38: Discussing the nature of childhood prodigies

listening and enjoy the podcast. Today, I'm very pleased to have Kimberly Stevens on the podcast together with Joanne ruth Satz. She is co author of the book The Prodig's Cousin, The Family Link between Autism and Extraordinary Talent. Thanks Kimberly for being on the show with me today. Thanks for having me. What a fascinating book I've been, you know, very endlessly fascinated with prodigies and their extraordinary capabilities and provide a lot of new insights in this book on

what some of these causes could be. Could you first of all tell me what's your relationship with the joe Anne ruth SATs and how did you both decide to go through this investigation. Well, that's easy. She's my mom, so you know I know her quite well, and you know, she really started on sort of the prodigy path when

she was in graduate school. She was at Case and she was in her last year and she'd been studying expertise and kind of extraordinary performers, and just sort of on a whim, she learned a child prodigy in Louisiana, and so she and my dad went down there to

see him. And she had this theory about what might be behind adult expertise and she wanted to see if it would you know, hold for a child who could do incredible things with you know, musically at two years old, three years old, and by this time he was six. So she went down there and she gave him some tests, an IQ test, a music audiation test, and what she found sort of surprised her. She thought he was going to have just a truly extraordinary IQ to explain what

he could do. And you know, he was a very smart kid. He had a very high IQ, but it was nowhere near as extraordinary as sort of his abilities with his instrument. But what she did find was he had a really incredible working memory and he had great

you know, music audiation skills. But she still wasn't convinced that that was sort of could be the whole answer, and so just by chance, heysked for a break in the middle of the test and they ended up going to McDonald's, where she ran into his cousin who had autism, and she kind of had this light bulb moment of you know, is there some connection with autism here that might be behind or have something to do with his

really extraordinary abilities. And that sort of got the ball rolling for her and then later for me very exciting. So it's clearly more to the story about these prodigious youths than just a high IQ. But what are some of the other factors that she found that were important and explaining their rapid learning ability for their specific domain. Yeah.

So what she found, and it started immediately with that first prodigy and kind of continued on with every kid she worked with, was that they all had truly extraordinary working memories. And to sort of distinguish that from regular memory. You know, recall might be if I rattled box seven numbers to you and you repeated them back to me. But working memory would be if you can manipulate the information, and so you would if I said, you know, can

you add the first three numbers in that series. I read to you that that would be working that way, and they were just truly extreme on that trait, like ninety nine point nine percentile on the test, And so that was sort of one of the first big pieces of the puzzle. And the next was that when she tested them on attention to detail, they were very, very strong on that trait. They kind of all had a real eye for, you know, minutia that the rest of

us might not pick up on. And the third was this really really strong pension to develop passionate interests and to let those interests kind of to just love to do their thing in a way that is extreme and unusual and kind of pervaded every area of their lives. Right what about grit Where does that come into play with prodigies? It seems like there it appears as though their work is effortless. But how much of the grid aspect is do you see in them? I think definitely some.

I think some of it sort of the passion piece takes care of for them that they want to do their skills so much and they derive I think so much pleasure from it that it doesn't feel like work. A lot of the time, it feels like what they want to do, which isn't to say there are, of course, you know, bumps in every road, and I think that the kids who really make a career of it figure out, you know, how to navigate those bumps and how to

sort of stick with parts that are more difficult. Yeah, there's this common perception in our society that prodigies are, you know, have tiger moms, right, They're constantly being pushed by the parents. I think the literature suggests that if anything, it's the children pushing the parents, it's the other way around. Do you see that as the case amongst the prodigies you've studied. I think that was absolutely true. You know.

I was really struck actually, as you know, my mom had worked with many of these families, and I spent more and more time kind of talking to them, talking

to their parents. But this real conflict that most of them felt between they had this child who could do something really incredible and love to do it, and they wanted to support that, but they also, I think constantly felt this sort of pull in the other direction to try to help them have a more typical childhood on the one hand, and to make sure that they didn't see their own self esteem and self worth as totally tied up in this one ability and sort of being

special in this one way to sort of help them be, you know, see themselves as whole people. For sure. I think that whole person approach is really important for these developing children who have they may lag in lots of other areas, right, So they might show amazing proficiency at putting the violin, but they may tie their shoes or they can't, you know, have they have made have difficulty making friends and things? Right? Do you see these kind

of jagged profiles? You know, I think there's certainly some of that that for some of the kids it was hard to relate to peers because you know, if all you want to talk about is physics and you're you know, seven year old friends aren't into it, it's hard to find common ground. But for many of them, that actually I think wasn't an issue that they were you know, there are these kids tend to be extremely empathetic and so they you know, they could connect with people and

even people at their age over over other things. So there are jagged profiles, but I think that varies. I don't think it's sort of universal to prodigy. I hear the empathy thing a lot in the literature on giftedness and the literature and prodigies. What do you think is the psychological mechanism going on there? Why would there be a co currence of a high ability in one area and having this general empathy. It's not obvious to me why there would be that connection, but you do see

that a lot in the literature. Can you tell me what you think is going on there? Yeah, So I think that's really interesting and one of the for my mom, one of the very unexpected things that she found is you know that these kids they not only you know, wanted to play violin heart and soul, they also wanted to use that to really benefit other people, which was intriguing.

And I think that there, you know, this is sort of a preliminary aspect of the research, but I think you actually could potentially, with the prodigies, connect that back

to autism as well. That you know, there's you hear sometimes that autism comes with sort of a lack of empathy, but there's a competing theory actually that autism entails sort of an over abundance of empathy that these individuals actually are highly highly sensitive to other people's feelings and other people's sort of state of mind, so much so that when someone else is upset or having a hard time for some reason, that it causes them to shut down.

So they actually have an over abundance of empathy that sort of doesn't allow them to visibly empathize in the way that some other people do. Right, And you brought up the autism topic, and that a lot of ways. That gets the core of this book, right then, a major discovery of this book. And so let's back up a second. So what are some findings that Joanne found

that linked autism to being a prodigy. There are various levels which she found that, right, Yeah, yeah, So I think it sort of starts most obviously where with their families, where actually many of the kids had a close autistic relatives, you know, a sibling or a first cousin or even a parent, and that papped up again and again. And then the second level, I think would be these behavioral

and cognitive similarities. So we've talked a bit about the working memory and how sort of central to the prodigy phenomenon that seems to be, and that's very interesting because there are repeated reports starting with you know, Le O'Connor in the nineteen forties, with you know, people with autism having these really extreary memories as well, and it's complicated, you know, it doesn't turn up in every study, but there does seem to be this rain of extreme memory

that's associated with some pieces of autism, and particularly in autistic savants. You see it in all of them. You know, people say it's sort of the lynchpin of autistic subplans as well. That attention to detail is also connected with autism, as is you know, the real tendency toward passionate interests, which are sometimes in the context of autism called obsession, but I think don't always necessarily look that different. It's

a pretty thin line between the two. And then the third and maybe most intriguing of the connections was genetic that my mom and her colleagues at Ohio State have found some preliminary evidence that both prodigies and autistic individuals have shared mutation on chromosome one that you know, it's early days, it's sort of the beginning of that process, but it's really interesting to think that they share a mutation that they're non prodigious, non autistic siblings do not.

That is interesting if that replicates, and what is that particular mutation what has been correlated with in the past and other research. So it hasn't shown up a lot actually in autism research, which is interesting in itself. I think it's only shown up in one or two studies, and in each case, I think it was not actually statistically significant. It kind of just you know, got just enough traction to be mentioned in the paper, but didn't

actually reach that, you know, that critical level statistically. So it's kind of novel ground, I think for autism in some ways. And you need a really large samples and this is one of the difficulties of studying prodigies. You need very large samples to find repical genes, and it's

very hard to find large samples of prodigies. Yes, which I think is one of the most incredible things about her research actually is that you know how much perseverance it took to find these kids sort of or in the trust of their families and put together these what are actually large by prodigy standards, but you know, might seem small in the context of really large genetic studies.

Sample of kids. But it was interesting in the in the genetics study becase is when I was talking to my mom and talking to her collaborators at Ohio State in connection with this book. You know, that was definitely something that came up again and again is that if we're going to find something, it's going to have to be really powerful because you know, even with this sample, it's still quite small by genetic standards, right, to find kind of an effect amongst all that noise is quite impressive,

especially from a genetics perspective. I mean, trying to find the genes for IQ is taking hundreds of thousands of people, you know, to kind of find any replicable signal there among the noise. So that is impressive. So tell me about yourself a little bit. You're a treelance journalist, is that right? Yes? Yes, yeah. What kind of topics do you write on? So this is sort of early days for me. I've been writing a lot about prodigies, but I hope to continue to write more about science and

about prodigies and autism. I think these are all really great areas that I'm sort of excited to dig into. They are exciting and by us understanding prodigies. Do you think that we learn learn something more generally about the nature of human achievement? I do. I think that it's you know, I don't think we can have a full sort of understanding of talent and expertise and what really

is underlying achievement until we can understand child prodigies. I think it's a really important piece of the puzzle for sure.

And you're probably quite familiar with the so called ten year role or ten thousand hours of practice, and a lot of these prodigies get to very high level of proficiency well below the ten thousand hour mark, right, Yeah, So clearly there's individual differences that matter in you know, practice matters, but there's different rates of learning, and these young kids that are learning things at such a rapid rate, you know, there's still children at the end of the day,

and you know, what are your thoughts on how to best support talent and nurture talent. Have you given much

thought to show the dev talent development process? Yeah, I mean I think that it's something I thought a lot about, you know, after I think telling these parents who sort of struggled with that question day to day is that I think sometimes it felt like, if I can't was support this talent, we're actually going to have a real problem because the kid is so passionate and dedicated to doing this, you know, it's really all they want to

do in some cases. But I think that, you know, letting the kids take the lead was a very important part of this for them. That it never felt like a job or like something their parents expected them to do ten hours a day. That you know, this was really a child driven phenomenon, and that I think the parents for the most part, try to you know, they might provide lessons, or they might pay for instruments or whatever the thing is, but I think they try to keep it that way, try to keep it so that

it comes from the kid. Yeah, I think it's good to add a human dimension to this kind of research. Your book does do that and provide some of these case studies and show that these are living, breathing human beings. They're not these just these machines that society is going to use for its own purposes. I mean, do you ever cringe it all when you see some of these television shows where they bring on a product and then

kind of milk their talent for all it's worth. Yeah, you know, I think that the kids like doing their things, so it definitely well, you know, I think they yeah as well, It actually is sort of I think sometimes how they feel the most comfortable and the most fulfilled. But I do think sometimes there is a tendency to be sort of snarky about prodigies, which I think is really sort of too bad, because the kids are pretty incredible themselves and so interesting from a research perspective, for sure.

I think of some really famous prodigies who made a big you know, I really find Michael Jackson interesting. Net if you could have studied you know, could sure back the hands of time, and you could have studied his genes, you know, did he have a dash of autism? You know, did he have a dash of He certainly has. People have talked a lot. His colleagues talked a lot about his attention to detail when he would perform and when

he would practice with them. So when you start going through some of this stuff, you start to see some of these patterns emerge, for sure, But like you said, there's variability here. It's not all prodigies that have this, you know, autism. As back to it, you find the working memory for sure, but you also find a very specific passion. What do you think are some other factors do you think, Like so, how much do you think nurture or cultural sort of exposure to certain domeans plays

a role in this? I think you have to imagine that it certainly plays a role, because we're looking at kids who've really achieved a lot, and to reach that kind of achievement, even with you know, incredible innate abilities, you know, it still requires some support. I think it's interesting that in these families there's definitely a range of expertise in the parents, you know, how much they know about music or art or map or whatever their kid's

passionate is there. You know, there's a range from professional music instructor to we have no idea with this child talking about right, But they all came from, you know, pretty stable families who were willing to support the talent

in some way. So I think it's you know, you hear extreme cases that come from places where you know there's really almost no support, but the most more commonly you seem to see families who, even if they're not knowledgeable, you know, are willing to provide instruments or painting lessons or whatever the thing is that would be helpful. Sure personally. I mean, you got a chance to see some of

these prodigies, right and talk to them. Do you have any stories you want to share, anything that you really struck you about any of these children? You know. I had this conversation with Jonathan Russell, who was violin prodigy as a kid, and he's now I think he's now twenty, and he's very into film scoring. Now that's the sort of direction his talent has taken. And I was so struck by how deep and broad his knowledge was of his topic that and how much you know, like I've mentioned,

it really colored all aspects of his life. He started playing on the piano while we were talking, and he'd play parts of film scores and he'd say, oh, well, everyone knows this one, or you know, anybody could recognize this or do that, And I would think, I don't know what song that is, and I could never create that like you did. But you know, he'd also talk about hanging out with a friend and they one of the things that they would try to do is recreate

music using just household appliances. You know, can we make this song using a blender in the washing machine and like it. I think that the very incredible love for what they do struck me every time. I love that

kind of story. I love it because it really humanizes talent and it's something that I think we could use more of in our society that in a lot of ways, it demonizes talent, you know, and you know a lot of kids that might be more advanced from more ready for more challenges, kind of get bullied, right, they can be made fun of, and kind of celebrating a culture of excellence I think is something that would be good for society especially now, say thank you so much for

the work you've done, and is there anything you want to add to this interview? That was great? Thank you, thank you. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode, or here are past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com.