The Genius in All of Us

Labels and limits

Maia Szalavitz has an interesting piece in yesterday's Washington Post about the national mania for diagnosing kids:

"Increasing numbers of children are given increasingly specific labels, ranging from psychiatric and neurological diagnoses such as Asperger's and attention-deficit disorder to educational descriptors including "gifted" and "learning disabled."

-- The main problem being that these labels tend to overwhelm parent, child and teacher with a fixed and false set of expectations. She cites Stanford's Carol Dweck, author Alissa Quart and psychiatrist Bruce Perry all insisting that abilities are not fixed.

"Recent research in neuroscience bolsters the idea that people can and do change. Says Perry: 'The brain is like a muscle: The areas that are used grow and improve while those which aren't, don't.'"

Kids diagnosed with a disability need to understand that there are no fixed limits on what they can achieve. "It's incumbent on parents," says Dweck, "to explain that 'Well, you may be wired a little differently; this might make it more difficult for you; you might have to work harder and use different strategies,' as opposed to 'This means you can't learn.' "

And at the other end of the spectrum, kids labeled as "gifted" need to understand that success will only come with effort and a willingness to take risks. "Children who believe in permanent traits like fixed intelligence," Dweck explains, "are actually vulnerable because when something goes wrong they think they don't deserve the label anymore."

Where does persistence come from?

Another important facet of Po Bronson's recent article: it touches on the nature and nurture of persistence. Is an individual's level of persistence hard-wired and immutable or can it be increased/decreased?

This is critical because, as we know anecdotally and as has been demonstrated by researchers (Renzulli, 1978, and many other studies), persistence is an essential component of greatness. Exceptional skill may look effortless -- the spectacular putt or pirouette -- but getting there takes relentless dedication, years of practice and humility. "It's not that I'm so smart," Einstein once said. "It's just that I stay with problems longer."

Where does persistence come from, and can it be acquired?

Psychologist Ellen Winner argues that persistence -- what she calls the "rage to master" -- "must have an inborn, biological component” (Von Károlyi & Winner, p. 379,), and that exceptional performers are “intrinsically motivated to acquire skill" in the areas in which they are innately gifted because they find it easier to learn those skills. (Winner (1996, p. 274).

Anders Ericsson argues against this second notion. Having spent years studying what he calls "deliberate practice" -- the slow, methodical process of getting better -- he points out that there's nothing easy or fun about it. It is, he says, "associated with frequent failures and frustrations and is not the most inherently enjoyable or 'fun’ activity available." His research shows that "aspiring individuals typically prefer [the harder, slower work] to playful interactions with friends."

So what makes some people spend so much energy on the the harder, slower practice instead of spending less energy on easier, more thrilling, but less skill-building play activities? Are such people simply born with that work-hard impulse?

Maybe some are -- Matt Ridley's Nature via Nurture reviews some evidence of how genes help play into personality. But there's also some emerging evidence for persistence being something we can develop. Bronson's piece cites Robert Cloninger, at Washington University in St. Louis, who not only zeroed in on the persistence circuitry in the brain (Gusnard, Cloninger et al, 1993), but also trained mice and rats to develop persistence. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” explains Cloninger. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.” In other words, yes, according to Cloninger, the animal mind can actually be trained to reward itself for slow and steady progress rather than the more thrilling instant gratification.

If we can marry this neurobiology with some psychology and real-world understanding -- such as Carol Dweck's work in motivating students to work harder, we may actually get closer to a real recipe for greatness that could be useful to any parent, teacher or coach.

How to motivate kids to be their best

A smart piece by Po Bronson in last week's New York magazine pulls together some great research about how to motivate kids to increase effort, take risks and get better at stuff.

The overall message of the article is that parents and teachers need to pay close attention to the type of praise they offer kids. We should praise kids for their effort -- not for their innate abilities. These conclusions come from years of solid research by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and others (Blackwell, Dweck, et al, 2006), demonstrating the following.

* Praise for innate ability:
- discourages effort by creating a mindset that equates effort with inferiority ("Expending effort becomes stigmatized," writes Bronson. "It’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.")
- discourages risk-taking, encouraging kids to play it safe, to avoid things they don't feel "naturally" good at
- removes kids' sense of control over their own lives
- leads to worse study habits and lower grades

* Praise for effort:
- imbues kids with a greater sense of control over their lives
- leads to improved study habits and grades

“When we praise children for their intelligence," explains Dweck, "we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes . . . Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure."

This research backs up some critical points about the development of talent and "giftedness":
- effort and motivation are crucial to success
- motivation *can* be nurtured
- while certain innate advantages may exist in individuals, calling attention to them is demonstrably unhelpful. Kids with *and* without these innate advantages benefit from developing a mindset that equates success with effort. Both groups are hurt by a mindset that equates success with innate ability.

Rethinking Education

Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative and a powerful speaker, has some provocative thoughts on the systemic troubles in education. Here are a few excerpts from his recent talk at the TED conference.

--  "All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them pretty ruthlessly."

--  "Creativity, now, is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status."

--  "Kids will take a chance...By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. [We stigmatize mistakes.] We're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. The result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said that all people are born artists, and the probems is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather we get educated out of it."

--  "Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. The whole system was invented around the world to meet the needs of industrialism...So you were steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Isn't that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician. Don't do art, you're not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now profoundly mistaken."

--  "Academic ability [has] come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of the public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized. We can't afford to go on that way."

--  "We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence...Intelligence is diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think aesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement."

[Thanks to my great voice coach Jocelyn Rasmussen for alerting me to Robinson's work.]

How Paganini became Paganini

From the New York Times, May 28, 1852:

"We remember, in a provincial town, seeing on a temporary stage a tall, lank, wizard-looking being, with long dark hair falling over his shoulders, and an eye and face expressing together the genius and the sensualist, eliciting thunders of applause from a numerous audience for his marvellous performances on the violin, which, in his think transparent, skeleton-like left hand, became at will a one-stringed or a twenty-stringed instrument, rising from its full natural tones to the softness and sweetness of the flageolet, or imitation the tinkling of the harp . . .

"This strange mixture of dross and gold was born at Genoa, the 18th February, 1784. His father, Antonio, and his mother, Teresa, were both dilletanti in music, and were not long in discerning in their youthful son a strong taste for the art they cultivated. To encourage this taste his mother had, or pretended to have, an angelic vision, and in the morning thus spake to him: "My son, thou shalt become a great musician; for an angel, radiant with beauty, appeared to me this night, and has listed to the prayer I made him. I prayed him that thou mayest become the first of violinists, and the angel has promised me it shall be so." From this time the study of the violin became his sole object, and it was not many years before he surprised and delighted the most eminent masters of that instrument with his compositions and performances."

Genius is . . .

I ran into some semantic trouble over dim-sum lunch the other day with two friends, Andy and Jim. They had a lot to say about the issues raised on this blog, but we kept getting stuck on terminology, starting with the word "genius."

Andy wanted to distinguish between "genius" and "greatness" in the following way: genius is a person's extraordinary ability, which is not always harnessed; greatness is the extraordinary achievement itself. Jim, who was paying for lunch and therefore had special status at the table, was inclined to agree.

I resisted. I've been pretty sloppy with my use of "genius" so far, but I've mostly been taking my cue from Michael J.A. Howe, who argues in his book Genius Explained that genius is a cultural construct, and therefore is inevitably connected to accomplishment.

"Describing a person as a genius is not like stating that he or she is tall, or even intelligent or clever. The word is never introduced soley as a description of an individual: it always denotes a recognition of outstanding accomplishments. If you are unconvinced about that, try to think of someone who is widely regarded as having been a genius but who never produced highly valued creative work...If a baker is someone who makes a bread, a genius is a man or woman who produces masterpieces or discoveries that greatly impress other people."

Dean Keith Simonton, author of Origins of Genius and a giant in the field, agrees with Howe, preferring what he calls the "eminence" definition over the high-I.Q. definition, for a few reasons. "The word is commonly used to refer to those individuals whose impact on history is most widely recognized," Simonton writes. He also argues that "genius" connotes a uniqueness which is impossible to appreciate without taking particular accomplishments into account. 

Merriam-Webster, on the other hand, seems to support Andy and Jim's purer notion of genius-as-aptitude. After running through the more archaic uses, it lists this definition:

"a. A single strongly marked capacity or aptitude; b. extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity; c. a person endowed with transcendent mental superiority; especially : a person with a very high IQ."

So which it: Is genius a raw ability that may or may not be activated, or is it a mature skill set visible only upon its deployment? The distinction might seem trivial, but the popular ambiguity of the word's meaning goes to the heart of discussion and debate about intelligence and talent. Is there such a thing as an unaccomplished genius? Can a person be a genius without actually doing great things?

I still think not, for several reasons.

1.  High I.Q. does not = Genius.
As already outlined elsewhere on this blog, I.Q. tests do a reasonably good job of measuring an individual's analytical intelligence, and ranking it among the general population. But raw analytical intelligence is a far leap from the ground-breaking creativity and dynamism that we commonly associate with genius. Not surprisingly, I.Q. tests cannot predict who will show even inklings of genius. Most geniuses probably do have an above-average I.Q., but there is no proven lower limit. The reknowned Genius physicist Richard Feynman was proud to remind people that his I.Q. was only slightly above average. Jane Piirto, author of Understanding Those Who Create, has suggested that talented performers can do quite well with an I.Q. of 100 -- dead average.
    Accepting that high I.Q. does not correlate to real genius means has two immediate implications:
    1) One does not necessarily need extraordinary school-smarts to make extraordinary contributions in their chosen field (ala Bruce Springsteen's remark here).
    2) While we should demand excellence everywhere in society, we should not burden young academic stars with unfair expectations of future genius. A high I.Q. is a nice start, a useful ingredient, but nothing more.

2. Genius is not a kernal, but a kaleidescope, .
Study after study shows that what we think of as genius (and more ordinary talent) is never the result of a single ability, but rather a massive aggregation of distinct qualities, each critical. They include: curiosity (Tannenbaum, 1983), persistence (Renzulli, 1978) flexibility (Davidson, 1992), resilience (Jenkins-Friedman 1992a, b), risk-taking (MacKinnon, 1978; Torrance, 1987), and passion (Benbow, 1992). Articulating all these qualities and where they come from is the primary focus of this blog/book.

3. Genius is relative.
The essence of genius lies in a person breaking out of a conventional paradigm: Einstein conceiving of E=MC2, Mozart composing his Requiem, Proust writing Remembrance of Things Past. No one would today accuse me of genius for being able to discuss the theory of relativity or being able to write at great length about the relationship of sense and memory. Yesterday's genius is tomorrow's ordinary knowledge or experience. (Thanks, Pete).
     If genius is all about challenging the intellectual/artistic status quo, then it doesn't exist until that challenge is actually mounted. We might say that we suspect someone of having the potential for genius, that we have high hopes for someone. But without the revelation of the actual ground-breaking idea or work, the genius clearly has not fully formed.

4. Genius is subjective, and rhetorical.
Except for a small handful of transcendent figures, the planet will never agree on who is and who isn't a genius. People wield the term loosely (recklessly?) and for a variety of reasons. In a TV studio recently, former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson called me a genius (before they started rolling tape) for writing a book he likes. I happen to believe that my friend Dan Seiden is a musical genius, but you've never even heard of him and so far no record executive is inclined to agree. (Dan himself won't even put a lot of his rawest and most powerful and most plaintively beautiful stuff online, forcing his friends to take matters into their own hands).   
    Not only can we not agree on who is and isn't a genius -- we can't agree on why someone is a genius. Is David Byrne a genius because of his unique mind -- or is it his unique songs, or his life-long, inspiring eclecticism? Is the savant Daniel Tammet -- who can verbalize pi to 22,500 decimal places and who learned the Icelandic language in a week -- a genius because an accident of biology makes him one of fifty true savants, OR is he a genius because he may be the only savant in the world who can elegantly articulate what he's going through? Reasonable people will argue one or the other.    
    I've noticed that people generally use the word in three different ways. 
   1. As a shorthand for someone with a high I.Q.
   2. As a way of expressing the otherness of a remarkable achiever -- Mozart, Einstein, Tiger Woods. We think of these people as being somehow beyond conventional human abilities and understanding. It helps us to think of them as somehow super-human.
   3. As an attempt to catapult a generally-unknown person into wider esteem. "You should read her essay -- she's a genius."

For all the above reasons, even with the slippery nature of the word, I don't think there is such thing as an "unaccomplished genius." But can a genius be unheralded? Absolutely. I disagree with Howe and Simonton on their pre-requisite of worldwide recognition. If the essence of genius is a person doing something new and special, we would expect public recognition of its importance to take a while. The MacArthur Foundation seems to make this point nicely with its "genius grants" -- even though the foundation officially does not use that loaded word. In its fellowship program, MacArthur recognizes "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction." MacArthur fellows are usually not yet renowned, and seem to be in the midst of a fertile period where their accomplishments are A) already substantial, but which B) also strongly hint of one's best work yet to come. It's as if MacArthur is saying, "We think you're on the cusp of genius."

Overconfidence —> Incompetence; Humility —> Success

A recent NYTimes article highlights the work of Cornell psychologist David Dunning and his grad student Justin Kruger on the critical relationship between self-assessment and skill level. Not surprisingly, they've shown that people with poor skills are also quite bad at assessing their own abilities. They tend to be grossly overconfident, demonstrating a notable deficiency in "self-monitoring skills." The opposite is also true: better performers have far more humble predictions, and subsequently more accurate assessments, of their performances. (Thanks to Sam Koritz for his recent post on this.)

That research connects nicely with a study by Dianne Horgan, from Memphis State University, showing that the success of child chess players correlates closely with their "calibration" skills -- the accuracy with which they can predict their own performance. Further, she showed that experienced child chess players can export their higher calibration skills to other, non-chess tasks.

None of this is shocking, but it strikes me as a central point in the aspiration for greatness. It certainly resonates with my own experience and observation: to get better and better at something, one needs to be one's own toughest critic -- fair, but always honest, humble and tough. You don't want to be demoralizing, needlessly tearing at the fabric of your self-esteem, but at every turn, you do want to be saying: "Well, that's not quite good enough -- I can do better." In fact, it seems to me that you want to attach self-esteem to the process of becoming better, instead of letting it become attached to any static result. That way, you can be critical of a performance and not become demoralized about what it says about you as a person. The self-criticism actually becomes a self-esteem booster because you feel good about doing the hard work to constantly improve.

 

Farewell to the happiness set point

Fascinating interview yesterday on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show with Wall Street Journal science reporter Sharon Begley, about her new book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves. As the title suggests, the thrust of the book is that the brain is far more elastic in both childhood and adulthood than previously understood, and we have the capability to change, improve and repair ourselves in any number of ways. One of the points that Begley made forcefully in the radio interview is that recent science has demolished geneticist David Lykken's notion of a happiness "set point" -- the suggestion that we are born with, and cannot change, our overall level of cheerfulness. According to Begley, the evidence is in that we can substantially alter our general disposition.

Origins of a pool genius

Interesting piece this morning on NPR's Morning Edition about Efren Reyes, a 52 year-old Filipino who some consider the best pool player ever.

"He plays shots that nobody else does," says German player Ralf Souquet. "He can see shots in his mind and his brain three or four shots ahead. We all try to do it, but he sees different patterns and different paths than we do. And he has by far the best cue-ball control. The cue ball seems to be his."

How did he become great? For starters, Reyes literally grew up in his uncle's pool hall in Manila -- his bed was a mattress on a pool table. When he started playing in earnest, around 8 years old (standing on Coke cases to see over the table), he would practice from 6am-9am before school, then play around town after school, and then practice more at his uncle's after closing time until he went to sleep.