Fascinating article on different teen “prodigies,” or kids with lots of ability.
“When you are a child prodigy, you are mastering a domain that has already been discovered – you are not inventing it,” says Boston College psychology professor Ellen Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. “To be a `big C’ creator, you have to do things in a different way, and most don’t make that transition, and it is very, very painful for them. Most prodigies are never heard from again. They drop out, or they become experts.”
These talented people get to a stage at which age doesn’t matter anymore, and they’re just like every other bright guy or gal trying to get ahead. Their test scores are irrelevant in a world where things like charisma and character are often the tickets to success. And that realization can be shattering. [...] Some suffer from what psychologists call the “imposter phenomenon,” the fear that they are not as smart as everyone said they were.
School certainly wasn’t working out. He had a teacher whom the Mercers liken to Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His parents decided to home-school him after a rocky year, and Kiki left her career in marketing behind. Looking back, Robert realizes that there was no other choice. “I would have retreated into an emotional shell, or I just would have lost it and had an emotional nervous breakdown at some point,” he says. “It’s not a light issue. For a lot of kids, it becomes a matter of life and death.”
We want a kid who can interact in society and feel confident about himself, be comfortable with a myriad of people, because if he’s this big brain who can only figure out how to design letter bombs . . .” She interrupts the thought, and we know she’s referring to Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, the child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16 and went on to lead a life of isolation and terrorism.
With great power comes even greater responsibility…
Consider the contrasting fates of two prodigies from the early 20th century. Norbert Wiener entered Tufts University in 1906 at age 11 and went on to graduate studies at Harvard in 1909. That same year, a brilliant 11-year-old named William James Sidis also enrolled at Harvard. Wiener became the father of cybernetics. Sidis became a recluse who collected streetcar transfers. He died alone and disillusioned at the age of 46.
A number of groups like Voyagers exist to help parents who don’t know what it means when their toddler conducts adult conversations at the supermarket. But these things cost money, lots of money, and that’s the open secret of this particular subculture. If you can’t afford to pay for services, or if you come from a background that hasn’t prepared you to work the system, your child could go without support, or his or her talents might not be acknowledged.
“You know, being that smart, you end up feeling that you have some sort of duty, or at least I ended up feeling that it would be an incredible waste not to make use of my talents and leave behind an equation that would be remembered. Or something. An idea.” Jonathan Edwards
How does a brainy loner learn to communicate? “I thought the only purpose of communication was to exchange ideas,” he says. “If someone was telling me something that didn’t have an interesting idea, it was noise, and I would ignore it. That was the point of communication, right? To exchange ideas. Wrong! Completely wrong. The point of communication is to exchange emotions. I was on a different wavelength from everybody else.” (emphasis mine)
This kind of stuff just fascinates me, people who seem to be so far above what is average. I wonder why?
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