The ones who flourish usually have a parent or an aunt or an uncle or somebody close to them who's encouraging and enabling them, Because if you grow up with no support system for your unusual gift, and it's not recognized in school, and your family doesn't recognize it or they don't care about it, it may just die out.
On this episode of the Psychology Podcast, I had a chat with the psychologist Ellen Winner about prodigies and gifted children. This was a very meaningful chat for me, considering that Ellen's book Gifted Children inspired me so much in college that I credit it as one of the major reasons why I became a psychologist in the first place and
decide to study what I do. In this episode, we discuss Ellen's views on IQ and giftedness, the role of parents in talent development, and how the needs of gifted children can best be met. We also discuss a bunch of myths, such as the notion that gifted children are gifted in all subject areas or the idea that they are all social misfits. Ellen argues for the importance of artistic giftedness and offers a nuanced understanding of the nature and nurture that causes the quote rage to master you
see in child prodigies and Gifted Children. So with great enthusiasm, I bring you Ellen Winner, Ellen Winner, Wow, thanks for being on the Psychology Podcast today with me.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
What a personally meaningful situation. This is your book Gifted Children, Realities and Myths in College is what is one of the two big books that influenced me. Three I'm gonna say three books that influenced me to go into this field in the first place, your book, Howard Gardner's book Frames of Mind, and Robert Sternberg's book Successful Intelligence. So those three books, that's why I'm in this field. That's
why I do what I do. That's great, So thank you for writing the book and for all the amazing research that you've done over the years. How did you get interested in studying gifted children in the first place?
Children are gifted children?
Gifted children? Oh maybe did you start off? Did you start studying all children?
Yeah? I started off. I'm trained as a developmental psychologist, Okay, and that came about because I got before I went to graduate school, I started working at Project zero. Do you know what Project zero is?
I sure do.
Yes.
In college, I was a big fan, a big fan of.
The at Project zero, we do research on young children and adults. But I was working with young children, doing studies of their understanding of the arts and their ability to make things in the arts. But I wasn't studying gifted children. But that's what got me interested. That's what made me decide to go to doctor. Did you get my doctorate and developmental psychology rather than clinical psychology, which
I was first going to do. And then and the more I did research on children in the arts and how they develop, I realized that they were huge variations and some children were extremely talented. And that's what got me interested in studying children who were very gifted in the arts. But then in the book I wrote Gifted Children Missing Realities, I expanded it to cover giftedness in other areas as well. Music, that's art, of course, visual art, reading, mathematics.
Did you were you an artist yourself?
Yes? I did start out as a child doing a lot of art and I planned to go to art school, but my parents said, go to college first, or regular college, and then you can go to art school. I obeyed them.
I went to college and studied English literature, but then I applied to art school, and I did go to the Museum of Fine Arts school after college in Boston, but after one year of it, I decided that this was not for me, because to be an artist is very isolating and very stressful, because it's very hard to actually make it in the arts, and so I decided instead to be a psychologist of the arts.
Yeah.
No, it's wonderful. Thank God to the field of psychology. You did. You know, there's a lot of misconceptions about these kinds of kids, and I just really wanted to dispel some of the biggest misconceptions and then talk about what actually is true about them. I think that a lot of people in their desire, like when they write popular books that like talent is overrated, those kinds of
books which are very very popular. I think there's this kind of they feel like there's this need to make everyone else f feel good about themselves by kind of sweeping under the rug the role of talent. It's sort of like, well, you know their parents pushed them, or you know they got they had all the opportunities in the world. You know, anyone could do it if they had those opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. And I just feel like that's not at the level of nuance that
I that I like to swim in. So to talk a little bit about what you actually what the data actually shows, and what you see with your own eyes as well.
Yes, well, I think this idea that talent doesn't matter got popularized by ANDREWS. Erickson, who wrote about all you need is ten thousand hours of deliberate practice, which means hard work to become an expert. He didn't actually say to become a genius, but we're child prodigies, and gifted
children in the arts are not necessarily geniuses. And then people started saying, these children who are prodigies in the arts, they just had ten thousand hours of deliber practice because they started at a very young age and they worked really hard and it mounts up, and their parents were actually probably pushing them too. So if you actually look at young children who are gifted in the arts or in any area, actually who are if you want to call them child prodigies, those are the ones that are
extremely gifted. If you look at any of those at a young age, you will see that they are not normal kids. They are not typical kids at all. They obviously have some kind of innate ability in the area in which they are working so hard, and they drive themselves. They have what I call a rage to master. They all they want to do is work in their area of expertise. So, yes, they got they get a lot
of deliberate practice. But no child is going to do that unless they already have a strong ability and therefore love of working in this particular domain.
Yeah, I think that's right. You know, you look at you just look at like even sports stars like Kobe Bryant, who I went to middle school in high school with, and I said, you know, you see, they had this rage to master, and you know it takes you know, practice matters, but not everyone gets the same bang for their buck out of the same training regimen that you have to know how to practice.
Right, So I really, I really discount that claim. I think it's completely wrong, and I've written a lot about how that's a myth that really should be dispelled. I think it also comes out of a desire not to be elitist. Everybody can get there. Yeah it sounds nice, but it just is not true.
Yeah. Well, you know, as you've probably been following a lot of gifted programs are being cut in the name of equity right now, Have you seen that? Have you seen that or and what are your thoughts in that situation.
Yeah, I think it's really unfortunate because children who are gifted, the more gifted they are, the more difficulty they have in the regular classroom because they are way above their age peers and they can't find anybody else like themselves. So parents have a real problem because schools are meant for the typical child. Our schools are not designed to take care of the extremes at either end. So one
thing parents sometimes do is grades skip their children. But that used to be more popular earlier, and now it's frowned upon because people think that the child who's grade skipped will have social problems. Another most often what schools do is they provide a pull out Gifted and Talented program where kids get pulled out of the regular classroom maybe once a week, and they are with other kids
that are identified as gifted in whatever area. All different areas may participate, and they work on projects that probably all kids could benefit from, and then they go right back to the regular classroom where if they're like five years ahead in math, they're still doing boring math. Another possibility is in individual education programs that get worked out for each child, and I think that has a lot
of promise. Ideally, it would be great if we could have I mean, in high school, we have advanced classes in different areas and kids can select into them AP classes for instance. I think it would be fine to have advanced classes even in elementary school, but you know, let children self select into them, because you're going to be you can be sure that kids who don't feel very competent at math or reading or writing are not going to self select into a class that makes huge
demands on them. So I think that I'm not in favor of testing kids to see if they get in, because I think that creates stress. Let themself select. If they can't handle the work, they have to get canceled out, counseled out. I didn't say cancel counseled out.
Gotcha. In your experience, how much are over involved parents involved gifted?
It really varies. Some parents who try to put their child on the public stage. If they're a music performer, for instance, parents some parents want them to perform at a very early age. Other parents don't do that, and I do think it's a mistake for parents to push too hard, because I think parents should encourage and enable, but not push too hard because it does create a
problem because the child. Let's take a child who's performing on doing a solo performance in an orchestra, in front of the orchestra or just alone, that child is going to get a huge amount of adulation for what he or she is doing. And when they grow up, if they're going to continue to be considered exceptional, they're going to have to do something original and new in the way they perform, for instance, to be to be considered unusual.
And because otherwise a lot of other say musicians, will have caught up with them even if they weren't prodigies as children. And I think this creates a real wound in the child that they were so special and now they're not special anymore. And that actually leads to the issue of whether child prodigies become great domain changing artists. You can ask that question of prodigies in any area, and that's something we could.
Talk about if you want, well, you know I do, Okay, what is the stat what are the stats show? Are they are some demeans where the conversion is more likely.
I don't actually have quantitative data on this. I can tell you that if you look at adults who are at the highest end of say mathematics or writing literature, or visual art or things that involve math like science, some of them were child prodigies, but majority of them were not. And so it's not necessary to be a child prodigy to be a really creative person in your domain. Most child prodigies end up being experts. So, for instance, a math prodigy might end up being a math professor,
but not a mathematician making original discoveries. And there's really no reason why we should expect prodigies to become major creators because they are very few major creator They're not that many prodigies, but there are a lot more prodigies than there are major creators. So it's very hard to make the leap because a child prodigy is mastering a domain that's already been gift. This's been given to them,
like classical music or mathematics. But to be a major creator, you have to invent something, and that's not the same skill as being a prodigy.
No, that's that's a very good point. In investigating from my book and Gifted and when I investigated savants and prodigies and other high forms of talent that seem to appear out of nowhere. I try to really get to the bottom of it and really just understand where does giftedness come from?
You know?
And it does seem like there's a lot of what I call implicit learning involved. There's a lot of soaking up of regularities and patterns. A lot of these demeans that you're referring to have have repeated regularities, and that we have an on pus learning system that evolved.
I would I would agree with that. I mean performers in classical music or math, prodigies or drawing. Giftedness is all these children are operating in a well structured domain. And I can say that for drawing giftedness because kids who are prodigious and drawing, they're drawing super realistically. There are very few that that draw non representationally that we would consider prodigies. There are a few, but these are well structured domains. And so yes, I think these kids
that do pick things up easily. In fact, I say they learn differently from their peers because they really teach themselves. They don't need to be explicitly taught very much. You know. I studied one child who learned to read at two, and the way he learned to read was he asked his mother to read him the same book every day for one week, pointing to the words as she read. And then he chose another book and they went through the same routine, and after that he had just cracked
the code of reading. That's implicit learning. But if you take an ill structured domain like biology or you know, writing novels, you don't very You really don't find prodigies in these ill structured domains. It takes a long time. Or composing even composing music, it takes that comes later.
Yeah, I'm just I wish we had we really could wrap our heads around more about the role of genetics in this stuff, because I don't think the heritability twin studies tell us much about the mechanism involved. It just tells us that there is a heritability efficient. But I want something deeper. I want to know the mechanism by which proteins that are coded can, somehow, through gene expression, cause such high levels of expertise which are not directly
encoded in the genes. There's no genetic blueprint for some of these evolutionary novel things that that these don't mean that these producties are earning that were never that never operated on evolutionary timescale, you know what I mean.
Yeah, I'm not sure that we could answer that question for the genetics of anything except perhaps a disease, right, but something very specific. I mean, do we know the mechanisms by which genetics affects intelligence? You know, the biochemical mechanisms.
All we know is that that many, many interacting genes are involved.
That's all we know exactly, right.
But anybody that says there's no genetics involved in extremely gifted to kids is just fooling themselves because it has to be. There has to be an eight component. Yeah, but not all of these children have first degree relatives who have that kind of talent, but they often do. One child that I'm studying right now is very gifted and drawing. Neither of his parents draw, but he has
a grandfather who became an architect. And I spoke to the grandfather and he said he drew precociously realistically at a very early age.
So that's something that stuck out for me when I read Deven Henry Feldman's book on prodigies. I'm sure that you and him are have talked before, Yes, yeah, and he's such a great guy as a human as well as a researcher. But in his book that really stuck out to me that a lot of these prodigies did have someone going back even far enough where you say, ah, the great great great great grandfather.
Yes. And also to get to the non genetic part, the ones who Flora usually have a parent or an aunt or an uncle or somebody close to them who's encouraging and enabling them. Because if you grow up with no support system for your unusual gift and it's not recognized in school, and your family doesn't recognize it or they don't care about it, it may just die out. I remember in my son's school when he was growing up, there was a child prodigy. I thought in drawing he
was just amazing. And I told his father that and he said, I'm not interested. He was an immigrant from Haiti, and the father said, I'm not interested in his drawing. I want to know how he doesn't math. I could understand his point. He wanted a son to grow up and earn a living. But I don't know what happened to that child, but I may it may well, that's the kind of child which may just stop gir awing, who may just stop drawing because it's not encouraged.
That's a bit heartbreaking. Yeah, when anyone, whenever, anyone has a passion, at whatever age.
Some people overcome their parent. Leonard Bernstein supposedly his parents wanted him. His father wanted him to go into some business that he wasn't in the slightest interested in, and he pursued. He just did what he wanted to do. But he's not your he's not your average adult who used to be a child prodigy. Though I'm sure he was a prodigy. You know, he's one of the select few. You have to have a certain personality to make the
leap from prodigy to creator. You have to be very strong willed and really have a desire to shake things up and to do something new. And that's a kind of personality characteristic.
Yeah, that's an additional source of genetic variation that yeah, yeah, you have had that into the interacting mix, right. Yeah, well it's let's just think this through for a second. So are there is there a benefit to because you can kick off that rage to master process at any age in your life. I want to start that with that postulate, so you can be seventy years old and
suddenly become captivated by something. It seems to me what happens with a lot of these prodigies is that, you know, while other two year olds are out there trying to you know, like screaming and trying to get food and water, there are some two year olds who are trying to consume books and like water, you know, and and and that is so that's that's what is an anomalists anomalists
about about prodigies. But they still are starting, you know, that they're starting the mastery process like anyone would start the mastery process who hasn't maybe a little bit of a knack for something. Is there a benefit? So I'm not gonna actually ask my question. Is there a benefit with what we know about you know, narrow periods uh where where we can soak up knowledge at certain ages
easier than other ages? Is that? Why is that? Why does that help explain a little bit why starting with that rage to master at a very very young age might bring better long term dividends than when you start later in life.
Well, of course I can't answer that question scientifically, but I can just speculate that doing that, there's something very special about the young child's mind and the way the young child, typical or gifted learns so effortlessly and rapidly. Think of how children learn language. So I think when a child is showing a rage to master at a very early age, they're consuming a huge amount of information and processing it in their minds, and it may well
lead to them being better eventually in their domain. Then somebody who starts doing this in adulthood I mean, of course, or in late adulthood, and of course the child has the benefit of all the years ahead of that child, whereas if you start something late, you have less time to develop that talent.
Well, that's assuming that you live a long life. Yes, you know, every everything's just I feel like everything's kind of like up to luck.
There's a lot of luck involved, a lot of luck in the genetic and in combination and environmental And that's one of the things David Feldman talks about, is the the co occurrence of many things that lead to a child prodigy.
That's right, Well, how how important is that co occurrence of IQ. I know that's a very contentious topic, and one which have you heard of Howard Gardner's work?
You know what? Oh, you know, he's my husband.
I know, I know, I'm joking. Okay, yeah, I was going to say, have you heard of your husband's work? But then I thought i'd you know, so he's, you know, obviously done a lot of work trying to expand our news of what intelligence means. But I think that he's I think he would admit that he's. He's often misunderstood.
His theory is often misunderstood. You know, he's he's still he's you know, he expanded multiple intelligences, but still each of those intelligences have their own giftedness and talent associated and there's still individual differences. It's just amazing to me how people take his theory like it meant therefore we all can be geniuses, all.
Children are gifted. And he never said that.
He never said that. I get it. I get him, I get him, and I understand his theory. So when you're in your own work with prodigies, to what extent do you really see that multiple intelligences play out?
You know?
With your own eyes.
Well, I think if you look at the domains where we see prodigies, they are they constitute some of the intelligence, logical, mathematical. We see mathematical prodigies. There's linguistic, and we see kids who speak early and read early, and there's musical, and we see that there's visual spatial and that I think I would put our visual art prodigies in there. What about the other intelligences? Do we find prodigies there? I don't.
People haven't really reported prodigies in interpersonal like understanding other people or intrapt personal like understanding yourself. Those may be harder to detect. And there's no reason to think that there. I mean, I know some children are precocious and empathy. I heard about one child who used to cry when people were in her family were sad because she was so or she cried from sad music because she was so overwhelmed by other people's sadness. You know, that could
be some kind of interpersonal intelligence. And as for nat ruralism, you know, the naturalist intelligence, probably Charles Darwin was a prodigy in naturalist intelligence. He went around collecting beetles of all kinds and was fascinated with them, but we don't really hear reports of kids in these less structured domains. And that doesn't mean they're not out there, we just
don't haven't had reports of them. Now, there is a myth that a gifted child is gifted in everything, and that does actually go against the idea of multiple intelligences, which argues that these intelligence are separate from one another. That doesn't mean you can't have all of them and be at a high level. It just means that you can also have just one and not be at a high level in others. And so that comes out back
to the question of IQ. In the visual arts, there are several pieces of data showing that kids who and adults too who are visual artists do not have above average intelligences. Of course some do, but on average they don't IQ. Yeah, IQ, because yes IQ, thanks for correcting me.
If you.
Remember the I. If you if you think about savants who are low in IQ and also autistic, they can do amazing things in visual arts and in memory and in music. And people like to say, well, they're not they're they're just like machines. They're not creative. But there have been some studies showing that actually musical savants are they are doing their improvising, they can improvise, They're not just machines. Clearly, these kinds of talents can exist without
IQ with that a high IQ. Now as for math and verbal and linguistic intelligences, well those are really part of the IQ test, so I doubt you could have You might have a savant prodigy in math who doesn't have a high IQ. But what savant prodigies do is calculation. That's a very narrow area of mathematics. But if you have a child that's really good at grasping mathematical concepts, it's likely that that child will have a higher than an average IQ, since IQ involves numerical reasoning. So I
think it depends on the domain. There's a lot of controversy about music too, whether musical talent musically gifted children have a hireman an average IQ. There's some evidence yes, But there's also some evidence that children who are have a high IQ tend to gravitate to music. Maybe they
like the structured part of it. But we don't know anything about kids who are musically talented in rock and roll or garage bands, so it may be that kids who want to do classical music, maybe that those kids come to it because they have i Q or it's correlated with it. But we can't just say musical giftedness is correlated with higher IQ because we haven't studied We've only studied one kind of musical giftedness, which is classical performance, classical music performance.
Why do people get so fixated on IQ? I think there's this kind of thought that, well, anything that's not IQ is learnable, whereas IQ is fixed. But that's like, that's not true out of look if you if you don't have the arts gene as well.
And also IQ is somewhat learnable because we know that our IQ scores have gone up over the over.
The decades, that's true flin effect.
And you know that children's IQ drops after their summer vacation and has to go back up again during school. So there certainly are environmental.
Influences, that's right.
They are both biological and environmental influences and everything and every psychological trait. Get over it, people get over it already, move on because people got so fixated on on IQ. So I'm really glad that you you know, I'm just going down this list of realities and myths, and you've really, you're really organically covering so many of them. So thank you. One that I think a lot of people think about when they think about gifted children, they think of them
as psychological and social misfits. What has been your own experience and working with these kinds of kids.
I think that I would make a distinction between moderately gifted and severely gifted. The more extreme the gift, the more social problems the child has. But it's not because the child is gifted. It's because the child is so alone, because there's not others like that child for that child to associate with. And so I think if that child were in a class of other kids just as gifted, they wouldn't have problems. I think the problem comes because
you're there's so few like you. And I always say to parents, the most important thing you can do for your child is find that if you have a prodigy, is to find at least one other child like your child so they don't feel so isolated.
There was a a researcher, her last name was Hollingsworth, who really yes, she talked. She she wrote you know above one e d I Q you know kind of children she studied, She found that a lot of their social awkwardness disappeared when she allowed them to kind of talk to each other. Now, I think that, like, on the one hand, this could be kind of like an excuse for my awkwardness, But I also think we can we need to also be careful to not get into
that mindset. We're like, oh, the reason why I feel awkward around ordinary civilians is because they're just not at my level of intelligence. Now, I don't want to get into that mindset, do you know what I mean?
Right?
So, how can we you know, how can we raise these kids by being honest about you know, Wow, there is a certain you know, it's really good to be around like minded and really like minded you know literally literally like minded people. But also to not look down on others, not think that because you know, because you have a particularly high Q, that you're better than others. Right, these are seemed to be lessons that we should instill in these children. Do you agree?
Yes? And I think that that's why I don't particularly like the label gifted or prodigy to be used with the child. I think it's much because that can lead to feelings that they're better than other people. I would just say, you're really good at this, and you really love this, and other people are good at other things.
But if your child is feeling, you know, like bullied because he's so different, or just lonely because he doesn't have anybody to talk to because nobody's on his wavelength, that's when I say to parents, try to find one other child. Now with the Internet, there are all kinds of more They are more opportunities, but it's not the same as face to face. You can't have play dates.
But I would say that as kids get older, the problem is lessened because when you go to high school there are more opportunity, opportunities to take advanced classes, and
you might find other kids in those classes. And certainly when you go to college, people self select into colleges which are of you know, which some colleges demand extremely high ability, so they when they come to if you go to you know, am I T Or Harvard or Princeton or Yale or Stanford, you're going to find other Not that everybody there is like that, but you're certainly going to find more atypical kids at the high end, and therefore you're less likely to be alone, but in
kindergarten and in elementary school it can be really difficult.
Well, it sounds to me like you advocate an acceleration grade skipping program above a pull out classroom gifted program. Is that fair?
Yeah? I think the pullout program is like a band aid.
It may be nice because kids meet other kids who are gifted that they might not be gifted in the same area doesn't so it might be good socially, but I don't think it's going to help their board of in school, so I would ideally it would be great if there could be instead of grade skipping, there could be domain specific skipping, so that let's say you have a math whiz, why can't that child go to during regular math class go up to the math class of
kids three years older. Of course, schools have to be organized by this so that they have vertical organization of classes, so that all the math classes are at the same time. I think that would be a nice solution. I think that would be much better than taking a child and putting them in a grade three or four years older
in all areas. I do know of several children whose parents have managed to figure that out, and that kids were in a school which had an elementary school and a middle school and a high school on three different campuses. This child was busted to the high school for math class and then bust back when he was in elementary and middle school.
Well, I agree about pull out programs. I think often there's more money that school districts spend on identification than programming, and they get to the point where they spend ninety nine percent of their money for finding the right IQ test, and then they just stick them all together and say, go be gifted, right, And that doesn't seem very promising. I also like the idea of elevating the standards for everyone. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with you?
I think it's great, it's just pie in the sky. But that's the first thing I would say, and I do say this in my book. Elevate the standards for everybody, expect more. And then kids who are just moderately gifted, you know, they maybe one or two years in advance, maybe they'll be just fine, they won't be bored, but so you still have the issue for the extremes. And by the way, even in schools for the gifted, and I studied one school in California called the Nueva School,
and I wrote about that in my book. Even there, parents of the extreme gifted complained that there were too many moderately gifted kids and their kid was still too extreme. They were still born in school. And when you have that problem, then I think you have to be flexible and give that child more advanced work, individual educational programs worked out for individual children.
Yeah, I like that. I like that. It just seems like at the end of the day, we're just talking about helping all children self actualize in their own way, yes, and to the best of their potential. And I kind of like that framing a little bit better. That's how I kind of frame it. I just I'm not in love with these labels like moderately gifted, exemplarly get what is it?
What does it?
Ex severely disease severely sound makes it sound like a disease severely severely you know, gifted? Because gifted. This is not an essence, right, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, But it's not an essence of a person. It's a characteristic of a human, of a human. You know, they're humans first, yes, and it's.
A continuum it's a continuum, you know, yeah, from typical to more and more and more gifted. And you know when where's the cutoff for a prodigy? You know? David Feldon says it's when they can do adult work by age thirteen or below. That's his cutoff. I don't really care whether we can classify a child as a prodigy or an almost prodigy. I think we just have to
think of this as a continuum. And if children are not getting adequately stimulated in school, something needs to be done because we don't want them to get bored and turned off of school. And I know a child right now who's in second grade who's experiencing that, and I worry about it.
I worry about that a lot too. And I worry about the pressure to achieve that these kids feel, and the shame, the shame they may feel.
That's right, and that's why I don't think it's a good idea for parents to put their kids on the public stage, whether it's performing music or being on Spelling Bee programs or whiz Kid programs on TV. I just do not think this is good for children. It's stressful, and it may make them feel they're better than others, and it may make them feel like that's what their parents love them for and nothing else.
That's a great point. That's a really, really truly great point. Yeah, it's almost like there's this sense that a lot of the kids feel like the only reason why they have worth in this world is because of their talent.
Right exactly, and that they should stay in that area as they grow up because they have to kind of make a commitment to it. And that's not fair either. They may well go want to go into something completely different.
Absolutely.
I mean, one of the kids that I studied in my book was a math prodigy. I called him a number boy because he called himself that. He's now in law school.
Can you be accomplished, not even accomplished, but can you, like, can you become gifted? I'm not saying prodigies because I understand prodigies has a specific age limit. You can't be a fifty year old prodigy. I get that, I get that, But can you fifty year Can you be fifty year old and suddenly become gifted at something?
Well, maybe you didn't realize that you had a gift in some area and then you find that area and you find that you're gifted in it. I think it's I don't believe that you can work in music all your life and then suddenly become and not be more than typical, and then suddenly at age fifty become gifted in music. Because I do think of gifted as an as part of you. It's not something think you said it's it's not an essence, but uh, what is it?
What would it mean to say you've become gifted? If we're saying that giftedness has a genetic component, a biological component.
Well, the way that it's often presented in these talent is Overrated books is these best selling books, you know, like Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, et cetera. They the way that they view that situation is that what this is what they'll say. They'll say, what appears like some innate talent is really so many years of hard work and that and that what you don't see is all the boring tasks that they do and all the hard work
they do. So that's their narrative they're putting forward about the situation.
That's when I'm right, and what I'm saying is that it takes any typical child is not going to work that hard. I mean, what typical child is going to sit down at the piano and practice for four hours day?
Leave an adult. I'm tking about adults too, yeah, fifty year olds. I'm talking about adults as well, Like.
Fifty Okay, what typical adult is going to do that? You have to you have to experience that. It has to come easily to you, and you have to get flow from it. And if it's not something that you particularly get good at, you can work at it. But I think working hard without talent is not going to get you that far. In my book, I have a child who drew trains obsessively as a very young child, pre K, and his trains did get better, but they were nothing on the level of what child prodigies in
art do. So I think it's it's just yeah, that's can work hard on things, but you're not going to get to the level. You're not going to get to be a Yo yom not just by working hard. You've got to have some kind of proclivity to music.
Logical mike mike drop, mike drop. That's an expression they used to say, you drop the mic, you last, you have the last word on the situation that's.
You want me to turn the mic off.
There's an expression, there's okay, okay, Obama's Obama's last speech. He he did his mic drop he's he he said his last thing that was amazing, dropped the mic ellen. Okay, of course, Well so that is amazing what you just said, and so so profound because there really that really isn't that the majority narrative. That really isn't the majority narrative now. But I will say this, and uh, I'm sure you'll agree. It's possible to have the absorption and interest not have
the talent, and that can still carry you pretty far. Now, maybe there are limits on how far that can take you. But you know, I've recently gotten into magic at this age. I'm older, you know, but I've gone down the rabbit hole, and I don't know if I have a talent for it. I don't know, but I tell you I love it, and I just get in the flow state by trying to master master all sorts of methods that I'm learning.
Well, you know, we don't know anything about prodigies in magic, but I would guess that if you're really drawn to it and you're working hard, at it, and of course all self driven. No teacher is giving you this as an assignment. We do have a talent. I'm not sure what intelligence is it takes to be a good musician magician, but certainly inter personal would have to be very important because you have to be able to fool people. M and maybe spatial because you have to be very deft with your hands.
Psychology too, Yes, right, you have to.
But that's what I meant by inter personally. You have to kind of understand other people's minds and understand how you want them to believe what you're doing.
Right, right, that's right, that's right. Yeah, I'm a I'm a mentalist, which is a form of magic where you read people's minds. Oh, it's called mentalism. I love it.
Oh yeah, you pretend you get people to believe you're reading their minds, or you really do read their minds.
I think it's a combination.
Well, you have to pay very careful attention to the little subtle cues, leakages in their face, you know, leakages of their If they're they're tapping their foot very quickly while they're smiling, you might think there that that's a sign that's leaking out of them. That shows they're really stressed.
That's right, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. But back to you, back to you here. You've written two additional books about arts education and an Art in the Psychology of Art. One is called an Uneasy Guest in the Schoolhouse, Art Education from Colonial Time to a Promising Feature, and How art Works a psychological exploration. So I just want to be thinking, Okay, studio amazing, Well, your body of work is incredible. So what what makes something art?
Well?
What a question? That is right?
What are the first chance? I know, I know it's my first chapter. And how art works? And that is that basically, don't confuse the question of what is art with what is good art? If I put it in a museum, it is functioning as art. You may think it's junk, but it is called art. So whatever art is, it's something that we set aside and put a special put it in a special place, and ask people to respond to it. And it's a socially constructed category. You know,
it's not like tree, which is a biological category. It's something that humans have constructed.
Well, yes, I mean there's so many thousands of years where all we had were aesthetic can axes that were they got more and more aesthetic. But that's that's it didn't dawn on until culture was created. It didn't dawn on us. We could do more with our creativity than more ornamental.
Hand in don't forget the cave paintings.
That's true that that came a little bit later, but no, you're absolutely right, you're absolute right. And also the cave paintings show our our human drive for significance because you see a lot of a lot of people, you know that you see there they're signing their their names in the way that they have at the time, you know, trying to get some posterity, you know. So there's also that drive that's shown in the paintings.
But are you saying the cave paintings were signed.
Well, what you do see our handprints.
Yes, and sometimes considered the artist's signature.
That's the way I personally, That's why I said, in their own way, you know, signed in their own and whatever that meant in there that I think that's the that humans were trying to get out, you know, like the Chavelet Cave. You know, they found all.
These Yes, I've seen those.
Yeah.
Well, you know, people have debated the function of those cave paintings for a long time, and I don't think we're ever going to know. Is it to inspire people to go out for the hunt? Is it to make themselves admired so they'll get a mate? You know, that's what evolutionary psychologists might say. So we can speculate, but certainly the artistic urge was there from the very beginning of being human.
Yeah, that's that's for sure. Why do we seek out and even share it sorrow and fear from art when we don't go out of our way to experience those things in real life.
Yeah, that's a very puzzling question psychologically and philosophically, but we certainly do. So we can look at a painting depicting war like Wernica by Picasso and think this is powerful and even beauty full, and it makes us also confront the sadness and the painting. But we don't mind doing that. And you know, Winfrey manning House has written about this from he was the former head of thenox
Plank Institute in Germany. We put an esthetic frame around it so it's not happening to us, so there's a certain distancing, aesthetic distancing, and so we can savor these emotions, these negative emotions, because we know that they exist. They exist in our lives personally, and so we want to understand them. And we can find beauty in the formal properties of the arts that convey sadness. Plenty of very beautiful sad music that makes you feel sad, but it
also is beautiful. So I think it's it's the concept of being moved. We really like to feel moved, and we get moved, particularly by sad art, by tragic art, because it's so strong and it gives us a feeling of meaning and understanding. It's it's kind of surprising that humans will pay money to feel sad, or to even feel horror. I might feel horror by looking at Guernica. Have you run away from that in your own life, because it's not distanced, it's happening to you.
It's true. Does art help us increase our empathy towards others that are very different from ourselves.
That's a really interesting question, and it's a very feel good claim that art makes us more empathetic. I'm skeptical, though, I have one study showing something very specific in that area. But I'm skeptical because there's so many examples of people who are not empathetic who understood art and loved art. And the best example is the Nazis. They loved art, they collected it, and they listened to music, classical music, and they loved Wagner. And yet look what they showed
no empathy. So my feeling what the study that I did on this, I said, I think we can't just we have to look at a specific kind of art about a specific issue and it might lead to empathy.
So what we looked at were a story about immigrants who had been brought over as children and who were not did not have citizenship, and they were living in huge amount of stress, and we showed and we wanted to find out whether people who read that book as opposed to newspaper clippings about the plight of immigrants, whether the book people would actually change their attitudes towards undocumented
immigrants in a more empathetic direction. And we were able to show that, but we did not show that it changed their behavior because we couldn't test their behavior. All we showed is it changed their attitudes, and that lasted for several months because we tested them again and their attitudes remained change. But that doesn't mean that art in general can do this. It may be specific to narrative art about a specific issue, and maybe it can change
your mind about that issue. But I think it's very, very difficult to change people's minds towards and make them more empathetic by a one shot thing. There has to be a long process, and it probably has to involve talking and discussing with the say children who are being shown artworks. There's no good evidence that looking at works of art improves people's empathy. What works of visual art or listening to sad music improves their empathy? Those kind
of general empathy. The only thing I can pinpoint is attitude change in the direction of empathy. If it's if the artwork is connected to that attitude change.
Well, I really appreciate that honesty, but that makes a lot of common sense as well. You know, context matters is basically what you're saying, right, is art making therapeutic? What do you think of art? I mean, our art therapy is a whole business.
Yeah, and there is quite a bit of evidence on that, and I know, you know, Jen Drake and her her work has shun her that making art, even very simple, making a simple drawing, improves mood into a more positive direction, whether it's children or adults, and that may be part of the basis of art therapy. Of course, art therapy is different because it involves a therapist who's talking to
you about your art and interpreting it. And but what Jen has shown is simply making art improves mood for at least some amount of time, and that it improves well being. She also showed that people have turned to the arts during the COVID pandemic, and I think that certainly tells you something about people trying to find comfort.
I'm still getting a little I'm still getting a little hung up on what art is and what art isn't. What isn't art? What isn't art is? Why is science not art?
Okay, what isn't art? This glass here? If I put this in a museum and gave it a title like glass half full or whatever, yes that's art. You may think it's of no interest at all, but it is art. But by itself it's just an object. Now. Nelson Goodman, who was the founder of Project Zero, was very interested in the difference between symbols used in the arts and symbols used in science. And he said, you could take the same zigzag line, and in the context of a
electro cardiogram cardiograph, that would be a scientific symbol. But if you take that same line and put a frame around it and put in a museum, people start attending to certain features that they didn't attend to in the scientific graph. They attend to the color of the line,
the texture, whether there are any variations in thickness. So he called that repleteness, that the symbol becomes replete when we think of as art, but we look right through it when they think of it as science, because we're not interested in the texture of the line. We could translate that graph into numbers and get exactly the same information.
I see, I think, I get it. I mean, well, so, but I mean science can be art, then, I mean data itself can be art in the right context, in the right presentation, I should say, in the right presentation of it.
I mean, if you put your scatter plot in yes, yes, then people will The argument is that then people will actually look at differently and they will start to perceive properties that were not important? Got it when they were looking at it as just a plain scatter plot.
Got it. Thank you for giving me the clearst answer to that question of why is science not art? Anyone's ever given to me in my entire life. So thank you. And why is that important? Why is art important in schools? Why are they cutting arts programs? And what are your thoughts on what we should be doing about that?
Well, of course I think that's a very sad thing that we're cutting art in schools, or that they're always the first thing to be cut when there's a budget crunch, because art is important for people's well being, and I think it's There are all kinds of reasons. One, it's important for students' well being. Two, students might be talented in an art form and never know it and may
not be good in academic subjects. And if there's art in school, they may discover their talent and realize that they could go on in a career somehow related to visual art or music. And the other reason is that art is a fundamental part of being human, and if kids in school should be I think that schools should be teaching kids about the most important things that humans have ever done. And that includes science, but it also includes the arts, and if you leave that out, I
think they're getting a lopsided education. Yeah, it's also the only it's probably the only area in school where they're doing something which doesn't have right and wrong.
Answers, divergent thinking.
Yeah, pash forbid.
Now, not all art education is creative. There's some very bad art education. And in our several books called Studio Thinking, where we have new editions of them, but we called it studio Thinking the Real Value of Visual Art Education, and we study the best teachers and visual very strong teachers in visual art, and we found that these teachers were teaching their kids artistic dispositions or artistic ways of thinking, learning to look really carefully, learning to express themselves, learning
to reflect on what they're doing and take criticism and revise. Very important thinking dispositions that can be taught in strong arts education programs. And it may well be that those skills transfer to other domains, like you may become a better observer in science if you learn to observe closely in art. But that should never be the justification for having art classes, because art should be considered important in itself. We don't talk about the value of math because it
might transfer to understanding musical skills. We just assume that math is important on its own.
Love that. Well, you make a good case for why we shouldn't cut these programs in schools, and and concominantly, And I don't think I just invented that word concominantly, but I don't think it's a word. But anyway, similarly,
along similar lines, we shouldn't cut gifted programs for similar reasons. Yep, because we have a lot of kids who are going to be even if they don't become the most high achieving artist in the world, they still are going to contribute great, great things to culture and even art class.
I would say in art class, you may not need a gifted art class because kids work at their own pace in art.
Cool and good point.
So yeah, good point.
I was just trying to tie everything up in a neat bow at the end of this interview. Well, let's not cut gift You will agree, though, let's not cut arts programs. Let's not cut gifted programs.
Absolutely, But I think that most parents would say, yeah, let's not cut art programs. But if you say to them, would you rather have art classes cut or would you rather have math classes cut? They'll say, Matt, I'd rather have the art classes cut. But generally there's public approval of keeping art in our schools. But the idea of gifted programs is very controversial because people worry that it's
keeping out minorities, and unfortunately that may sometimes happen. So we have to search hard for kids from underrepresented groups to be put into these programs. But it's an unpopular view because it's maybe considered elitist.
All right, the answer is to expand the search, not limit women excellence exactly. Ellen Winter, thank you so much for being on my show today and for the legendary work that you've done in the field and for personally inspiring me to do what I do.
Thank you so much, Scott, it's been a pleasure talking to you, ask great questions.
Thank you.
Glad we finally got this one in the can.