Chapter 8 - But What About Natural Talent?

Studies

• Savants don’t have a miraculous talent; instead they have worked for it, just like anyone else
• Autistic savants are much more likely than the nonsavants to be very detailoriented and prone to repetitive behaviors
• When examining chess-playing ability in children who are just learning to play, those with higher IQs do indeed become better players faster
• Adult chess players have no better visuospatial abilities than normal nonchess-playing adults
• Skilled adult chess players (even grandmasters) do not have systematically higher IQs than other adults with similar levels of education
• Go masters score no higher on IQ tests than people in the general population
• The amount of chess practice that the children had done was the biggest factor in explaining how well they played chess, with more practice being correlated with better scores on the various measures of chess skill. Smaller but still significant factor was intelligence, with higher IQ being related to better chess skills. Visuospatial intelligence wasn’t the most important factor, but rather memory and processing speed were
• Among chess elite players, the amount of practice was the major factor determining their chess skills, but intelligence played no noticeable role
• Chess players in the elite group with lower IQs were slightly better players than those in the elite group with higher IQs because they tended to practice more, which improved their chess game to the point that they played better
• The average IQ of scientists is certainly higher than the average IQ of the general population, but among scientists there is no correlation between IQ and scientific productivity
• Scientists in at least some fields need an IQ score of around 110 to 120 to be successful, but that higher score doesn’t confer any additional benefit
• Factors such as the child’s temperament and ability to pay attention to a parent influence the size of vocabulary the child will build
• Infants who paid more attention to a parent when he/she was reading a book and pointing to the pictures in the book grew up to have a much better vocabulary at five years of age than infants who paid less attention

Key Terms

• Congenital amusia: extremely rare medical condition in which people are born tone-deaf

General Information

• Innate characteristics play a much smaller and different role than many people generally assume
• Paganini’s performance was the product of long and careful practice
• There has never been a convincing case for anyone developing extraordinary abilities without intense, extended practice
• The first serious compositions that we can attribute to Mozart were written when he was 15 or 16 years old, after more than a decade of serious practice
• Mario Lemieux had a lot of practice before people began noticing what a “natural” talent he had
• Donald Thomas had trained in the high jump while also developing his ability to jump high off of one foot through his practice dunking
• Most savants are mentally challenged in one way or another
• Donny, an autistic savant, developed his abilities over years of working with and thinking about dates
• Savants’ abilities indicate that these are acquired skills, so that they developed those abilities similarly as other experts
• In our culture, the reason that most non-singers cannot sing is simply that they never practiced to develop the ability to sing
• People do not stop learning and improving because they have reached some innate limits on their performance; they stop learning and improving because they stopped practicing or never started
• There is no evidence that anyone is born without the innate talent to sing or do math or perform any other skill
• It is best not to equate IQ with innate intelligence but simply to stick with the facts and think of IQ as some cognitive factor (measured by IQ tests) that has been shown to predict certain things, such as success in school
• Higher intelligence is not correlated with better chess playing among adults
• When children are just beginning to learn chess, their intelligence (performance on IQ tests) plays a role in how quickly they can learn the game and reach a certain minimal level of competence
• With enough solitary practice, the mental representations become so useful and powerful in playing chess that the major thing separating two players is not their intelligence but the quality and quantity of their mental representations and how effectively they use them
• While people with certain innate characteristics (IQ) may have an advantage when first learning a skill, that advantage gets smaller over time, and eventually the amount and the quality of practice take on a much larger role in determining how skilled a person becomes
• Outside of some very basic physical traits, such as height and body size in sports, we have no solid evidence that such minimum requirements exist
• Among those people who have practiced enough and have reached a certain level of skill, there is no evidence that any genetically determined abilities play a role in deciding who will be among the best
• It is really difficult to predict who will rise to the top of any given field
• If there are indeed genetic differences that play a role in influencing how well someone performs, they aren’t likely to be something that affects the relevant skills directly, such as a “music gene” or a “math gene”
• Because we know that practice is the most important factor in determining a person’s ultimate achievement, it makes sense that if genes do play a role, their role would play out through shaping how likely a person is to engage in deliberate practice or how effective that practice is likely to be
• If you believe in innate talent, you will encourage and support the “talented” ones and discourage the rest, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy
• The best way to avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy is to recognize the potential in all of us and work to find ways to develop it
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