NATURE | NEWS FEATURE
How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45­year study of
super­smart children
A long­running investigation of exceptional children reveals what it takes to produce the scientists
who will lead the twenty­first century.
Tom Clynes
07 September 2016
Illustration by Vasava
On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12­year­old named Joseph Bates.
The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for
him to take a computer­science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Even that wasn't
enough. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the
FORTRAN programming language to graduate students.
Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for
his work in psychometrics — the study of cognitive performance. To discover more about the young prodigy's
talent, Stanley gave Bates a battery of tests that included the SAT college­admissions exam, normally taken by
university­bound 16­ to 18­year­olds in the United States.
Bates's score was well above the threshold for admission to Johns Hopkins, and
prompted Stanley to search for a local high school that would let the child take
advanced mathematics and science classes. When that plan failed, Stanley
convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol as an undergraduate.
Stanley would affectionately refer to Bates as “student zero” of his Study of
Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), which would transform how gifted children
Early child
development: Body of
knowledge
are identified and supported by the US education system. As the longest­running
current longitudinal survey of intellectually talented children, SMPY has for 45 years tracked the careers and
accomplishments of some 5,000 individuals, many of whom have gone on to become high­achieving scientists.
The study's ever­growing data set has generated more than 400 papers and several books, and provided key
insights into how to spot and develop talent in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and
beyond.
“What Julian wanted to know was, how do you find the kids with the highest potential for excellence in what we
now call STEM, and how do you boost the chance that they'll reach that potential,” says Camilla Benbow, a
protégé of Stanley's who is now dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, Tennessee. But Stanley wasn't interested in just studying bright children; he wanted to nurture their
intellect and enhance the odds that they would change the world. His motto, he told his graduate students, was
“no more dry bones methodology”.
With the first SMPY recruits now at the peak of their careers1, what has become clear
is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence.
Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those
whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years
through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University's Center for
Talented Youth — which Stanley began in the 1980s as an adjunct to SMPY. At the
start, both the study and the centre were open to young adolescents who scored in
the top 1% on university entrance exams. Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao
Why we are teaching
science wrong, and
how to make it right
and Lenhard Ng were one­percenters, as were Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google
co­founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins
centre.
“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the
Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins
centre. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies2, including SMPY, to
demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top
1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators
and billionaires,” he says.
Such results contradict long­established ideas
suggesting that expert performance is built
mainly through practice — that anyone can
get to the top with enough focused effort of
the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests
that early cognitive ability has more effect on
achievement than either deliberate practice or
environmental factors such as socio­economic
status. The research emphasizes the
importance of nurturing precocious children,
at a time when the prevailing focus in the
United States and other countries is on
improving the performance of struggling
students (see ‘Nurturing a talented child’). At
the same time, the work to identify and
support academically talented students has
raised troubling questions about the risks of
labelling children, and the shortfalls of talent
searches and standardized tests as a means
of identifying high­potential students,
especially in poor and rural districts.
“With so much emphasis on predicting who
will rise to the top, we run the risk of selling
short the many kids who are missed by these
tests,” says Dona Matthews, a developmental
psychologist in Toronto, Canada, who co­
founded the Center for Gifted Studies and
Education at Hunter College in New York City.
“For those children who are tested, it does
them no favours to call them 'gifted' or
'ungifted'. Either way, it can really undermine
a child's motivation to learn.”
Start of a study
On a muggy August day, Benbow and her
husband, psychologist David Lubinski,
Source: K. Ferriman Robertson et al. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 19, 346–351 (2010).
describe the origins of SMPY as they walk
across the quadrangle at Vanderbilt University. Benbow was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins when she
met Stanley in a class he taught in 1976. Benbow and Lubinski, who have co­directed the study since Stanley's
retirement, brought it to Vanderbilt in 1998.
“In a sense, that brought Julian's research full circle, since this is where he started his career as a professor,”
Benbow says as she nears the university's psychology laboratory, the first US building dedicated to the study of
the field. Built in 1915, it houses a small collection of antique calculators — the tools of quantitative psychology
in the early 1950s, when Stanley began his academic work in psychometrics and statistics.
His interest in developing scientific talent had been piqued by one of the most famous
longitudinal studies in psychology, Lewis Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius3, 4.
Beginning in 1921, Terman selected teenage subjects on the basis of high IQ scores,
then tracked and encouraged their careers. But to Terman's chagrin, his cohort
produced only a few esteemed scientists. Among those rejected because their IQ of
129 was too low to make the cut was William Shockley, the Nobel­prizewinning co­
inventor of the transistor. Physicist Luis Alvarez, another Nobel winner, was also
rejected.
Brain stimulation in
children spurs hope
— and concern
Stanley suspected that Terman wouldn't have missed Shockley and Alvarez if he'd had a reliable way to test
them specifically on quantitative reasoning ability. So Stanley decided to try the Scholastic Aptitude Test (now
simply the SAT). Although the test is intended for older students, Stanley hypothesized that it would be well
suited to measuring the analytical reasoning abilities of elite younger students.
Nurturing a talented child
“Setting out to raise a genius is the last thing we'd advise any parent to do,” says Camilla Benbow, dean of
education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. That goal, she says,
“can lead to all sorts of social and emotional problems”.
Benbow and other talent­development researchers offer the following tips to encourage both achievement
and happiness for smart children.
Expose children to diverse experiences.
When a child exhibits strong interests or talents, provide opportunities to develop them.
Support both intellectual and emotional needs.
Help children to develop a 'growth mindset' by praising effort, not ability.
Encourage children to take intellectual risks and to be open to failures that help them learn.
Beware of labels: being identified as gifted can be an emotional burden.
Work with teachers to meet your child's needs. Smart students often need more­challenging material,
extra support or the freedom to learn at their own pace.
Have your child's abilities tested. This can support a parent's arguments for more­advanced work, and
can reveal issues such as dyslexia, attention­deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or social and emotional
challenges.
In March 1972, Stanley rounded up 450 bright 12­ to 14­year­olds from the Baltimore area and gave them the
mathematics portion of the SAT. It was the first standardized academic 'talent search'. (Later, researchers
included the verbal portion and other assessments.)
“The first big surprise was how many adolescents could figure out math problems that they hadn't encountered
in their course work,” says developmental psychologist Daniel Keating, then a PhD student at Johns Hopkins
University. “The second surprise was how many of these young kids scored well above the admissions cut­off
for many elite universities.”
Stanley hadn't envisioned SMPY as a multi­decade longitudinal study. But after the
first follow­up survey, five years later, Benbow proposed extending the study to track
subjects through their lives, adding cohorts and including assessments of interests,
preferences, and occupational and other life accomplishments. The study's first four
cohorts range from the top 3% to the top 0.01% in their SAT scores. The SMPY team
added a fifth cohort of the leading mathematics and science graduate students in
1992 to test the generalizability of the talent­search model for identifying scientific
Wanted: 80,000 British
babies for massive
study
potential.
“I don't know of any other study in the world that has given us such a comprehensive look at exactly how and
why STEM talent develops,” says Christoph Perleth, a psychologist at the University of Rostock in Germany
who studies intelligence and talent development.
Spatial skills
As the data flowed in, it quickly became apparent that a one­size­fits­all approach to gifted education, and
education in general, was inadequate.
“SMPY gave us the first large­sample basis for the field to move away from general intelligence toward
assessments of specific cognitive abilities, interests and other factors,” says Rena Subotnik, who directs the
Center for Gifted Education Policy at the American Psychological Association in Washington DC.
In 1976, Stanley started to test his second cohort (a sample of 563 13­year­
olds who scored in the top 0.5% on the SAT) on spatial ability — the capacity
to understand and remember spatial relationships between objects5. Tests for
spatial ability might include matching objects that are seen from different
perspectives, determining which cross­section will result when an object is cut
in certain ways, or estimating water levels on tilted bottles of various shapes.
Stanley was curious about whether spatial ability might better predict
educational and occupational outcomes than could measures of quantitative
and verbal reasoning on their own.
Follow­up surveys — at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48 — backed up his hunch. A
2013 analysis5 found a correlation between the number of patents and peer­
refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on
SATs and spatial­ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11%
of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.
JHU/Gado/Getty
Julian Stanley established the
Study of Mathematically
Precocious Youth in the 1970s.
The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that
spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation. “I think it may be the largest known
untapped source of human potential,” says Lubinski, who adds that students who are only marginally
impressive in mathematics or verbal ability but high in spatial ability often make exceptional engineers,
architects and surgeons. “And yet, no admissions directors I know of are looking at this, and it's generally
overlooked in school­based assessments.”
Although studies such as SMPY have given educators the ability to identify and
support gifted youngsters, worldwide interest in this population is uneven. In the
Middle East and east Asia, high­performing STEM students have received significant
attention over the past decade. South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore screen
children for giftedness and steer high performers into innovative programmes. In
2010, China launched a ten­year National Talent Development Plan to support and
guide top students into science, technology and other high­demand fields.
Chinese project
probes the genetics of
genius
In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has
moved more towards inclusion. England decided in 2010 to scrap the National Academy for Gifted and
Talented Youth, and redirected funds towards an effort to get more poor students into leading universities.
On the fast track
When Stanley began his work, the choices for bright children in the United States were limited, so he sought
out environments in which early talent could blossom. “It was clear to Julian that it's not enough to identify
potential; it has to be developed in appropriate ways if you're going to keep that flame well lit,” says Linda
Brody, who studied with Stanley and now runs a programme at Johns Hopkins focused on counselling
profoundly gifted children.
At first, the efforts were on a case­by­case basis. Parents of other bright children began to approach Stanley
after hearing about his work with Bates, who thrived after entering university. By 17, he had earned bachelor's
and master's degrees in computer science and was pursuing a doctorate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New
York. Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he would become a
pioneer in artificial intelligence.
“I was shy and the social pressures of high school wouldn't have made it a good fit for me,” says Bates, now 60.
“But at college, with the other science and math nerds, I fit right in, even though I was much younger. I could
grow up on the social side at my own rate and also on the intellectual side, because the faster pace kept me
interested in the content.”
“Whether we like it or not,
these people really do
control our society.”
The SMPY data supported the idea of accelerating fast learners by
allowing them to skip school grades. In a comparison of children who
bypassed a grade with a control group of similarly smart children who
didn't, the grade­skippers were 60% more likely to earn doctorates or
patents and more than twice as likely to get a PhD in a STEM field6.
Acceleration is common in SMPY's elite 1­in­10,000 cohort, whose intellectual diversity and rapid pace of
learning make them among the most challenging to educate. Advancing these students costs little or nothing,
and in some cases may save schools money, says Lubinski. “These kids often don't need anything innovative
or novel,” he says, “they just need earlier access to what's already available to older kids.”
Many educators and parents continue to believe that acceleration is bad for children
— that it will hurt them socially, push them out of childhood or create knowledge gaps.
But education researchers generally agree that acceleration benefits the vast majority
of gifted children socially and emotionally, as well as academically and professionally7.
Skipping grades is not the only option. SMPY researchers say that even modest
interventions — for example, access to challenging material such as college­level
Advanced Placement courses — have a demonstrable effect. Among students with
Gene variants linked
to success at school
prove divisive
high ability, those who were given a richer density of advanced precollegiate
educational opportunities in STEM went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents and pursue
higher­level careers than their equally smart peers who didn't have these opportunities8.
Despite SMPY's many insights, researchers still have an incomplete picture of giftedness and achievement.
“We don't know why, even at the high end, some people will do well and others won't,” says Douglas
Detterman, a psychologist who studies cognitive ability at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
“Intelligence won't account for all the differences between people; motivation, personality factors, how hard you
work and other things are important.”
Some insights have come from German studies9, 10, 11 that have a methodology similar to SMPY's. The
Munich Longitudinal Study of Giftedness, which started tracking 26,000 gifted students in the mid­1980s, found
that cognitive factors were the most predictive, but that some personal traits — such as motivation, curiosity
and ability to cope with stress — had a limited influence on performance. Environmental factors, such as family,
school and peers, also had an impact.
The data from such intellectual­talent searches also contribute to knowledge of how
people develop expertise in subjects. Some researchers and writers, notably
psychologist Anders Ericsson at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author
Malcolm Gladwell, have popularized the idea of an ability threshold. This holds that for
individuals beyond a certain IQ barrier (120 is often cited), concentrated practice time
is much more important than additional intellectual abilities in acquiring expertise. But
data from SMPY and the Duke talent programme dispute that hypothesis (see 'Top of
History: Einstein was
no lone genius
the charts'). A study published this year12 compared the outcomes of students in the top 1% of childhood
intellectual ability with those in the top 0.01%. Whereas the first group gain advanced degrees at about 25
times the rate of the general population, the more elite students earn PhDs at about 50 times the base rate.
But some of the work is controversial. In North America and Europe, some child­development experts lament
that much of the research on talent development is driven by the urge to predict who will rise to the top, and
educators have expressed considerable unease about the concept of identifying and labelling a group of pupils
as gifted or talented13.
“A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a good match for that particular test at that
point in time,” says Matthews. “A low test score tells you practically nothing,” she says, because many factors
can depress students' performance, including their cultural backgrounds and how comfortable they are with
taking high­stakes tests. Matthews contends that when children who are near the high and low extremes of
early achievement feel assessed in terms of future success, it can damage their motivation to learn and can
contribute to what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset. It's far better, Dweck
says, to encourage a growth mindset, in which children believe that brains and talent are merely a starting
point, and that abilities can be developed through hard work and continued intellectual risk­taking.
“Students focus on improvement instead of worrying about how smart they are and hungering for approval,”
says Dweck. “They work hard to learn more and get smarter.” Research by Dweck and her colleagues shows
that students who learn with this mindset show greater motivation at school, get better marks and have higher
test scores14.
Benbow agrees that standardized tests should not be used to limit students' options,
but rather to develop learning and teaching strategies appropriate to children's
abilities, which allow students at every level to reach their potential.
Next year, Benbow and Lubinski plan to launch a mid­life survey of the profoundly
gifted cohort (the 1 in 10,000), with an emphasis on career achievements and life
satisfaction, and to re­survey their 1992 sample of graduate students at leading US
Sweden's enormous
education experiment
improved longevity
universities. The forthcoming studies may further erode the enduring misperception
that gifted children are bright enough to succeed on their own, without much help.
“The education community is still resistant to this message,” says David Geary, a cognitive developmental
psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, who specializes in mathematical learning. “There's a
general belief that kids who have advantages, cognitive or otherwise, shouldn't be given extra encouragement;
that we should focus more on lower­performing kids.”
Although gifted­education specialists herald the expansion of talent­development options in the United States,
the benefits have mostly been limited so far to students who are at the top of both the talent and socio­
economic curves.
“We know how to identify these kids, and we know how to help them,” says Lubinski. “And yet we're missing a
lot of the smartest kids in the country.”
As Lubinski and Benbow walk through the quadrangle, the clock strikes noon,
releasing packs of enthusiastic adolescents racing towards the dining hall. Many are
participants in the Vanderbilt Programs for Talented Youth, summer enrichment
courses in which gifted students spend three weeks gorging themselves on a year's
worth of mathematics, science or literature. Others are participants in Vanderbilt's
sports camps.
Sign up ­ it's free!
“They're just developing different talents,” says Lubinski, a former high­school and college wrestler. “But our
society has been much more encouraging of athletic talents than we are of intellectual talents.”
And yet these gifted students, the 'mathletes' of the world, can shape the future. “When you look at the issues
facing society now — whether it's health care, climate change, terrorism, energy — these are the kids who have
the most potential to solve these problems,” says Lubinski. “These are the kids we'd do well to bet on.”
Nature 537, 152–155 (08 September 2016)
Tweet
Facebook
LinkedIn
Weibo
doi:10.1038/537152a
Wechat
References
1. Lubinski, D., Benbow, C. P. & Kell, H. J. Psychol. Sci. 25, 2217–2232 (2014).
Article PubMed
Show context
2. Wai, J. Intelligence 45, 74–80 (2014).
Article
Show context
3. Oden, M. H. Genet. Psychol. Monogr. 77, 3–93 (1968).
Show context
PubMed ChemPort
4. Terman, L. M. Am. Psychol. 9, 221–230 (1954).
Article
Show context
5. Kell, H. J., Lubinski, D., Benbow, C. P. & Steiger, J. H. Psychol. Sci. 24, 1831–1836 (2013).
Show context
Article PubMed
6. Park, G., Lubinski, D. & Benbow, C. P. J. Educ. Psychol. 105, 176–198 (2013).
Article
Show context
7. Steenbergen­Hu, S. & Moon, S. M. Gift. Child Q. 55, 39–53 (2011).
Article
Show context
8. Wai, J., Lubinski, D., Benbow, C. P. & Steiger, J. H. J. Educ. Psychol. 102, 860–871 (2010).
Show context
Article
9. Heller, K. A., von Bistram, A. & Collier, A. in Munich Studies of Giftedness (ed. Heller, K. A.) 433–454 (LIT,
2010).
Show context
10. Heller, K. A. Talent Dev. Excell. 5, 51–64 (2013); available at http://go.nature.com/2cpr0ji
Show context
11. Heller, K. A. in Munich Studies of Giftedness (ed. Heller, K. A.) 3–12 (LIT, 2010).
Show context
12. Makel, M. C. et al. Psychol. Sci. 27, 1004–1018 (2016).
Show context
Article PubMed
13. Koshy, V. & Pinheiro­Torres, C. Br. Educ. Res. J. 39, 953–978 (2013).
Show context
14. Dweck, C. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006).
Show context
Article
Related stories and links
From nature.com
Root of maths genius sought
29 October 2013
Root of maths genius sought
29 October 2013
Ethics: Taboo genetics
02 October 2013
Dangerous work
02 October 2013
Chinese project probes the genetics of genius
14 May 2013
Darwin 200: Should scientists study race and IQ? YES: The scientific truth must be pursued
11 February 2009
From elsewhere
Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth
Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth
Author information
Affiliations
Tom Clynes is a journalist and the author of The Boy Who Played With Fusion: Extreme Science,
Extreme Parenting and How to Make a Star.
For the best commenting experience, please login or register as a user and agree to our Community
Guidelines. You will be re­directed back to this page where you will see comments updating in real­time and
have the ability to recommend comments to other users.
30 comments
Subscribe to comments
aditi patil • 2016­09­30 11:49 AM
Nice information. we all should start using solar power energy which will help to generate free electricity
and reduces electricity bills,i am currently using solar panels for my home and i am feeling great
because i am contributing towards nature and environment and it also help to generate free electricity
and it reduces electricity bill also.i want to thanks for this to Insolergy who gave me such a wonderul
solar power project.If you want to install the same you can visit on this site http://www.insolergy.com/
John Scientist • 2016­09­21 10:38 PM
The author overlooks half of the picture: opportunity and social mobility. Without these, a genius with an
education will achieve little. He might become a very clever clerk or low­level assistant, while the
important and well­paid positions will be occupied by those with a family background.
Zsolt Lenkei • 2016­09­19 11:05 AM
This article contains some interesting anecdotic data, but to know whether it's efficient (before
discussing whether it's really useful for society) to specifically nurture kids that pass a specific test
threshold, comparisons with two control groups are missing: 1) Specifically nurtured sub­threshold kids
and 2) Non­nurtured over­threshold kids.
Flaminia Arduini • 2016­09­14 01:33 PM
Good to know that ... “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and
academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires”. Then I wonder if that
1% is somehow associated to another 1% signaled by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Sciences (2001). Stiglitz found that 25 years ago the richest 1% of Americans had 33% of
the nation’s wealth and took 12% of its yearly income. Today, that 1% of Americans has 40% of the
nation’s wealth and takes almost 25% of its yearly income. Stiglitz then argues that this is why America
became one of the most unequal advanced country in the world. For sure, those kids who test in the top
1% are not helping America's socio­economical issues.
Philip Ward • 2016­09­14 11:07 AM
Two comments; Firstly, this reads as if most of the studies have identified people who are good at
certain tests when young, hot­housed them and sent them to elite educational institutions and then
found they very very "successful" by the criteria our society use to measure such things. I'm not sure we
should be surprised about that. Secondly, there is no evidence that these are the kinds of people who
are best at solving society's problems. Politics is far more important than science in that endeavour.
Mark Beyer • 2016­09­13 07:43 PM
I've always found it difficult to understand why being able to count very well is a standard for genius
status. It's no wonder that these child geniuses are troubled when all they are challenged to do is more
science and math. How about asking them to read and comment upon the greats of literature, history,
philosophy? Few of these kids, or when they become adults, have any real valuable to say about the
world outside plus and minus, or binary theory. Boredom in school? Try asking a history teacher why
Napoleon shouldn't be revered as a progressive leader. Bored with studies? Read post­WWII political
biographies to find out what's gone wrong. Bored with your peers? Get a girlfriend and start having sex.
These are the values of being human, not chasing game theory and making more money than the next
guy in the unemployment line because your IT business went under after Chinese/Indian/Indonesians
undercut your pricing ratios. We only ever really learn about ourselves by being in touch with humanity,
which CAN include speaking to real people (but not always), but which always comes through by
reading literature, history, philosophy, and socio­anthropology.
Dumbo Jones • 2016­09­21 10:51 AM
"Bored with your peers? Get a girlfriend and start having sex" Right, because that is extremely
easy, especially for nerd, autistic, shy and unattractive book­smart boys. Everybody knows girls
just love bookish boys! They can't wait to have sex with them, day and night.
Robert Smith • 2016­09­13 06:52 AM
Many of my smart friends grew up lonely. They had noone to talk to. Their ideas and questions were out
of place in their environment. The humane action is to connect smart kids with other smart kids, so they
have a community. Any economic payoff is gravy.
Stephanie Dunn • 2016­09­13 12:27 PM
What makes you think this was unique to your "smart" friends, whatever that means? Forcing
children into segregated, artificial, classroom environments where they are constantly watched,
coaxed, and judged ensures that most feel out of place.
Bonnie Gilchrist • 2016­09­13 02:12 AM
I think we all know that any criterion that involves merit or ability is going to run afoul of disparate
impact. This is what doomed tracking 50 years ago and it continues to destroy any attempt to nurture
gifted young people. We need to be honest about this if we hope to make any progress.
Peter Csermely • 2016­09­12 01:14 PM
As the current president of the European Council for High Ability (http://echa.info/members­area), a 29
years old European NGO, I would like to add some more info to the statement of the paper "in Europe,
support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed". Besides the UK
example, which is correct, there is now a wide­ranging grass­root movement in Europe establishing a
European Talent Support Network. This network has now more than 300 participating organizations
from 35 countries and accepts additional organizations as members (http://echa.info/158­call­for­
application­to­be­a­european­talent­point­or­to­be­an­associated­european­talent­point). Several of
these organizations are in fact European affiliates of CTY and there are member­institutions like the
Ministry of Education from Malta. As I am writing these lines I am sitting at the EU presidential flagship
conference of the Slovakian EU presidency on talent support (http://www.talents2016.eu/en/conference­
on­the­fostering­and­development­of­talent/). The EU Commissioner of education, the current and the
next EU­president ministers of education from Slovakia and Malta all greeted the event and expressed
their commitment for supporting talented young people. It is my impression that helping gifted and
talented young people is in the rise in Europe.
William RedWell • 2016­09­10 05:43 PM
Lots of good insights. And lots of hand­wringing in the comments, but I do agree that high STEM
intelligence and solutions to terrorism, for example, are poorly linked. We should absolutely encourage
and foster this type of intelligence, but for for every Thomas Jefferson, you need a John Adams and,
perhaps even more importantly, a George Washington. Drawing a line from high intelligence to solving
big problems is a classic mistake, a mistake particularly characteristic of technical thinkers who are
better at spacial acuity and abstract reasoning than implementation or social coordination.
Al De Baran • 2016­09­12 10:39 PM
" lots of hand­wringing in the comments" "lots of well­grounded criticism in the comments". There,
fixed that for you. No need to thank me.
Peter MetaSkeptic • 2016­09­10 07:08 PM
Classical manipulation from a hegemonic ideology believer. First prove yourself sympathetic to the
cause "lots of good insights", which gives you the moral right to oppose the main idea or to express
your own, which is in contradiction which the spirit of the text. Science is no good to solve social
problems (the idea of the comment). Well, let see. Guards at a supermarket check only men bags
at the exit. Whatever the reason they're doing so, it's a pure strategy and thief can easily defeat.
Guards have to check both women and men's bags and therefore use a mixed strategy. But why
and how do you prove that requires mathematics. SORRY, science is require here to enhance
daily life quality. :)
Paul Hughes • 2016­09­10 04:02 AM
Would five to 10 years of programs, nurturing, guidance, focused attention and the like, that begins at
age 13 or so, take up, say ... 10,000 hours?
Peter MetaSkeptic • 2016­09­10 07:25 PM
NO. Facing a NO is always disappointing, I know the feeling, but no matter how educated you are,
new problems (well not all but some of them) require smart people to be solved. Try or ask
someone, to find a new equation to calculated n first natural numbers. The most used formula is
n(n­1)/2, but they are many others. Reality is, no matter how educated people are, you need to be
smart to find answer to that sort of question. Why is this important? Imagine that all answer that
were given were wrong for a problem, how to you find the right answer and help people to get a
better life? 1 000 000 000 hours of training won't help. It's funny because that thing about 10000
hours is well known and can be apply to most people, but you use it badly.
Al De Baran • 2016­09­09 11:46 PM
It is hard to know where to start in sifting through this farrago of nonsense: The false equation of high
I.Q. or other test scores with "genius"; the instrumental definition of intelligence; the uncritical notion that
the only worthwhile use of intelligence is in the service of the Economy and the State; and, of course,
the presumption that the only real intelligence is that which conforms to the abilities needed to succeed
in STEM careers. Clearly, in our Brave New World, no Hegels or Shakespeares need apply.
Felipe­Andres Piedra • 2016­09­09 04:13 PM
Simply weak boilerplate. Thank you Stephanie Dunn for your insightful and compassionate posts.
Tom Medvetz • 2016­09­09 02:44 AM
"...Such results contradict long­established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly
through practice..." No, they do not contradict those ideas at all. Rather, the fact that "Many of the
innovators were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as...
Center for Talented Youth" suggests that intense and targeted pedagogical attention might be the key to
success­­not innate ability. (Incidentally, I say this as an alum of, and former instructor for, CTY­­which is
a wonderful program.) Now, if we could look specifically at prodigies who received no extra attention, or
indeed if there were a control group of average­IQ kids who received extra attention but failed to
become high achievers, then maybe that conclusion would be warranted. But the conclusion of this
piece as written is surprisingly sloppy and unscientific.
Dennis Goos • 2016­09­08 10:58 PM
Considering that the studies demonstrated innate abilities (as opposed to trained abilities), I wonder if
there is anything significant that schools and educators can do other than supply materials appropriate
for the individual's level of educational development. Having said that, I'll speculate that many of the
one­percenters will turn whatever material is at hand into self enriching analysis. How else to explain all
the autodidacts of history like Leibnitz or Alexander Hamilton?
Patricia LiWang • 2016­09­08 09:36 PM
Peripherally related to this article: The government and leading funding agencies all would like to see
highly promising STEM students of *all* ethnicities flourish. This article mentions identifying really great
students young. So how could these two meet? How about at least giving extra opportunities to kids
who make perfect scores on the state tests in their area? Simply go to a poor area and see which kids
score perfectly (or near­perfectly). I live in a minority­majority area, and I can tell you, there are plenty of
very smart minority kids who score great, with huge potential (they are in class with my kids). And I can
also tell you that our school district provides *no* resources for Gifted education beyond grudgingly
allowing two teachers per grade in the whole city to teach gifted kids. I have asked whether the kids are
tracked to be sure that they get resources later: no. Are they nurtured or helped if their parents are poor
(many are quite poor): no. There is nothing except that classroom with a teacher who struggles mightily
to inspire them, until they pass the 8th grade. Then nothing at all. If people care about finding poor,
under­rep geniuses, here is a place to start. I can't say I personally know kids who could go to Johns
Hopkins at the age of 12, but I do know perfect­scorers, and they should have investments made in
them.
Douglas Borsom • 2016­09­08 06:50 PM
"... these people really do control our society." So now we know whom to blame.
Stephanie Dunn • 2016­09­08 02:28 PM
My objection to this article, and the line of thinking it promotes, isn't an objection to the idea of individual
differences in ability. It is an objection to the idea that we should be engaged in the kind of social
engineering that treats narrowly defined abilities as economic resources, and then manipulates the lives
of all individuals accordingly. More than anything, I'm arguing against the narrowing of opportunity for
everyone that comes from a myopic search for the few people who match a predefined concept of
potential. This doesn't mean that I want to prevent the 10 year old kid who is thrilled by calculus from
getting the resources to do calculus. Far from it. I want that kid, and his parents, to have far more
control over his learning resources than they do now. The problem is that focusing on a narrow testing
of abilities in order to mete out opportunities is as harmful as it is helpful. I don't accept the premise that
the 10 year old math prodigy is more worthy than the 10 year old who wants to spend her day making
up stories or the 10 year old who is still overwhelmed with life and spends his day just watching
everyone else. I also don't accept the premise that our current means of controlling people's education
is more harmful to the prodigy than it is to everyone else. It is an equal opportunity potential killer. I'd
prefer they all be nurtured and valued, and I'd prefer they all be given the opportunity to try calculus if
the interest ever strikes them. I'd prefer that we stop teaching them that both their potential and their
value can be measured by a battery of tests. Sure the 10 year old math wiz might create an intelligent
robot someday, but that robot might pose a crisis to employment and human identity that causes social
disaster. He also might become an MBA who creates some new derivative that leads to even more
poverty for the majority, while the 10 year old who drew pictures might have an insight that leads to
clean, abundant energy, and the 10 year old who was quietly watching from the back of the room might
create an awe inspiring movie that sparks a new era in social harmony. We just don't know. It's all just
conjecture, so who are we to play God over people's lives based on IQ scores. What we do know is that
our children become adults, some of whom believe in their worth and potential, and some of whom are
filled with shame and doubt. A society full of the former has great potential, but we are creating a
society filled with the latter. The idea that our value is determined by a fixed set of abilities, making
some people more worthy than others, is just not a productive idea.
David Gurwitz • 2016­09­11 07:43 PM
Well said, Stephanie. Could not have better phrased my objections and concerns raised when
reading this controversial news story.
Bob Freeman • 2016­09­08 02:11 PM
The title and article don't match, it isn't about "Raising a Genius" but training a talented kid. A genius is,
by definition, out of the norm and using standard testing would not work, especially if the kid doesn't
want to be put on display like a monkey in a box. It is easy to game the system and just run your own
life. Not to brag, but you can act "normal" or just be weird and not be inspected and tweaked your whole
life by a scientific community that have nothing better to do and aren't smart enough to realize it. Please
see: www.h2liftship.com
Jeremy Cantor • 2016­09­07 11:59 PM
Einstein never said that "Everyone is a genius" thing. It is also transparently, demonstrably and
outrageously false. Misattribution of quotes is endemic on the internet, and every time someone passes
along something that is less intelligent, less moral, less artistic, less beautiful (or what have you) than
the great person who did not really say it, that someone is announcing to the world that the great are
not really so great, or to put it another way, "Hey, that sounds like something my barber would say! And
he's kinda like me!!" It as an exercise in anti­intellectuallism, one of the great American diseases. Which
brings us around to the topic of anti­intellectualism... The headline is "How to raise a genius: lessons
from a 45­year study of super­smart children," but it is NOT about how to create a child genius; it is
about how to avoid ruining one. “Such results contradict long­established ideas suggesting that expert
performance is built mainly through practice — that anyone can get to the top with enough focused
effort of the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability has more effect on
achievement than either deliberate practice or environmental factors such as socio­economic status.” In
other words, the results fly in the face of one of the core tenets of American anti­intellectualism — that
there is no such thing as superior mental ability. (Americans have no problem believing that superior
ability exists in sports, though…)
Kodali Rao • 2016­09­07 09:08 PM
According to Einstein, 'Everyone is a genius. If you ask the fish to climb the tree, it will spend the rest of
its life thinking it is stupid'. In other words, it all depends on the metrics used.
ro pettiner • 2016­09­07 07:26 PM
Well, I did it...I gave birth to one of these kinds of kids. And when he left nursery school with the best
teacher who had no formal teaching degree, and entered kindergarten, we knew something was wrong.
First grade was even worse for him and upon testing we were told he was 'gifted'. Not much
recommended except to keep him busy at home. Disaster. Second grade a tad better with a very
understanding teacher. Third grade, learned he was two standard deviations above the norm, math
being strongest and capable of senior in high school calculus. I did not want him double promoted, just
adjusted to take classes at his level in math and science. The rest could have been the regular classes.
Nope. Nothing of the sort was available forty years ago and he was tutored in after school projects by a
very good young high school teacher. . Had to double promote skipping sixth grade, finally. Overall, he
continues to think he is 'normal' and an underachiever, with five degrees. He is now one of those
'eminent scientists' and never believes he is doing enough. He may make an important discovery some
day that will help a lot of people, I hope. He is well liked by all who come in contact with him. And he has
achieved in spite of being very underserved by our education system when he was a boy. We did hear
of the Johns Hopkins study and he could have participated but circumstances interfered. He now has a
great but very demanding job, a lovely wife, mother to his three beautiful children and is some times
overwhelmed. But he is fairly well adjusted, altho anxious some times. He is highly respected in his field
and by his friends and family. I think he came out ok, altho I still wish he could have had what he needed
at the time. Imagine my dismay when a couple of years later his sister was diagnosed almost the same.
She was also double promoted, on the artistic side, completed a very demanding liberal arts degree
and some graduate work before marrying and starting a family. Today she is the best of wives and
mothers who must keep the home fires going while the husband is away at work, and is raising the
family of three children, one of whom has special needs. Also, very well respected and liked by all, more
easy going than her older bro. I like that both have great integrity and tremendous senses of humor. We
had a saying in the old days of education...the cream always rises to the top...no matter what. I treated
these kids as normal, involved them in music, sports, outside activities, and encouraged their curiousity
at every turn, gave them every opportunity I could. They did fine. They are good people.
Stephanie Dunn • 2016­09­07 05:06 PM
I see no contradiction here to the ideas about expert performance being based on practice. There is
nothing in this article that leads to any conclusion about how these children came into their talents. Why
are we to assume the talents being tested arose spontaneously, rather than being planted and nurtured
in some way ­ even if the planting and nurturing isn't clearly visible. The comment, "Whether we like it or
not, these people really do control our society" is as much about the limitations inherent in our society
as it is about the inevitable power of people whose academic talents were recognized and nurtured. The
chances for success in our system are greatly enhanced by academic credentials, but this doesn't
necessarily mean the specific academic skills that leads to those credentials caused the success. It may
simply mean that we've limited the chances of success for people who haven't gained entry into those
academic channels. In other words, doors open for people who meet the prerequisites of entry, and
close for those who don't. It makes no sense to then to assume that those prerequisites caused the
success. They may have simply allowed its possibility, just as their absence removes that possibility.
Look at it this way: An elite education increases the odds of success for many reasons, one of the
biggest being that doors are opened by that education and support is given to people who gain entry
into that education (another being the internalized identity these people acquire). If elite education was
limited, for example, to blue eyed people, then blue eyed people would be more successful that any
others. The conclusion that their blue eyes caused their success, however, would be flawed. The
correct conclusion would be that the admission of blue eyed people into elite education caused their
success. (It is also likely that the internalized identity brown eyed people would develop would be a
powerful hindrance to their success.) Likewise, The children who found their way into this study, at least
from the information I can glean from this article, were likely already being nurtured for academic
success. This is certainly true in my town, where the "gifted" kids are mostly from families who value
academics very highly and who nurture specific academic skills from the day their children are born.
These families have the lifestyles and values that are likely to land their children in an SAT test at age
13. I've lived this. It is very clear. So it seems to me that the mere fact that a child ended up in this study
indicates that that child's academic success was already being nurtured, and that that child was already
being ushered into programs that would lead them into the elite educational tracks that lead to
recognition and success. Stanley was clear about his intent to "enhance the odds that they would
change the world". How any of this indicates that the eventual success was due to some inherent or
genetic ability rather than nurturing escapes me. Rather than seeing narrow, testable, ability as the root
of success, we might do better to start looking at how we've made narrow, testable ability a prerequisite
for success by giving so much weight and influence to a few institutions that use narrow, testable ability
as their condition for entry. We might want to recognize the damaging message that is given to all the
very capable people who don't hit that 1% mark. We might want to admit that it's almost impossible for
people outside this rarefied subset to get similar resources and opportunities.
Anand Ramanathan • 2016­09­07 04:44 PM
The article is titled "How to raise a genius" but does not discuss the role of nurturing. Does labeling
students as gifted make them succeed or were they bound to succeed anyway? Also, the tone of the
article, with quotes like "Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society" seems to
imply that talent is all that matters, but the implications are not black and white. Talent improves ones
odds, but does not guarantee success. Else, 100% of the top of the "gifted" students would have
patents, doctorates and be in the 95% income percentile (in reality 10­35% of the "gifted" achieve these
things).
See other News & Comment articles from Nature
Nature
ISSN 0028­0836
EISSN 1476­4687
© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All Rights Reserved.
partner of AGORA, HINARI, OARE, INASP, CrossRef and COUNTER