Adults, especially teachers, may find extremely clever children threatening: a small child talking to you as an equal can put you on the back foot. Chrissie was told she had two options: she could either home-school Tom or send him to a private school that could give him more individual attention.
Both ideas horrified her. She disagreed with home-schooling on principle — surely it would worsen his feeling of isolation. He still struggles to relate to other kids, and finds the economic disparity between him and his fellow pupils shocking.
But he finds the teaching more stimulating. Debate rages about the wisdom of accelerating children out of their age group. If they are moved up, they may struggle socially. If they stay down, they may switch off intellectually. Students need social and psychological support, says Leonie Kronborg of Monash University in Australia. She points to programs for gifted adolescents like the Early Entrance Program at the University of Washington in America: young teenagers can begin studying at university as part of a group of similarly advanced people their own age, so they are intellectually stimulated but keep socialising with their peers.
Faced with sons and daughters who are bored and miserable at school, many parents of gifted children opt to take things into their own hands. In the mids a father and daughter, Harry and Ruth Lawrence, made a striking pair, travelling around Oxford on a tandem bicycle. Harry had given up his career in computing and home-educated Ruth since she was five; at 12 she won a place to study maths at Oxford University.
She now works as a respected — but not outstanding — mathematician. When she had her first child, she vowed not to push him to move any faster academically than he wanted to. Some countries have cultivated an educational environment that is welcoming to gifted children. Singapore runs a highly selective program designed to identify the most exceptionally intelligent students each year. At the age of eight or nine all children are assessed in maths, English and reasoning.
They can then choose whether to attend certain secondary schools that offer such classes. But emphasising educational attainment has proved controversial. Since , there have been efforts to increase socialisation between children of different abilities.
Such an approach reflects a very traditional idea of intelligence — using certain types of tests to identify children with apparently innate intellectual abilities. Elsewhere educationalists are using a broader range of methods to spot highly intelligent children and increasing their focus on attitudes and personality traits often found in the most successful people — the drive, for instance, that Deborah Eyre talks about.
Nearly all of them went on to do much better in tests than their comparable peers. Raj Chetty, an American economist at Harvard University, has calculated that those who score in the top 5 per cent of standard tests at primary school are many times more likely than the other 95 per cent to file patents as adults — and that probability is far higher among bright kids from rich families.
Whatever their natural talents, children whose aptitudes are nurtured and given opportunities have a far better chance in life. But gifted children do not necessarily shine later on. There are those whose abilities are missed by the limitations of IQ tests. And there are the many exceptional children who face barriers in later years because they never developed the interpersonal skills needed to succeed in the workplace or the wider world of social activity.
In the s, Lewis Terman, an American psychologist, studied children with very high intelligence. Others followed up that group 70 years later. They found that they had accomplished no more than their socio-economic status would have predicted. One child Terman excluded as not bright enough, William Shockley, had co-invented the transistor and won the Nobel prize in physics.
And an unhappy childhood stays with you. Kim Ung-yong was a child prodigy in South Korea. Now a civil engineer in his 50s, he feels he was cheated of a childhood. He began speaking at six months and had mastered four languages by the age of two. Skip to navigation Skip to content Skip to footer Help using this website - Accessibility statement.
Soon he became irritable and eccentric, developing a compulsion to search for money on the street. As his illness progressed, so did his drawing, advancing from simple still-life paintings to haunting, impressionist depictions of buildings from his childhood. In four out of five cases, they found lesions on the left hemisphere.
Nobel Prize-winning research from the s shows that the two halves of the brain specialise in different tasks; in general, the right side is home to creativity and the left is the centre of logic and language. But the left side is also something of a bully. This is backed up by several other studies, including one in which creative insight was roused in healthy volunteers by temporarily dialling down activity in the left hemisphere and increasing it in the right.
Consider autism. One theory suggests that autism arises from abnormally low levels of serotonin in the left hemisphere in childhood, which prevents the region from developing normally. Just like with sudden savant syndrome, this allows the right hemisphere to become more active.
Interestingly, many people with sudden savant syndrome also develop symptoms of autism, including social problems, obsessive compulsive disorder OCD and all-consuming interests. This is something universal across all sudden savants. Jon Sarkin compares his art to an instinct. It is believed that many creative geniuses - such as Albert Einstein - may have been on the spectrum Credit: Alamy.
Padgett agrees. Muybridge was no exception. After the bet, he moved to Philadelphia and continued with his passion for capturing motion on film, photographing all kinds of activities such as walking up and down the stairs and, oddly, himself swinging a pickaxe in the nude. Between and , he took more than , pictures. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. The mystery of why some people become sudden geniuses.
Share using Email. By Zaria Gorvett. What can this teach us about how geniuses are made? As it happens, sometimes the opposite is true. Or is it simply observation bias - I am more inclined to follow and track the lives of those geniuses and therefore notice this effect more. I have a dynasty of alive members.
I had, at one point, 9 genius children - only one of them made it to adulthood, which was disappointing to say the least. The rest died naturally of various things. Hardly any of the regular children have been dying like this and certainly not at the same rate.
I was intrigued enough to plough through the dynasty tree history - 10 generations of it - and it seems that historically this was happening too. I have had, in 10 generations, 4 children make it to adulthood who were born geniuses.
Statistically this seems very low. Of those 4 children only 1 of them lived a "long" life - she was 55 when died a natural death. None of those genius adults bred a genius either although that's not a surprise to me. My dynasty itself doesn't seem to breed geniuses and I have to keep finding and marrying geniuses from outside in the hope that it sticks.
So, genius children die younger or my observation bias? Showing 1 - 10 of 10 comments. A combination of observation bias and the fact that genius children are very theatening to others, and so can get targeted because of that - it isn't the genius stat that makes them die, it's being -very good-. Likewise, geniuses have shorter attention spans, as they bounce between multiple projects and concepts. Geniuses feel most creative at night, and are often too wired to turn their brains off and power down.
They can also run on very little sleep and still find enough energy in the day to channel their ideas and creations.
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