head injury, a phenomenon called “acquired” savant syndrome. Second, Dr. Bruce Miller’s work, as described in detail elsewhere on this site, documents 12 cases of elderly persons, previously non-disabled, with no extraordinary savant skills, whose savant abilities newly emerged, sometimes at a prodigious level, after a particular type of dementia—fronto-temporal dementia—began and progressed. Thirdly, some procedures such as hypnosis or sodium amytal interviews in non-disabled persons, and brain surface electrode exploration during certain types of neurosurgical procedures, provide evidence that a huge reservoir of memories lies dormant, and non-accessed, in each of us. Fourth, the images and memories that surface, often to our surprise, during some dreams, also tap that huge store of buried memories beyond that available in our everyday waking state. Finally, often as we relax or “tune out” other distractions, sometime after “retirement” for example, some previously hidden, latent interests, talents or abilities quite suddenly, and surprisingly, emerge. Sometimes that emergence is actually a re-kindling of some earlier childhood abilities, such as art, for whatever reason set aside with maturation and “growing up.” (Treffert, “Savant Syndrome.”)
Diane Powell adds:
Our model of savant abilities suggests that our brains operate at two levels, the quantum and the classical. These two levels are no more exclusionary than classical (or Newtonian) physics and quantum mechanics. One major difference between them is that the forces in classical physics operate locally, whereas forces in quantum physics operate nonlocally. Both types of forces operate in our brains, which is why our brains can process consciousness both locally and nonlocally. Some people have conditions such as autism that shift the balance between local and nonlocal processes by knocking out the functioning of the neocortex. The rest of us can decrease this classical dominance by such mind-quieting practices as meditation. Hence, as we become more consciously aware or awake, we use nonlocal processes more and more. Along the way, we will progressively see the world less abstractly. We will see it more as it really is. (Powell, “We Are All Savants,” p. 17.)
“Apart from brain impairment and magnetic stimulation,” they wrote, “savant-like skills might also be made accessible by altered states of perception or by EEG-assisted feedback. [Oliver] Sacks provides support for the former view. He produced camera-like precise drawings only when under the influence of amphetamines. Early (savant-like) cave art has been attributed to mescaline induced perceptual states”: Snyder, Mulcahy, Taylor, Mitchell, Sachdev, and Gandevia, “Savant-like skills exposed in normal people by suppressing the left fronto-temporal lobe,” pp. 149–58.
Snyder’s Citations
Perception
Snyder, A. W., and D. J. Mitchell. “Is integer arithmetic fundamental to mental processing? The mind’s secret arithmetic.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character 266 (1999): 587–92.
EEG-assisted feedback
Birbaumer, N. “Rain Man’s revelations.” Nature 399 (1999): 211–12.
Oliver Sacks
Sacks, Oliver. “The Mind’s Eye.” New Yorker, July 28, 2003, pp. 48–59.
Cave art
Humphrey, N. “Comments on shamanism and cognitive evolution.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 12, no. 1 (2002): 91–94.
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.”
Ann Hulbert writes:
Since Terman didn’t have the resources to comprehensively test the more than a quarter-million students in the California school districts he was looking at, he enlisted teachers to help make the first cut. They supplied him with the kids they considered the best, a group unlikely to include “some nerdy person in the corner mumbling to himself,” points out Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in the scientific study of historical genius. Testing this cohort—as well as other batches of bright children he rounded up earlier—Terman emerged with an overwhelmingly white and middle-class sample of roughly 1,500 students whose average age was 11 and whose I.Q.’s ranged between 135 and 200, about the top 1 percent. (The mean I.Q. in this group was 151, and 77 subjects tested at 170 or higher.) It is worth noting that his methods selected for a conscientious breed of parents as well, given that lengthy questionnaires about their children were part of the drill. (Hulbert, “The Prodigy Puzzle.”)
The group was mostly middle class and mostly white; there were just two African Americans, which Terman took care to note “are both part white … exact proportion of white blood is not known.” (Italics mine.) (Terman, Genetic Studies of Genius: Volume I, Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children, p. 56.)
In his first report, published in 1925, Terman tried to temper his expectations. “To expect all or even a majority of the subjects to attain any considerable degree of eminence would be unwarranted,” he warned. But still, he could not contain his optimism: “It is with the most distinguished 25 to 50 of [any average group of 5,000 adults] that our gifted boys could be most fairly compared a few decades hence.” (Terman, Genetic Studies of Genius: Volume I, Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children, p. 641.)
None went on to earn the Nobel Prize—as two children rejected from Terman’s original group did.
Ann Hulbert writes:
In 1956, the year Terman died, a Nobel Prize was awarded to William Shockley, who as a California schoolboy didn’t make the cut for the Termites but went on to help invent the transistor (and was later hailed as a catalyst in the creation of Silicon Valley, and also pilloried as a racist eugenicist). In 1968, another reject, Luis Alvarez, won the prize for his work in elementary particle physics. No Termite ever became a Nobel laureate, though some became well-published scientists and multiple patent holders. Alumni include journalists, poets and movie directors as well as professors, among whom psychologists have been particularly distinguished, perhaps not surprisingly. Terman, after all, pulled Stanford strings and did everything he could to help his protégés, who had been selected for what are often now called “schoolhouse gifts” and had grown up as a self-identified group imbued, not least by him, with expectations of academically approved achievement.
The fact that “the group has produced no great musical composer,” as the study’s authors wistfully noted, “and no great creative artist” perhaps wasn’t so surprising, either. (Hulbert, “The Prodigy Puzzle.”)
Holahan & Sears found that the “Termites” in their seventies and eighties were no more successful in adulthood than if they had been randomly selected from the same socio-economic backgrounds—regardless of their IQ scores. This was somewhat mirrored in the findings of Subotnik, Kassan, Summers & Wasser (1993) who investigated a sample of 210 New York children selected for the Hunter College Elementary School by nomination and high-IQ scores (mean IQ 157). None had reached eminence by the ages of 40 to 50, nor were they any more successful than their socio-economic and IQ peers in spite of their tailor-made gifted education. (Freeman, “Giftedness in the Long Term,” pp. 384–403.)
“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.”
The entire text of the quote:
On the whole, one is left with the feelings that the above-180 IQ subjects were not as remarkable as might have been expected. Without question they have done better than the general population in most major categories and there is some evidence (although not a great deal) that they were more successful in their careers than the 150 IQ group. But, when we recall Terman’s early optimism about his subjects’ potential, and the words of Hollingworth (1942) that “the children who test at above 180 IQ constitute the ‘top’ among college graduates,” there is the disappointing sense that they might have done more with their lives. (Feldman, “A follow-up of subjects scoring above 180 IQ in Terman’s genetic studies of genius,” pp. 518–23.)
Ann Hulbert adds:
Focusing on a small cohort of children with I.Q.’s above 180, [Leta] Hollingworth’s case studies couldn’t supply clear-cut evidence that a high-testing childhood was a precursor of later extraordinariness. (Hulbert, “The Prodigy Puzzle.”)
“Most gifted children, even most child prodigies, do not go on to become adult creators”: Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69;.
Ericsson strongly affirms this point:
Notably, there are only comparatively few prodigies, such as Mozart, Picasso, and Yehudi Menuhin, who continued their success into adulthood—most prodigies do not live up to expectations (Bamberger, 1986; Barlow, 1952; Freeman, 2000; Goldsmith, 2000). (Ericsson, Roring, Nandagopal, “Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance: an account based on the expert performance framework,” pp. 3–56;.)
Ericsson’s Citations
Bamberger, J. “Growing Up Prodigies: The Mid-life Crisis.” In Developmental Approaches to Giftedness and Creativity, edited by D. H. Feldman. Jossey-Bass, 1986. pp. 61–67;
Barlow, F. Mental Prodigies. Greenwood Press, 1952.
Freeman, J. “Teaching for Talent: Lessons from the Research.” In Developing Talent Across the Lifespan, edited by C. F. M. Lieshout and P. G. Heymans. Psychology Press, 2000, pp. 231–48;.
Goldsmith, L. T. “Tracking Trajectories of Talent: Child Prodigies.” In Talents Unfolding, edited by R. C. Friedman and B. M. Shore. American Psychological Association, 2000, pp. 89–118;.
Middlesex University’s Joan Freeman adds:
Trost (1993) calculated that less than half of “what makes excellence” can be accounted for by measurements and observations in childhood. The key to success, he said, lies in the individual’s dedication. (Freeman, “Families, the essential context for gifts and talents,” pp. 573–85;; Trost, “Prediction of Excellence in School, University and Work,” pp. 235–36.)
“Technical perfection wins the prodigy adoration, but if the prodigy does not eventually go beyond this, he or she sinks into oblivion.”
More from Ellen Winner:
A creator is someone who changes a domain. Personality and will are crucial factors in becoming an innovator or revolutionizer of a domain. Creators have a desire to shake things up. They are restless, rebellious, and dissatisfied with the status quo. They are courageous and independent. They are able to manage multiple related projects at the same time, engaging in what Gruber calls a “network of enterprise.” For these two reasons, we should never expect a prodigy to go on to become a creator. The ones who do make this transition are the exceptions, not the rule. (Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69.)
Joan Freeman writes:
Subotnik, Kassan, Summers & Wasser (1993) have shown that giftedness may take many different forms; it may appear in quite unexpected situations and at different points during a lifetime. It is not always possible to identify future gifts. (Freeman, “Giftedness in the long term,” pp. 384–403.)
With all due respect to Professor Freeman, isn’t the effort to “identify future gifts” a slightly crazy way of discussing future achievement? If we step away from the “giftedness” paradigm and simply regard achievements as achievements, the same research cited above would be restated simply: Adults with undistinguished backgrounds and childhoods often turn out to be high achievers, and those achievements can happen at various points in their lives.
“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.”
Ellen Winner on “when giftedness ends”:
One non-inevitable reason that prodigies may fail to make the transition is that they have become frozen into expertise. 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.” Expertise is what has won them fame and adoration as child prodigies. It is difficult to break away from expertise and take the kinds of risks required to be creative. A second non-inevitable reason is that some with the potential to make the transition do not do so because they have been pushed so hard by their parents and teachers and managers that they lose their intrinsic motivation. At adolescence they begin to ask, “Who am I doing this for?” And if the answer is that they are doing this for a parent or a teacher but not for themselves, they may decide that they do not want to do this anymore. And so they drop out. The case of William James Sidis, a math prodigy pushed relentlessly by his father, is one such case among many. (Italics mine.) (Winner, “The origins and ends of giftedness,” pp. 159–69.)
Ann Hulbert writes:
For at least a quarter century now, there has been “a benevolent conspiracy” among influential musical figures to fend off burnout by trying to foster “a more humanistic, nonexploitative approach to the development of talent,” as the writer Marie Winn put it in a New York Times Magazine article in 1979. What a researcher named Jeanne Bamberger has termed a “midlife” crisis seems to occur for prodigious young musicians: a transitional period of cognitive and emotional maturation during which only some performers manage to move beyond intuitive imitation to a more reflective sense of direction. Parents must carve out space for precocious players to “have a childhood … an adolescence,” according to influential figures like Itzhak Perlman; resist the pressure, they urge, to “get management” and a packed schedule of practice and performance. (Hulbert, “The Prodigy Puzzle.”)
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.
Marina Ma calls it a genetic gift in her book, but to my eyes, this comment is obviously a combination of her cultural humility and her being a little too close to detect the forest of details that spurred Yo-Yo on.
“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.”
And let’s not forget what can happen before birth. Here is Giselle E. Whitwell’s thorough review of the profound impact that sound can have on a fetus in utero:
Verny and others have noted that babies have a preference for stories, rhymes, and poems first heard in the womb. When the mother reads out loud, the sound is received by her baby in part via bone conduction. Dr. Henry Truby, Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics and Linguistics at the University of Miami, points out that after the sixth month, the fetus moves in rhythm to the mother’s speech and that spectrographs of the first cry of an abortus at 28 weeks could be matched with his mother’s. The elements of music, namely tonal pitch, timbre, intensity and rhythm, are also elements used in speaking a language. For this reason, music prepares the ear, body and brain to listen to, integrate and produce language sounds. Music can thus be considered a pre-linguistic language which is nourishing and stimulating to the whole human being, affecting body, emotions, intellect, and developing an internal sense of beauty, sustaining and awakening the qualities in us that are wordless and otherwise inexpressible. The research of Polverini-Rey (1992) seems to indicate that prenates exposed to lullabies in utero were calmed by the stimulus. The famous British violinist Yehudi Menuhin believes that his own musical talent was partly due to the fact that his parents were always singing and playing music before he was born.
The ear first appears in the 3rd week of gestation and it becomes functional by the 16th week. The fetus begins active listening by the 24th week. We know from ultrasound observations that the fetus hears and responds to a sound pulse starting about 16 weeks of age; this is even before the ear construction is complete. The cochlear structures of the ear appear to function by the 20th week and mature synapses have been found between the 24th and 28th weeks. For this reason most formal programs of prenatal stimulation are usually designed to begin during the third trimester. The sense of hearing is probably the most developed of all the senses before birth. Four-month-old fetuses can respond in very specific ways to sound; if exposed to loud music, their heart beat will accelerate. A Japanese study of pregnant women living near the Osaka airport had smaller babies and an inflated incidence of prematurity—arguably related to the environment of incessant loud noise. Chronic noise can also be associated with birth defects. I recently received a report from a mother who was in her 7th month of pregnancy when she visited the zoo. In the lion’s enclosure, the animals were in process of being fed. The roar of one lion would set off another lion and the sound was so intense she had to leave the scene as the fetus reacted with a strong kick and left her feeling ill. Many years later, when the child was 7 years of age, it was found that he had a hearing deficiency in the lower-middle range. This child also reacts with fear when viewing TV programs of lions and related animals. There are numerous reports about mothers having to leave war movies and concerts because the auditory stimulus caused the fetus to become hyperactive.
Chamberlain (1998), using Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences, has presented evidence for musical intelligence before birth. Peter Hepper (1991) discovered that prenates exposed to TV soap opera music during pregnancy responded with focused and rapt attention to this music after birth—evidence of long-term memory. On hearing the music after birth, these newborns had a significant decrease in heart rate and movements, and shifted into a more alert state. Likewise, Shetler (1989) reported that 33% of fetal subjects in his study demonstrated contrasting reactions to tempo variations between faster and slower selections of music. This may be the earliest and most primitive musical response in utero. The pioneering New Zealand fetologist, William Liley, found that from at least 25 weeks on, the unborn child would jump in rhythm with the timpanist’s contribution to an orchestral performance. The research of Michele Clements (1977) in a London maternity hospital found that four to five month fetuses were soothed by Vivaldi and Mozart but disturbed by loud passages of Beethoven, Brahms and Rock. Newborns have shown a preference for a melody their mother sang in utero rather than a new song sung by their mother. Babies during the third trimester in utero respond to vibroacoustic as well as air-coupled acoustic sounds, indicative of functional hearing. A study by Gelman et al. (1982) determined that a 2000 Hz. stimulus elicited a significant increase in fetal movements, a finding which supported the earlier study by Johnsson et al. (1964). From 26 weeks to term, fetuses have shown fetal heart accelerations in response to vibroacoustic stimuli. Consistent startle responses to vibroacoustic stimuli were also recorded during this period of development. Behavioral reactions included arm movements, leg extensions, and head aversions. Yawning activity was observed after the conclusion of stimuli. Research by Luz et al. (1980 and 1985) has found that the normal fetus responds to external acoustic stimulation during labor in childbirth. These included startle responses to the onset of a brief stimulus. New evidence of cognitive development in the prenatal era is presented by William Sallenbach (1994) who made in-depth and systematic observations of his own daughter’s behavior from weeks 32 to 34 in utero. (The full report of his findings is available on this Web site in Life Before Birth/Early Parenting.) Until recently, most research on early learning processes has been in the area of habituation, conditioning or imprinting sequences. However, Sallenbach observed that in the last trimester of pregnancy, the prenate’s learning state shows movement from abstraction and generalization to one of increased specificity and differentiation. During a bonding session using music, the prenate was observed moving her hands gently. In a special musical arrangement, where dissonance was included, the subject’s reactions were more rhythmic with rolling movements. Similarly, in prenatal music classes, Sister Lorna Zemke has found that the fetus will respond rhythmically to rhythms tapped on the mother’s belly. (Whitwell, “The Importance of Prenatal Sound and Music.”)
“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”: Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music,; see also Münte, Altenmüller, Jäncke, et al., “The musician’s brain as a model of neuroplasticity,” pp. 473–78, and Weinberger, “Music and the Brain,” 88–95.
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.
Glenn Gould had it—so did Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Horowitz, and Sinatra. On the surface, absolute pitch seems like the province of musical geniuses—the exotic gift that they have and we don’t. But the truth about absolute pitch—and the opposite phenomenon of so-called tone deafness—is much more interesting, and helps us understand what “musical talent” really is and isn’t.
What is absolute pitch?
Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to produce and identify a certain musical tone without any reference tone. A person with AP is able to hum middle C or any other note on request, without any prompting from a song or an instrument.
How common is AP?
In strict definitional terms, AP is pretty rare—somewhere between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 2,000 in the general population. But the rare part is the note naming, not the note reproducing. Many studies have now shown that most people can sing a familiar song in the right key without being given a reference tone and that virtually everyone who speaks a tonal language such as Mandarin can remember and recall specific pitches. What few people possess is the specific trained ability to link that tone to a named note.
“Our studies tie right in with the idea that we all have this latent absolute pitch ability, but we can’t get fully bloomed absolute pitch without early childhood training,” says Shepherd College’s Laura Bischoff.
“The real puzzle about perfect pitch is not why so few people possess it but rather why most people do not,” UC San Diego’s Diana Deutsch says. “Everyone has an implicit form of perfect pitch, even though we aren’t all able to put a label to notes. They can recognize the note but can’t label it. What’s learned as a child is the ability to label.”
Also, contrary to public assumption, AP is not an all-or-nothing skill. Many have AP in varying degrees, explain Bischoff and University of Rochester’s Elizabeth West Marvin.
Is AP a critical ingredient in musical talent?
No. While AP can sometimes be a useful tool for musicians, it is far from essential in helping musicians build the necessary skills or in expressing themselves magnificently. AP is more common among professional musicians than nonmusicians, but research shows very clearly that this is not cause and effect. Rather, the correlation exists because both are so frequently a product of early (prior to age six) musical training.
Neither Wagner nor Stravinsky had AP, to name just two. McGill University’s Daniel Levitin (author of This Is Your Brain on Music) does not think AP helps musicians much. What musicians thrive on and must develop to a fine degree, he points out, is relative pitch—the ability to distinguish between tones. Such relative pitch is available to almost everyone, to be developed to whatever individual degree desired.
“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.”)
Regardless of whether a child seems to be exceptional, mediocre, or even awful at any particular skill at a particular point in time, the potential exists for that person to develop into a high-achieving adult.
San Jose State University’s Gregory Feist writes:
It is important to point out, just as is true of mathematical precocity and prodigiousness, early childhood talent in music by no means is a necessary or a sufficient condition for adult creative achievement. It is often the case that the musically most-accomplished adults do not begin to set themselves apart in any significant way until middle adolescence, and even here there are hundreds if not thousands of similarly talented musicians. It is also true that being a musical prodigy or even being precocious does not guarantee or even predict to a high degree adult creative achievement. (Feist, “The Evolved Fluid Specificity of Human Creative Talent,” p. 69.)
Because talent is a function of acquired skills rather than innate ability, adult achievement depends completely on long-term attitude and resources and process rather than any particular age-based talent quotient.
This does not, of course, mean that everything is within our control, as is discussed in chapter 7.