A study of eight child prodigies finds that share some striking
characteristics, most notably high levels of autistic traits and an
overrepresentation of autism in their close family members
Child prodigies evoke awe, wonder and sometimes jealousy: how can
such young children display the kinds of musical or mathematical talents that
most adults will never master, even with years of dedicated practice? Lucky for
these despairing types, the prevailing wisdom suggests that such comparisons
are unfair — prodigies are born, not made (mostly). Practice alone isn’t going
to turn out the next 6-year-old Mozart.
So finds a recent study of eight young prodigies, which sought to
shed some light on the roots of their talent. The prodigies included in
the study [PDF] are all famous (but remain unidentified in
the paper), having achieved acclaim and professional status in their fields by
the ripe age of 10. Most are musical prodigies; one is an artist and another a
math whiz, who developed a new discipline in mathematics and, by age 13, had
had a paper accepted for publication in a mathematics journal. Two of the youngsters
showed extraordinary skill in two separate fields: one child in music and art
(his work now hangs in prestigious galleries the world over), and the other in
music and molecular gastronomy (the science behind food preparation — why
mayonnaise becomes firm or why a soufflé swells, for example). He became
interested in food at age 10 and, by 11, had carried out his first catering
event.
All of the prodigies had stories of remarkable early abilities:
one infant began speaking at 3 months old and was reading by age 1; two others
were reading at age 2. The gastronomist was programming computers at 3. Several
children could reproduce complex pieces of music after hearing them just once,
at the age most kids are finishing preschool. Many had toured internationally
or played Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall well before age 10.
Six of the prodigies were still children at the time of the study,
which is slated for publication in the journal Intelligence. The
other two participants were grown, aged 19 and 32.
The study found a few key characteristics these youngsters had in
common. For one, they all had exceptional working memories — the system that
holds information active in the mind, keeping it available for further
processing. The capacity of working memory is limited: for numbers, for
example, most people can hold seven digits at a time on average; hence, the
seven-digit phone number. But prodigies can hold much more, and not only can
they remember extraordinarily large numbers, they can also manipulate them and
carry out calculations that you or I might have trouble managing with pencil
and paper.
Working memory isn’t just the ability to remember long strings of
numbers. It is the ability to hold and process quantities of information, both
verbal and non-verbal — such as, say, memorizing a musical score and rewriting
it in your head. All the children in the study scored off the charts when
tested on measures of working memory: they placed in at least the 99th
percentile, with most in the 99.9th percentile.
Surprisingly, however, the study found that not all of the
prodigies had high IQs. Indeed, while they had higher-than-average
intelligence, some didn’t have IQs that were as elevated as their performance
and early achievements would suggest. One child had an IQ of just 108, at the
high end of normal.
There was something else striking too. The authors found that
prodigies scored high in autistic traits, most notably in their ferocious
attention to detail. They scored even higher on this trait than did people
diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism that
typically includes obsession with details.
Three of the eight prodigies had a diagnosed autism spectrum
disorder themselves. The child who had spoken his first words at 3 months,
stopped speaking altogether at 18 months, then started again when he was just
over two-and-a-half years old; he was diagnosed with autism at 3. What’s more,
four of the eight families included in the study reported autism diagnoses in
first- or second-degree relatives, and three of these families reported a total
of 11 close relatives with autism. In the general population, by contrast,
about 1 in 88 people have either autism or Asperger’s.
Other unusual parallels between prodigies and those with autism:
they’re both more likely to be male (though that finding may be due in part to
the failure to recognize either girls on the autism spectrum or, perhaps,
girls’ hidden talents) and both are associated with difficult pregnancies,
suggesting that uterine environment may play a role in their development. In
the math whiz’s case, for example, his mother “started labor nine times between
the 29th and 37th weeks of her pregnancy and required medication to stop the
labor. During the 35th week of her pregnancy, her water broke and she had a
105-degree fever from an infection in her uterus. The child prodigy did not
have a soft spot at delivery,” the authors write.
When Asperger’s was first described in 1944 by Austrian
pediatrician Hans Asperger, he referred to children with the syndrome as
“little professors” because of their prodigious vocabularies and precocious
expertise, and because they tended to lecture others endlessly without being
aware of their own tediousness. Poor social skills and obsessive interests
characterize the condition.
Yet, despite the obvious similarities, very little research has
been done on the connection between autism and extreme talent. One previous
study, published in 2007, did find that close relatives of prodigies — like
close relatives of people with autism — tended to score higher on autistic
traits, particularly in problems with social skills, difficulty switching
attention and intense attention to detail. Other than that, however, the issue
hasn’t been studied systematically, beyond the observation that autism is often
seen in savants, or people with exceptional abilities who have other simultaneous
impairments.
Prodigies, in contrast, appear to benefit from certain autistic
tendencies while avoiding the shortfalls of others. On a standard assessment of
traits associated with autism, the prodigies in the current study scored higher
than a control group on all measures, including attention to detail and
problems with social skills or communication (though this result was not
statistically significant, probably because the sample was so small). But they
also scored significantly lower than a separate comparison group of people who
had Asperger’s — except on the attention-to-detail measure, in which they
outshone everyone.
“One possible explanation for 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 actually enhances their prodigiousness —
undiminished or even enhanced,” the authors write.
In other words, these children may have some genetic trait or
learned skill that allows them to maintain intense focus, without compromising
their social skills or suffering from other disabilities that typically
accompany autism spectrum disorders. Comparing these children with those who
have full-blown autism or Asperger’s could therefore potentially help pinpoint
what goes wrong in those who develop disabling forms of autism and what goes
right in others with similar traits who simply benefit from enhanced abilities.
The current study doesn’t tread that ground, but its findings do
fit in with the intense world theory of autism, which posits how the disorder
may arise. The theory holds that certain patterns of brain circuitry cause
autistic symptoms, including excessive connectivity in local brain regions,
which can heighten attention and perception, and diminished wiring between
distant regions, which can lead to a sort of system overload. In both animal
and human studies, this type of brain wiring has been associated with enhanced
memory and also with amplified fear and sensory overstimulation. The former is
usually a good thing; the latter may cause disability.
The intense world theory propounds that all autism carries the
potential for exceptional talent and social deficits. The social problems, the
theory suggests, may ensue from the autistic person’s dysfunctional attempts —
social withdrawal and repetitive behaviors, for instance — to deal with his
heightened senses and memory.
It’s possible, then, that the wiring in prodigies’ brains
resembles that of an autistic person’s, with tight local connections, except
without the reduction in long-distance links. Or, their brains may function
just like those with autism, but their high intelligence allows them to develop
socially acceptable ways of coping with the sensory overload.
Although some researchers — and much of the public, influenced by
popular books like journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers —
argue that prodigious expertise can be acquired with sheer effort, 10,000 hours
of practice to be exact, the current findings suggest that natural talents can
blossom in far less time. “[Many prodigies] displayed their extreme talent
before reaching 10 years of age, undercutting the nurture-based theories that
credit contemporary training techniques and upwards of 10 years of deliberate
practice as the root of all exceptional achievement,” the authors write.
That doesn’t mean all is lost for everyone else, notes Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive psychologist at New York
University. “There is research showing the positive benefits of working memory
training,” he wrote on his blog on Psychology Today‘s website,
suggesting that practice could take us closer to perfect.
The current study is a small one, and much more research needs to
be done to elucidate the connections between highly gifted children and those
with autism spectrum conditions. But the findings strongly suggest that such
connections exist. They also caution against characterizing the genetic roots
of conditions like autism — or other potentially disabling problems like mood
disorders, which have been linked with exceptional creativity — as wholly
negative. If the same “risk” genes may lead to both debilitating autism and
great intellectual gifts, we need to understand them far better before we label
them as unwanted.
Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the
discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and
on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.
Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and
co-author of Born for Love: Why
Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered.
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