Childhood Prodigies-

Factual Questions
1

http://chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/article/0,2669,SAV-0010010268,FF.html

Per link above I was reading an interesting story about another one of these childhood “super geniuses” that seem to pop up from time to time and typically are 9-12 years old doing advanced college level work.

My question is what happens to these people? Do other smart people eventually catch up with them? I don’t really hear much about Nobel Prize winners or great artists or other noted high achieving individuals having been super precocious. Do they eventually just settle into just being really smart adults toiling away in some lab or engineering dept along with all the other PHDs or what?

2

Oftentimes they face a lot of social stigmatization. It’s hard to be significantly younger than your peers, especially when you’re at an age when the physical differences are a big deal. (As in, everyone has hit puberty except you…)

As an example (not that I’m a prodigy by any stretch) I was supposed to skip first grade, but my 'rents were informed that it wasn’t a good idea for me socially and emotionally, as I had a severe stutter and was quite shy. So they said no. Some parents would not have, and placed the child in a better intellectual but worse social environment. I have a friend who skipped several grades in school, and he tells me that he has a horrible time making friends. He routinely lies about his age.

You might want to do a net search and see what you find, but IIRC, child prodigies often burn out early and don’t make significant contributions. <sits back and waits for someone to prove her wrong>

3

Ah yes, the “super geniuses.”

Hi. You never read about me in the papers, because I was only two years ahead of everyone else instead of eight or ten–(Clarification: I was in my hometown newspaper several times. <sigh> )–but I estimate I’m in the top 1/10th to 1/100th of one percent of the population.

I don’t think it’s so much that smart people eventually catch up as that the “supergeniuses” eventually slow down. This happens for several reasons:

  1. They eventually come to a level of work that challenges their minds–for me this was my third and fourth year of college. For some of these kids it seems to be postdoctoral research. <shrug>

  2. They get tired of pushing themselves. Or mom and dad stop pushing them when they turn 18. (This latter is, IMO, one of the most evil things parents can do to their children; even the grades I skipped were not forced upon me).

  3. They get tired of being so damned smart. Tired of the attention, tired of being expected to outperform everyone at everything. This is part of what’s happened to me. I started my Ph.D. and am now in the proces of extricating myself from the program so I can pursue plain ol’ lab-rat research for 25k a year, and write science fiction in my spare time.

  4. They go insane. Unfortunate but true. I have heard of one girl who got straight A’s through elementary, high school, and college, up into graduate school. The last class she took in graduate school, she got a B.

After which she went into a suicidal depression from which she could not be roused for six months, and from which I doubt she ever fully recovered.

My own bout with depression started about the time I started grad school and is still ongoing.

As to Nobel prizes and such not being won by them (“us”?)–the odds are against it. We’re flukes of nature, a set of random genes that puts together a highly inteligent brain. Nobel Prizes are flukes of science/literature/what-have-you, things so extraordinary that, well, they only are awarded once a year, and only a few people have ever earned more than one.

You don’t often get the privilege of two really good flukes in your lifetime. Maybe one good and one bad, but not two good. Those would be the extremely rare people. Like Marie Curie, for instance.

I very much wish I weren’t so damn smart–because people still expect me to outperform, and I’m tired of doing it.

There’s a nice, personal perspective for you :slight_smile:

(And, sorry, andygirl, I can’t prove you wrong. In fact, just the opposite).

LL

4

he’s far from being the youngest kid in college in the US at the moment. There’s one 6 yo Justin Chapman who started last year plus quite a few kids whose parents actively avoid the media.

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My question is what happens to these people? Do other smart people eventually catch up with them? I don’t really hear much about Nobel Prize winners or great artists or other noted high achieving individuals having been super precocious. Do they eventually just settle into just being really smart adults toiling away in some lab or engineering dept along with all the other PHDs or what?
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I think the kids whose parents avoid the media :wink: have a headstart on some sort of a normal life. It is a fine line between letting the kid stagnate or ‘pushing’ them. IMO it is a myth that the parents of kids like these are pushy - usually it is a case of doing the best that can be done with a child who is so far from the norm that the parent appears pushy whereas the truth is that the kid is pushing for the parent to feed their prodigious intellect.

One of the concepts in Ellen Winner’s book Gifted Children, Myths and Realities is the idea of domains and mastery. A child can have an astronomical IQ but until they master a domain such as chess or maths they are not really seen as a prodigy.

Some of these kids will go on to do creative work in their field. Some of them won’t. The research on mental illness is mixed - I’ve seen research which shows these kids to be more stable than the norm and I have read stuff using the same stats to ‘prove’ they have more mental illness. Depression is a big problem for many of these kids - being totally alien and a misfit with other kids doesn’t make life easy. On the profoundly gifted lists there seems to be a mix of parents with kids who are doing just fine with minor adjustments and other parents who are struggling with kids with disorders such as OCD or Aspergers or depression.

The causes of burn out are hard to prove or disprove. I am betting that for every Sidis there are many kids who didn’t get the attention and their lives ran just fine.

http.www.prometheus.org has some interesting stuff.
http.www.hoagiesgifted.org has brilliant links.

5

I think a lot of it has to do with time scale. Yeah, these people are really smart, but there are a lot of other really smart people out there too. So, if you’re a 12 year old college graduate, that’s great, but when you’re 24 and have been working for 12 years, you’ve been doing pretty much the same thing as a 35 year old. Big things come from a lifetime of work, no matter how smart you are (well, most of the time), and so most Nobel prize winners are ~40-60 or so. If someone who was a kid genius wins one, it probably won’t be until he’s in his 30s or 40s, which will seem normal, and thus not make much of a story.

Jman