Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Highly gifted vs prodigy...how to tell the differe

I remember finding this very interesting when I read it a while back, and perhaps relevant...

http://www.lumosity.com/blog/prodigy/

Of course they highlight working memory at Lumosity-- it's what they're selling...

Males being more competitive is consistent with their being more focused or obsessive and more likely to convert innate ability into prodigy-level performance. As I know from experience, if winning at chess is very important to you, you are more likely to put in a lot of time studying and practicing.

This is roughly what I have read about.

There is a very interesting chapter in Andrew Solomon's book Far From the Tree that discusses musical prodigies. Those are the kids who, before reaching adolescence, performed at the level of a reasonably accomplished adult. Talent is definitely a huge part of it, but it's not just talent, it's talent well developed when they were still 8-, 9- or 10-year-olds. So there is usually a lot of effort involved.

However, the caution is that many of these prodigies don't grow up to be world-class musicians. There are many reasons, some burn out, some simply plateau very early, some resent the entire idea of being a prodigy and rebel, etc., etc.

On the other hand, studies of world-class achievers (in music, math, science, etc) in the book Developing Talent in Young People have shown that these people were almost all not prodigies when they were children. They obviously had some talent but didn't stand out that much. What was different for them was the passion and the persistence.

Guess that is why there are no female athletes.

And there are many female prodigies. I had a subscription to the Young People's concerts with the NY Philharmonic. They always had some teenager that was a prodigy and guess what? Most were girls. One violinist started pre Julliard at 6. There is an amazing young pianist, maybe around 8 now, a girl, in Chicago.

In my opinion, you used to have successful guys marry based on looks and being cared for. In the last 20 years, you have more doctors marry doctors, men in PhD programs, marry women in PhD programs. There is more competitiveness being raised in girls now. To be more like Hilliary Clinton than Laura Bush.

Males are more focused?

I will look for it.

Another thing that is really fascinating to me is that, as mentioned in Andrew Solomon's book but especially in Developing Talent in Young People, K-12 school didn't seem to matter that much, if at all, for either the prodigies or those who attained world-class achievement. I think I relaxed a lot after knowing this.

LOL now there's a loaded statement. Before I bristle too much on behalf of my fellow females, let me say that I do recall reading something about the fact that females have more connections between the hemispheres of our brains, enabling us to do a variety of things such as verbalize our emotions and "multitask" (if that even exists - more likely we just switch rapidly from one task to another rather than executing multiple tasks simultaneously). Anyway. Males, meanwhile, have more of a propensity for specialization. Could that be misconstrued as focus? Because frankly, one could easily focus on multitasking. But now are we even talking about the same thing? (focus Vs specialization)

These are just generalized statements, of course... they don't necessarily apply to everyone and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to counter them.

As should be clear from the context, I used "focused" in the sense of having fewer interests, not in the sense of being better able to concentrate. And in my messages I have said that being more focused may increase the chance of becoming a prodigy but also has downsides. Bobby Fischer was a focused chess prodigy who never finished high school but achieved his chess aim. Looking at his whole life, including some of the terrible things he said, perhaps atributable to insufficient education and knowledge about the world, he was not an advertisement for extreme focus.

Interesting discussion, but it looks like the OP's last visit was before their original (moderated) post appeared, so they haven't even seen their original post appear, let alone the rest of the thread.