Child Prodigies: Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away

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Speaker 13 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 13 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.
And we're all feeling pretty precocious today. You're in Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 14 You know, judging from what just happened, I think if we release a little five-minute mini-episode every week of the five minutes before we're recording, but before we start the

Speaker 14 stuff that we're doing,

Speaker 14 I bet people would eat that up.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Rated R.

Speaker 13 So, uh, yeah, I'm sure some people would like that. The stuff you should know, Army definitely would.

Speaker 14 Yeah, for sure. Everyone else would be like, who cares? What these guys are talking about off my exactly.

Speaker 13 I tune in for facts, and that's it. Yeah.

Speaker 13 You know who else would probably eat it up, Chuck?

Speaker 14 I'm thinking about names in this.

Speaker 14 I don't know.

Speaker 13 Well, I was just going to start with Mozart. Oh, okay.

Speaker 13 Wolfgang Amadeus Marzart would have loved that kind of thing. He was really into hearing people

Speaker 13 talk candidly to one another. It was one of his things.

Speaker 14 Well, we're talking about child prodigies, and that's why you bring up Mozart, obviously. Thanks to Julia for help with this.

Speaker 14 And also, this is the first time, I think, that we're covering something that was a chapter in our book.

Speaker 13 No, we've done it before, and I can't place it. We definitely, there was one other one that we definitely did, yeah.

Speaker 14 Mr. Potato Head?

Speaker 13 No,

Speaker 13 no, I'll try to think of it and I'll allocate about 5% of my brain to coming up with it while we do the episode, okay?

Speaker 14 Okay. At any rate, this was one of the chapters from our book, and we were both individually relieved when we texted each other that we each read, reread the chapter.
And it was basically the same.

Speaker 14 And I was worried. I was like, man, this is going to be so different that one of them is going to be sort of wrong.

Speaker 14 But long way of saying why we talked about Mozart is because if you read anything on the internet about child prodigies, Mozart's a name that's going to probably come up, one of the more famous prodigies.

Speaker 14 And there's Julia found a pretty fun story about Mozart as a teenager, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah, I actually went and listened to this Miserare. Yeah, Miserere.
It's a choral piece for like, I think, nine choral parts.

Speaker 13 And it was written by Gregorio Alighieri back in, I don't remember when he wrote it, but at least before 1770, because that was the year that a young Amadeus Mozart, who was 14 at the time, went to Vatican City to hear this.

Speaker 13 And the reason he and his father traveled to Vatican City is because this choral piece was so beloved by the people,

Speaker 13 I guess the Pope and all of his buddies

Speaker 13 that they forbade anybody from performing it outside of Vatican City. And so, you know, a corollary to that was no one could transcribe it.

Speaker 13 So that

Speaker 13 it was just to be heard in Vatican City. They thought it was that beautiful.
And it's, if you heard it, you probably recognize it.

Speaker 13 Your mom probably listened to it while she was cleaning the house, or you heard it on like America's Top 40 in the 70s or something.

Speaker 14 I've just, I've been distracted ever since you said the Pope and his buddies, because now all I can think of is a sitcom called Pope and Company.

Speaker 13 That's not bad.

Speaker 14 Ampersand, CO dot, obviously.

Speaker 13 right and the pope has his like favorite recliner that's almost like an extra character yeah don't sit in it if you're not

Speaker 14 that's right uh yeah so anyway uh very revered thing within vatican city and did you mention that no one could transcribe it i certainly did while you were i was spaced out

Speaker 13 yeah i was really thinking about like what the opening credits of that sitcom would look like do you have the uh theme song in your head uh

Speaker 14 it's it's clicking around up there i'm not i'm no prodigy so it'll take a minute all right uh but uh you mentioned the transcription because Mozart, as a precocious 14-year-old, couldn't fall asleep, apparently, the night after the performance.

Speaker 14 So he woke up from his slumber and transcribed it, even though he wasn't supposed to, from memory as a 14-year-old, went back, heard it a couple of days later, and was like, oh, I made a couple of mistakes from memory.

Speaker 14 He realized this and went back and fixed them. He had hid it in his hat because, you know, he wasn't allowed to have this transcribed.
But just kind of a fun story of Mozart's precociousness.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And so he was at, he was age 14.
So technically by this time, he was a former prodigy.

Speaker 14 Oh, is that the cutoff?

Speaker 13 No, 10 is the cutoff. You have to have achieved this by 10 to be considered a prodigy.
But the reason I said generally is because

Speaker 13 if you go by the strictest definition of prodigy, there are...

Speaker 13 Only a handful of the ones we talk about in this episode or we'll talk about actually qualify as prodigies.

Speaker 13 And technically, Mozart, you could make a case if he was a prodigy, he was kind of a poor example of a prodigy because he went on to do great things as an adult, which is also something that's not usually characteristic of a prodigy.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and we also need to kind of spell out the difference between genius and prodigy because they're not necessarily the same thing.

Speaker 14 Well, they're not the same thing at all, but they can overlap at times, I guess is the better way to say it.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and I think Mozart would be an example of that.

Speaker 14 Yeah, for sure. But genius usually is a high IQ or a high Q score of 140.

Speaker 14 But they may not, you know, ever achieve anything. You can be a genius and not achieve anything great.
I mean, you probably will if you're a genius, but not necessarily. Right.

Speaker 14 A prodigy doesn't necessarily have a high IQ. They often do.

Speaker 14 But. Oh, yeah, there it is right there, generally by the age of 10.
But what a prodigy is, is a kid that achieves like, like surpasses adult

Speaker 14 levels of mastery

Speaker 14 by the time they're 10.

Speaker 14 Like stuff that, you know, a lot of adults can't even achieve in expertise or, you know, like I can do this math or this chess or this, play this, you know, instrument better than an adult who's been doing it for decades before the age of 10.

Speaker 13 Yeah, they reach like the elite level where you can't really get any better as far as adults go by the age of 10.

Speaker 13 And then one of the other things about being a prodigy then is that by definition, you have achieved something. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Whereas, like you said, with being a genius, you are a genius throughout your whole life, but you may or may not achieve something. Right.

Speaker 13 To be considered a prodigy, you have to have achieved something. That's just part and parcel with it.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And prodigies were all the rage sort of in the beginning of the 20th century when tabloid journalism started and when IQ tests started.
They were all over the newspapers.

Speaker 14 People just were, you know, amazed and want, you know, in awe of these kids kids who could do these amazing things. They were all over the place.

Speaker 13 Yeah, the term pint size was thrown around a lot.

Speaker 13 But they would, they would, like reporters would interview them to ask them their thoughts on like current events and stuff like that. And they'd be quoted extensively in the paper.

Speaker 13 And people, I mean, people, like you said, were in awe, but they were also like, oh, that's a pretty good point. I hadn't thought about that.
So they were taken seriously, too.

Speaker 13 And then there's a couple of other points that kind of make up prodigies that we've kind of figured out over the years.

Speaker 13 One of the things we should say about prodigies is that there's a surprising lack of people working on this.

Speaker 13 There are some people who study prodigies and they're experts in the psychology and neurology of prodigies. But because there's so few people working on it, we don't have a full grasp on it.

Speaker 13 So it's largely speculation, but it seems like we're starting to get on track about what makes a prodigy. But even still, there's not like a cut and dried uniform definition of a prodigy.

Speaker 13 Some extra things, though, that usually show up

Speaker 13 in particular is that they usually excel in just one field of knowledge, a domain. And then in that specific field of knowledge, they excel in one kind of subsection of it.

Speaker 13 So for example, if you were a

Speaker 13 music prodigy, you probably are a prodigy in, say, classical music. You're not like classical jazz, ska, right? You're a prodigy in just one.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 So that's another, another frequent thing too. You just get really, really, really good at one specific thing.
That's a characteristic of prodigies.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And they're, you know, you can be a prodigy in anything.
A lot of times you'll see it in music and the maths.

Speaker 14 Chess is another good one that you see a lot of prodigies in, but you can really be a prodigy in anything.

Speaker 14 But it's, like you said, a narrow range, but they usually exhibit one intelligence type.

Speaker 14 If you're talking about like psychological intelligence type, linguistic, mathematical, logical, spatial, visual, musical,

Speaker 14 kinesthetic, yeah, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.

Speaker 14 And, you know, it's rare that a prodigy excels in more than one of these.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and

Speaker 13 that's multiple intelligences theory that Gardner, I can't remember Gardner's first name, put out in the early 90s.

Speaker 13 And it basically overturned the idea of general intelligence, which up to that point, that's what everybody thought people had.

Speaker 13 And Gardner was like, no, actually, I think it's like carved into different areas and people can kind of take from each of those. Then

Speaker 13 that makes up your intelligence, not just a big general encyclopedia version of it.

Speaker 13 But it seems to be

Speaker 13 pretty well accepted these days. But like you said,

Speaker 13 most of the time they'll excel in just one of those. Again,

Speaker 13 you know, you're probably not a linguistic prodigy and an

Speaker 13 intrapersonal prodigy where you are really good at examining yourself.

Speaker 14 Yeah. And how you get to be a prodigy is, you know, pretty complex.
And we'll see later. It's probably

Speaker 14 a combination of a bunch of different things.

Speaker 14 It's definitely a combination of nature and nurture.

Speaker 14 And they've done some studying, and we'll get to some studies later on about the, you know, genetics and the biology of it all and like brain function but there is a psychologist who is also in our book uh Ellen Winner and she's one of the people if you look up prodigies she's one of the few experts you talked about right that knows a lot about this stuff but she um she believes in both nature and nurture but she very much is like there's got to be a genetic component and she has a quote if a child suddenly at age three goes to the piano and picks out a tune and does it beautifully, this has to be because that child has a different brain.

Speaker 14 And I totally agree. Like there's there's something you're born with.

Speaker 14 If you, if you've ever seen the, the videos of Tiger Woods when he's like two years old with a pretty perfect golf swing, like it's that it's something that someone is born with.

Speaker 13 Right. Um, there's also, uh,

Speaker 13 Julia found a quote from an editor of Vanity Fair who mentioned Elizabeth Benson, who we'll talk about a little bit more.

Speaker 13 Um, but he agreed that it was probably biology, but he ascribed it to a perfect functioning of her endocrine glands.

Speaker 13 Interesting. He figured it was glandular is what was behind being a prodigy.
But the point is it was biology. And this is 1913, by the way.

Speaker 14 Like right now?

Speaker 13 Right now, it's no, it's not 1913. It's 1983.
Oh, God.

Speaker 14 Thank God.

Speaker 14 I've got on my son britches and my OP tank top.

Speaker 13 I know, you look kind of out of place, man.

Speaker 14 So the other thing about genetics is you can see it in like, like, you know, there can be siblings that are prodigies, like together, I guess co-prodigies.

Speaker 14 So it definitely sort of leans to the idea that it could be genetic.

Speaker 14 There are quite a few male, very famous male composers who had sisters who were also prodigies and amazing composers and pianists or violinists or what have you, but they didn't get the, you know, the attention that their uh you know brother sibling counterparts got because they were girls.

Speaker 14 Maria Mozart was one. Felix Mendelssohn had a sister named Fanny who was a music prodigy.

Speaker 14 And then others that you often see mention, obviously, are Venus and Serena Williams. And then the Polger sisters who were Judith, Susan, and Sophia, they were chess prodigies.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 13 And you were thinking about Pope and Company as a sitcom. Well, I was studying this.
I noticed Felix and Fanny would make a good children's book series, right? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 13 Like I just imagine them as little kids, and in between piano lessons, they go off and solve mysteries together, Felix and Fanny series.

Speaker 13 And so, anytime I think of children's books, I think of our literary agent, our former agent, Stephen Barr. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 13 So, I looked him up to say hi, and I was looking, uh, I was looking him up on the internet. He has his own children's book that he wrote and published.
It's called The Upside Down Hat.

Speaker 13 And so, I emailed him and congratulated him. I was very excited to see that.
Yeah, and he's got two more coming, too.

Speaker 14 Stephen was the best. And I knew he had a kid since we had worked with him.
So that's super cool. I love that.

Speaker 13 Yeah, he's got two now, he says.

Speaker 14 Two kids or two children's books?

Speaker 13 Two kids, three children's books, including the two that are coming out soon.

Speaker 14 Well, I guess he needs to get a third kid.

Speaker 13 Right, one for each. Yeah, it's called The Upside Down Hat, and it's pretty cute looking.

Speaker 14 Oh, that's wonderful.

Speaker 14 So I guess let's take a break. Well, I guess the last thing we should say is, you know, I mentioned sort of the perfect storm of things to make a prodigy.

Speaker 14 and that definitely seems to be the consensus like there's there's some genetics at play great but the the cognitive developmental and environmental factors are all kind of coming together at the same time uh to lead to that um what ellen winner calls a rage to master which we're going to talk about out of the break that seems to be the recipe right

Speaker 13 it makes me wonder like how many things have we just not understood that we could have already have we not constantly been trying to boil everything down to one thing.

Speaker 13 Like this is one cause for all this other stuff. Like, is it nature? Is it nurture? No, it's both.
And I'm glad to see that Prodigy researchers have accepted that fact.

Speaker 14 Greed.

Speaker 13 Okay, well, let's take that break then. All right, we'll be right back.

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Speaker 14 All right, so I mentioned the phrase

Speaker 14 rage to master, and that was something I believe Ellen Winner came up with.

Speaker 14 And that's kind of exactly what it sounds like, which is something that they found with Prodigies that these little kids come out of the womb. They get to be like two, maybe, three years old.

Speaker 14 And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they exhibit a gift, and that's the only thing they want to do and this is not some kid who's like hey they turned out to be pretty good at this and they played a lot of piano like we're talking about prodigies like they become obsessed with they have a rage to master this thing Yeah, and it's just basically like they ignore everything else, even stuff that little kids would want to do, like fun playing stuff,

Speaker 13 going to the movies or whatever. Making friends.
All they want to do. Yeah.
All they want to do is that one thing over and over and over again and master it.

Speaker 13 And so there's a researcher researcher named Larry Vandervert who

Speaker 13 believes that it has to do with the

Speaker 13 connection between the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex.

Speaker 13 And the reason he focuses in on the cerebellum is because apparently that is where we learn things, we become experts in things, we learn to practice things.

Speaker 13 And the cerebellum has a bunch of connections to the cerebral cortex. Cerebral cortex is in charge of our higher functioning.

Speaker 13 So with those two combined combined together, working together, us doing things repetitively is how we learn to get better and better at it, right? His whole thing is that with a prodigy,

Speaker 13 what we're seeing is the evolution of humanity at its brightest point.

Speaker 13 Like these are examples of what could conceivably be every single person if that perfect storm you were talking about came together.

Speaker 13 And it's just like the

Speaker 13 most finely tuned functioning example of what our brains have evolved to be able to do. That's what he says prodigies are.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it's pretty interesting.

Speaker 14 He theorizes that the cerebellum creates some kind of feedback loop is what he calls it, where you have, you know, some kind of selective affinity or a talent or an interest in something.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 getting better at that, I mean, it's got to be like a dopamine reward or something. Like it hits those reward centers and there's some sort of psychological gold star that you give yourself.

Speaker 14 And that feels so good that

Speaker 14 the kid with a prodigious brain is constantly seeking that reward. And it creates what he calls a maximal grip.

Speaker 14 Like this grip has just got hold of this kid because they're always seeking that mental gold star of getting better and better and better at that one thing.

Speaker 13 Yeah, right. So it's almost like they're.

Speaker 14 They have no chill.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 13 It's like their brains get stuck in a natural progression or natural part of developing as a human being from childhood to adulthood. And they just go off like a rocket on that one tangent.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that was not me.

Speaker 13 No, it wasn't me either.

Speaker 14 I can do a lot of things pretty good.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 A dilettante.

Speaker 14 Yeah. I mean, that's always been my thing.
Like with sports, I was never like built the way you needed to be built to play like varsity sports.

Speaker 14 But I could throw a football and catch a football and punt a football and I could play a little tennis. I can play a little golf.

Speaker 14 I can, you you know i played you know a little baseball a little softball a little soccer and kick a soccer ball wow i can i can throw frisbee like you know i'm well-rounded athletically but i was never gonna be on a like a a high school team right i gotcha i was okay in church league

Speaker 13 everybody wins but i wouldn't embarrass myself in anything you know um I excelled as a child in hiding my knockoff flintstone vitamins in my Lincoln log houses because they were so disgusting I couldn't eat them.

Speaker 13 Man, they were gross. I can actually almost make myself nauseated thinking about them now.
Really?

Speaker 14 Betty was not a vitamin.

Speaker 13 I don't remember that. Was she not? She was missing?

Speaker 14 I don't think so because there was a local band in Atlanta called Betty's Not a Vitamin.

Speaker 13 Oh, okay.

Speaker 14 Because of that factoid.

Speaker 13 Well, had she been in the Flintstone knockoff vitamins I had, she would have looked all misshapen and her name would have been like um teddy or something like that

Speaker 13 with two with three t's I love it there's one other thing about Larry Vandervert's hypothesis about the cerebellum because he said you know this is a weird like um

Speaker 13 example of human natural human development he he pointed out that part of what being a prodigy is excelling at something cultural right like

Speaker 13 everything that prodigy kids do they're not inventing anything they're just getting good at something that already exists. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 So part of his theory or hypothesis is that you couldn't have a prodigy by definition before the advent of culture.

Speaker 13 So he theorizes that probably about 10,000 years ago is when the first prodigy started to pop up.

Speaker 14 Oh, interesting.

Speaker 13 I thought that was...

Speaker 14 Tuk-Tuk's son or daughter?

Speaker 13 Yeah. Maybe great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great-grandson or daughter.

Speaker 14 Okay. Yeah.
Good point.

Speaker 13 That's my posit.

Speaker 14 I never remember when Tuk-Tuk lived, so you know me. I get a little confused.

Speaker 13 He's all over the place.

Speaker 14 So another really interesting biological

Speaker 14 piece to this is memory. And

Speaker 14 working memory is something that they found. I think there was a paper in 2012 by researchers Erbach and Ruth Zotz.
They gathered cognitive data from eight child prodigies.

Speaker 14 And they looked at a couple of things. They looked at their developmental history.
They looked at scores on the Stanford-Benet

Speaker 14 5th edition intelligence test and the autism spectrum quotient.

Speaker 14 And they found, you know, there were different range of IQs, but even the ones that had high IQs weren't on the extreme end of like, you know, super genius or anything. But what they did find was that

Speaker 14 every single one of them were the 99th percentile for working memory.

Speaker 13 I saw some also scored in the 99.9th percentile.

Speaker 13 So like there's something there.

Speaker 13 I was reading, I think, a Scientific American article on this, and they said that if you just randomly selected eight people and gave them this test, like there's a zero chance that they would all score in the 99th percentile.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, it is quite a finding.

Speaker 13 But I think also like a really important finding, too, is that their IQs aren't particularly eye-popping. Yeah.
You know, some of them were, I think, past 140, and that's the

Speaker 13 140 is the minimum for genius. 130, I think, is where being gifted starts.

Speaker 13 At least one of them had an IQ of 100, and that is exactly average IQ. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So IQ or intelligence, or at least the way that we understand measuring intelligence with IQ, see, it doesn't seem to have that much to do with being a prodigy.

Speaker 13 It has some, because again, 100, I think, was the minimum, and they went up to genius level and passed, but it doesn't have nearly as much as you would think.

Speaker 14 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 14 But working memory, like, that's really interesting to me because that's the last, like, that's your act of working memory, the last few things that have happened, calling those up really easily.

Speaker 14 So if you're talking, you know, about obviously with, you know, musicianship and chess and math and things like that, like being able to really quickly recall the last few notes you played or the last few parts of this logarithm,

Speaker 14 that's going to... have a big impact, obviously.

Speaker 13 For sure. There's a good example that I found of that.
John von Neumann, who would go on to become a great mathematician, physicist, pioneer in computer science.

Speaker 13 He, as a child prodigy, would entertain his parents' friends at their parties by, they'd give him a phone book and he would read over one of the pages and then hand the phone book back.

Speaker 13 And they'd ask him questions like, what's... you know, they'd pick a name and say, what's their phone number and address? And he'd tell them.

Speaker 13 And then they'd say, well, recite this whole page. And he would recite it verbatim just after looking at it for a little while, while, which is an amazing example of working memory.

Speaker 13 But that's also, I mean, he was a phone book prodigy, pure and simple.

Speaker 14 As you know, I recently had lunch with a friend of the show and pal, Kevin Pollock, the actor and comedian. And sadly, you were out of town, so you couldn't go.
But Pollock's first

Speaker 14 act was...

Speaker 14 Not doing it, because he's a great impressionist, as we all know,

Speaker 14 not doing impressions of comedy albums. Like a lot lot of kids, the first thing they do is like just repeat the bits from comedy records or specials.
Right.

Speaker 14 He would mouth them in perfect synchronicity.

Speaker 13 Oh, wow.

Speaker 14 So he would do air air comedy and he would do like the throat clears and everything. And he did it, you know, as like, I don't know how young he was.

Speaker 14 He said he was like six or seven to where like one of his mom's neighbors or one of his neighbors or one of his mom's friends was like, you're doing this at the, you know, the Scheinbaums Barn Mitzvah next week.

Speaker 13 Like I'm booking you.

Speaker 14 And he was like, for the first six years or so of his life, like he did it at school. Like, my act was completely just mouthing these comedy bits.

Speaker 13 That's pretty awesome. Yeah, that's pretty fun.
It's impressive. He was a Richard Pryor comedy album prodigy.

Speaker 14 Well, I mean, he made a good point, which was he was like, the material killed because the material was great because it was like the best comics.

Speaker 14 And he went, and then I got it down so good, that part killed. And he was like, I couldn't fail, basically.

Speaker 13 That's pretty great, man.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Fun story.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah. So one other thing about working memory, Chuck, before we move on, it one of the things that it helps with is learning things like chess or math or things that have steps to them.

Speaker 13 You're keeping the information you need to complete this step so you can move on to the next. And you're probably also thinking about what the next step is too simultaneously.

Speaker 13 Working memory really comes in handy for that. So it makes sense that they have just amazing working memory levels.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 And the connection to autism is really interesting too, because because in that paper you know and from 2012 i mentioned that they looked at cognitive data for uh several things one of which was the autism spectrum quotient and they found it you know they found a pretty undeniable connection they found that subjects who were prodigies had uh definitely had more autistic relatives than the general population does

Speaker 14 and very high scores in the attention to detail part of the autism spectrum quotient. So,

Speaker 14 you know, attention to detail is something, obviously, if you have a gift for, you might wind up a prodigy.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but they didn't score high or beyond the

Speaker 13 general population in the other parts of the autism spectrum quotient. Yeah.
So they don't have autism.

Speaker 13 I think that's because there's a separate group where if you have like severe autism or some other cognitive difference,

Speaker 13 you are a savant. You're not a prodigy.
You're a savant, even though the stuff you're doing is prodigious.

Speaker 13 Yeah. You're considered separate for some reason.
I don't know why, but that seems to still be the case.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 14 Those same two researchers, Ruth Zotz and

Speaker 13 Ulrock? Erbach. Ulbach.
Urbach? Jerry Orbach. Jerry Orbach.

Speaker 14 They authored a second paper, and this is from 2014, where they studied 18 prodigies this time.

Speaker 14 And they were masters, these 18, in either math, music, or art. And some of the patterns they found were pretty interesting.
They all had that same great working memory.

Speaker 14 So that was sort of proved out a little further even. But the music and math prodigy scored a lot higher on working memory than even the art prodigies.
And this was super interesting to me.

Speaker 14 The math prodigies displayed the highest levels of overall intelligence and extraordinary visual-spatial skills, whereas the art prodigies had the lowest visual-spatial scores.

Speaker 13 Yeah, which is weird.

Speaker 14 Yeah, counterintuitive. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Should we take a break or keep going?

Speaker 14 Yeah, let's take a break.

Speaker 13 Okay, we're going to take a break, everybody. Here we go.

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Speaker 13 Okay, Chuck. So

Speaker 13 we've talked a couple of times about how prodigy experts agree that it does seem to be a combination of nature and nurture. I think perfect storm is a term that people use a lot.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 the parents of a prodigy definitely do have a role in their development as a prodigy.

Speaker 13 And there have been parents of prodigies who have really kind of claimed that they're essentially responsible for their child's prodigy. Um, there was, uh, I think William James Sittis's dad.

Speaker 13 Remember, we did a whole episode on that poor guy. Oh, yeah.
His deal. What's his deal?

Speaker 13 He uh was one of the most amazing child prodigies of all time, just beyond gifted, just dusted other prodigies, like made them look like just lumps of unmolded clay done by a artist prodigy with terrible visual spatial skills, essentially.

Speaker 13 I love it. Um, but he's But he was worth his own episode.
It was a good episode. But his dad, Boris,

Speaker 13 taught him from a very early age, essentially, from basically when he was born. And he essentially claimed responsibility.

Speaker 13 There's another very famous prodigy whose name was Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr.

Speaker 13 And her mom was Winifred Sackville Stoner Sr.

Speaker 13 and her mom claimed responsibility for her child's prodigy. We'll talk a little bit more about them, but parents do play a huge role, even when,

Speaker 13 even if it's not quite as far as some of them boast.

Speaker 14 Yeah. I mean, you know, if you're going to be a prodigy at golf or tennis or, you know, piano or something like that, it requires, you know, those things aren't cheap.

Speaker 14 I mean, certainly there are stories of people who from a family that maybe, you know, didn't have the kind of resources that other families might have that.

Speaker 14 that, you know, find a local municipal golf course where they can go and play super cheap. But those are like, those are kind of of rich kid sports.
Pianos cost a lot of money.

Speaker 14 So a lot of times with these, if you look at the parents and the family situation, they are very involved parents who have resources to make it happen, not only with equipment, but dedicating the time and hiring a lot of times at very expensive hourly rates, like masters in that thing to help teach that kid.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 So yeah, you can boil it down to a handful of factors that parents play a large role in. First, you have to start with the kid has a natural ability, right?

Speaker 13 You don't teach that. That has to exist already.

Speaker 14 Yes.

Speaker 13 Then

Speaker 13 the kid has to have access to those teachers. And like you said, these aren't Joe Schmo teachers like teaching out of their house on the side for a little extra cash.

Speaker 13 These are like the best of the best teacher experts in this field.

Speaker 13 That's who the parents need to have the resources to pay. And those teachers have to come in at just the right moment.

Speaker 13 i don't think it's necessarily down to the minute but they have to come pretty early in the kid's development so that the kid doesn't get bored because they've gone as far as they can go or because they don't necessarily understand what would even be next yeah or you know you might get lucky and have that within your own family like i

Speaker 14 uh i mean i think wolfgang um van halen

Speaker 14 I don't know at what age he achieved his level of talent, but you know, he had a built-in situation with his father and was the touring bassist and backup singer with Van Halen when he was like 16 years old and can play everything.

Speaker 14 Like, I mean, he's, he's not just a guitar guy, but he can, he plays on his records with his band Mammoth. He plays it all.
He plays the drums. He plays the keyboards.
He plays the bass.

Speaker 14 He plays the guitar. He does all the singing.
He's like, you know, he's a prodigy. And he had a built-in teacher as one of the greatest guitar players of all time.

Speaker 13 I thought you were joking. I didn't realize that Eddie Van Halen's son is named Wolfgang.
I thought you were making a joke about Mozart.

Speaker 14 Well, no, I mean, that is kind of funny.

Speaker 13 Well, Mozart's father is, he was a music teacher as well or a musician.

Speaker 14 And his name was Eddie Van Halen.

Speaker 13 Ironically, right.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, if you have, like you said, a built-in family member already that's, that's, knows what they're doing and can teach you, at least early on, um, that helps a lot.

Speaker 13 I think also Picasso, his father was an art instructor, but he.

Speaker 14 Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 13 He, uh, yeah, Picasso just excelled way beyond his father very, very early on. I think his father also kind of took that a little personally, seems like the type.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and, you know, there are some exceptions here, like with everything.

Speaker 14 It's not like every single prodigy has had the means and the resources and the parents that threw everything at them to try and help them.

Speaker 14 And one notable exception Julia found was Blaise Pascal, the French math prodigy. He was born in 1623, and at the beginning of his schooling, his dad, very famous mathematician, Etienne Pascal,

Speaker 14 said, I want my kid to learn more than math, and math is so interesting. If he gets a hold of these math books, he's going to ignore everything else because math is so incredible.

Speaker 14 And so he hid all the math books in his house, but young Pascal.

Speaker 14 um got an outdated math book somehow that was in english even though all he only spoke french and he was so smart and such a prodigy he translated that and reinvented parts of that,

Speaker 14 like geometry in that book that weren't in the book.

Speaker 13 Right. Yeah.
He also came up with probability theory later on. Like he was definitely a math prodigy.
And so he overcame an absence of material.

Speaker 13 There's also some good examples of prodigies who overcame a

Speaker 13 like an absence of resources, right? So like they came from very poor families. Like Like, Stevie Wonder is a very good example of that.

Speaker 13 He's a self-taught musician on all sorts of different

Speaker 13 instruments. And his parents did not have the resources to buy him all these things.
There was another guy from the turn of the last century named Srinivasa Ramanujan. And he was very poor in India.

Speaker 13 He came from a very poor family.

Speaker 14 And he, like Blaise Pascal, got his hands on an outdated math book and just taught himself math and became, um he ended up studying at cambridge yeah for sure i mean there are definitely those examples um but there are also there are also on the other side like plenty of examples of you know the the nurture thing going in a bad direction yeah uh where the parents have uh and i know we we julie didn't cover this but in our book we covered do you remember who wrote that chapter by the way i think it was yours I think it was too.

Speaker 14 It was so long ago, I don't remember. I know what you mean.

Speaker 14 But I think it might have been mine because I remember very much wanting to include and did include in the book the story of Todd Marinovich,

Speaker 14 who was a prodigious quarterback.

Speaker 14 And another example is Jennifer Capriotti, the tennis prodigy. Like they were kids who

Speaker 14 were both excelling to the point where they were young teenagers and Sports Illustrated being written about. And they were pushed by these overbearing fathers in their case.

Speaker 14 And they both burned out and washed out and ended up having problems with drugs and problems with the law and stuff like that.

Speaker 14 So, there are some pretty sad cases there where parents take what could potentially be a good thing and just ruin it because they're parents.

Speaker 13 You know, I was reading today about Venus and Serena Williams and their tennis prodigy

Speaker 13 status, I guess. But

Speaker 13 Richard,

Speaker 13 their father, Richard Williams, he had Venus turned pro at age 14 because the USTA was about to release the Capriotti rule, which was like you can't turn pro after a certain age because Jennifer Capriotti was such a cautionary tale.

Speaker 13 So before the rule could be passed, Richard was like, you're turning pro now. And her debut, she beat number 66 and almost beat number the top seeded player at

Speaker 13 her first professional tournament. Age 14.

Speaker 14 Yeah, boy, those Williams sisters were fun or still are fun to watch.

Speaker 14 I didn't see that movie, did you? King Richard?

Speaker 13 No, I didn't.

Speaker 13 Okay, moving on.

Speaker 13 Yeah, we have nothing to say about it then, apparently.

Speaker 14 Well, speaking of moving on, we're to the point where we talk about when you're not a prodigy anymore, because you mentioned early on,

Speaker 14 you know, once you have mastered this thing, that's it. And a lot of times, that is it.

Speaker 14 Some, you know, they're different stories. Some flame out and go down a bad road.

Speaker 14 Some go on to have, you know, great careers doing their thing. Like you mentioned, Mozart, obviously.

Speaker 14 But some go on to have great careers and it's not like a super famous situation like Mozart, but they do great for themselves. But, you know, it's like being a child movie star.

Speaker 14 Like once you reach a certain age, that sort of

Speaker 14 appeal might be over, the adorableness of the kid that can play the piano at 10 years old. Right.
And you're just an adult who can play the piano really well.

Speaker 14 And all of a sudden, you're not special anymore. And that can lead to a big fall.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Yeah.
It can. Cause because you're essentially, especially at the early on in the 20th century when the papers would track you down and ask your opinion as a child prodigy.

Speaker 13 You were a child star, essentially. And that is not something that society has figured out how to handle properly.
We don't know what to do with child stars.

Speaker 13 So instead, we just chew them up and spit them out and say, good luck. We don't need you any longer.
That same effect in general can happen to child prodigies.

Speaker 13 And one really good example is Bobby Fisher. He's, he's,

Speaker 13 the, he's the cautionary tale for child prodigies and how bad things can get after you're not a prodigy anymore.

Speaker 14 Yeah, for sure. He was the chess prodigy.
Um, I've recommended it before, but the great, great film, Searching for Bobby Fisher is so, so good.

Speaker 14 Highly recommended. But he was born in Chicago in the 40s, uh, was playing competitive chess by the age of eight and won the U.S.

Speaker 14 Open at 14 and became the youngest international grandmaster at 15 years old in 1958, 15 years old in six months. But when he, when his career fell,

Speaker 14 he fell hard and spent a couple of decades roaming around Southern California, destitute.

Speaker 14 He spent nine months in a Japanese prison and is kind of known for the last couple of decades of his life as being a pretty hateful anti-Semite.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Yeah.
He,

Speaker 13 I don't know if he had a blog or something like that, but after 9-11, he like he publicly celebrated it on his blog. Like he,

Speaker 13 he really just took some seriously weird turns.

Speaker 13 And yeah, he was, he's just a great example of how bad things can get after society's done with you and you're not, you're not useful anymore, not adorable or noteworthy.

Speaker 13 I think also he clearly had some mental health issues that were

Speaker 13 probably going to emerge either way, but

Speaker 13 being a child prodigy and just such it's such a weird way to grow up that could not have helped at all. Yeah.

Speaker 14 And, you know, there are other cases of kids. And here's a piece of advice.
You can do what you want if you've got a really pretty genius kid, but don't send your kid to college at like 12 years old.

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 14 I just, I don't see that ever leading to good things. I think you should try and normalize a child's childhood as much as possible, even if they're

Speaker 14 unchallenged in school. There are other ways that you can foster that.
I think besides saying you're going to Harvard at 11 and you're going to be in the newspapers for that.

Speaker 14 The case of Elizabeth Benson, she was a 214 plus IQ kid who went to college at 12 and graduated and disappeared. And later on, there was one of those like, where are they now articles? And

Speaker 14 this is no shade at somebody who's a cashier. It's a fine job and we need cashiers.

Speaker 14 The article very much was like, this former child prodigy is now just a cashier. And that was sort of how it was framed.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but despite that, she kept like batting away that kind of sentiment and just talking about how happy she was.

Speaker 13 She was married. She was very happy with her very normal life, with her very normal husband.
And this is a person like a 214, it has a plus next to it, which might as well be an asterisk.

Speaker 13 She scored perfectly on an IQ test. And the reason that plus is there is because they imagined she could have kept going, but they ran out of questions.

Speaker 14 Anybody got a question? Yeah.

Speaker 13 So she, and she even considered herself in the article, she said, you know, based on the stories of some of my peers, like I actually got off pretty well. Like, I'm happy with life as an adult.

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah. But yeah, she's, she's an example of one that went pretty well.

Speaker 13 But the best that you could do if you don't eventually turn into an adult who starts contributing greatly to your fields of interest, like Mozart, like John von Neumann, like Pablo Picasso.

Speaker 13 The best you can hope for is to lead a normal life as an adult, you know?

Speaker 14 I keep thinking you're going to say John Von Jobi every time.

Speaker 13 I know.

Speaker 13 I keep wanting to call him Johan, too, and it's not.

Speaker 14 Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 14 You mentioned Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr. early on.
She was a language prodigy in the early

Speaker 14 20th century,

Speaker 14 probably most famous for...

Speaker 14 In 1492, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue was written by Winifred Sackville Stoner Jr.

Speaker 14 But her mom was one of those parents that really, really pushed her, apparently,

Speaker 14 and gained a lot of fame. Like the mother did, she wrote books about, it was sort of like Royal Tannenbaums when

Speaker 14 Ethelene Tannenbaum, you know, talked about her prodigious family of children.

Speaker 14 And I think we mentioned the tannenbaums in the book, of course, because I wrote the chapter. And that's one of my favorite movies.
But

Speaker 14 the mom gained a lot of attention and was on the like the lecture circuit and stuff like that. And the daughter was like, you know, take my advice, dear mothers.

Speaker 14 Spare your children from so-called fame, which easily turns to shame. And be happy if you have a happy, healthy, contented boy or girl.

Speaker 14 Amen to that.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's great advice. Great advice.
So if you have a child prodigy on your hands, tread carefully, consult experts, maybe get in touch with Ellen Winter.

Speaker 13 I'm sure she'd be very happy to speak with you and tell you what not to do.

Speaker 13 So there you go. That's our annual dose of advice for the parents of child prodigies.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and I also want to say, I bet it's not the easiest thing, though, to be fair to parents. You know,

Speaker 14 it puts them in a tough position if your kid is obsessed with this one thing and clearly super gifted because you don't want to squash that. So

Speaker 14 it's a tightrope you're walking there. So I get it.

Speaker 13 Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's not a position I would necessarily want to be in, but

Speaker 13 you've got some really great fodder for your annual Christmas letter that you send out with your Christmas card. Yeah, for sure.
You want to make your

Speaker 13 sister and Boise feel jealous?

Speaker 13 You talk about your child prodigy and what they're doing.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I've only known one person in my life that does that, and that is in Emily's family.

Speaker 14 Her Aunt Peg sends out the annual Christmas sort of family catch-up thing.

Speaker 14 And I've always just been delighted to read it and thought it was super cool and wondered why no one in my lousy family ever cared enough to do anything like that.

Speaker 13 That's a very sohio thing to do oh is it okay yeah for sure i get it uh before we uh go on to listener mail chuck i just want to point out a couple of at least one good band and album name rage to master oh very nice and then i think you could make a pretty good bon jovi tribute band with johan bon jovi right

Speaker 13 or john von yohi yeah there you go john von newman

Speaker 13 no one would get that except for stuff you should know listeners yeah that's true. What were you going to say? Because I wanted to...

Speaker 14 You know what I was going to say.

Speaker 13 You say it.

Speaker 14 Bada bing, bada boom, bon jovi.

Speaker 13 And there, Chuck has unlocked listener mail.

Speaker 14 This is a correction of sorts, and this is something I didn't know. I'm glad to know.
When we did our USAID episode, we were talking about condoms for Gaza.

Speaker 14 This is from Bernie. He said, I think you guys did a great job.
Just wanted to clarify something. The $50 million for condoms was not for Gaza, as in Gaza next to Israel.

Speaker 14 It was for Gaza province in Mozambique. Elon Musk even corrected this in one of his weird Oval Office press conferences.

Speaker 14 But as you said, the sound bite had already gone out and people did not want to hear any retraction to what they now believe.

Speaker 14 So glad you guys covered this topic is so important globally. As someone who's been in this line of work for my entire adult life, this episode really hit home to me.
Keep up the great work.

Speaker 14 All the best.

Speaker 13 Bernie F.

Speaker 14 Chavez.

Speaker 13 Thanks a lot, Bernie. That was a very gentle correction, and we appreciate those.

Speaker 13 Rather than I can't believe you guys screwed this up this badly, which we get once in a while, but for the most part, we hear gentle corrections like Bernie's.

Speaker 13 So hats off to you and thanks for setting us straight, Bernie.

Speaker 13 If you want to be like Bernie and send us an email, you can. You can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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