Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Outliers, Tiger Moms, and Nature

Absolutely. But... Backwards recall is sometimes said [citation needed] to be very different from forwards recall in the cognitive skills it exercises; to reverse a sequence you (supposedly) have to hold it in memory and process it at the same time. In a naive, un-memory-trained person (me!) that feels true. Forward recall I do essentially by audio memory, perhaps with a little mathematically-based pattern spotting. Backwards recall does seem much harder (and one has less occasion to practise it!)

Still, my guess would be that these trained memorisers would not have that much more difficulty with the backwards than with the forwards task, even though the article doesn't speak to it. I would guess that the walking through a house trick would be easily adapted to "placing" numbers on a forwards walk through the house and "retrieving" them on a backwards walk. What that trick does is to turn the memorisation task into a simple matter of repeated association, with the sequencing, forwards or backwards, parasitic on a sequence one already knows well.

Of course, the effectiveness of the recall task as part of a cognitive test - the correlation between how good someone is at it and how good they'll be at other tasks - is not in contradiction with the idea that it can be trained. That's why IQ tests are secret. This is one part that can't be secret, and should training memory ever become a popular pastime, doubtless this part of the test will have to be removed because it will no longer be predictive.

A little late on this, but their is more then one way to so called success. If I practiced 10,000 hours on a viloen I would be good, but never great. If I was born with talent and did not prcatice I may be good, but not great. If I had talent and practiced, but had no great formal instruction I may be good, but not great. If I had all three I would be great. And the same goes for my spelling and grammer.

Also if you practice 10,000 hours but wrong you still won't know it. Also just b/c you can do something doesn't mean understanding and ability to move beyond.

I think you missed my point. I was definitely not trying to claim that practice doesn't improve performance. I was saying that there's a point beyond which practice won't help in the face of insufficient talent.

Let me put this another way: people here talk about the very high intelligence of their children. Do these kids really have an extreme set of talents, or are they just working hard/being made to work hard? If the latter, do the schools have a point when they make accusations about hothousing the kids?

Practice is a necessary ingredient in success. But referring back to the hard work myth, and as Edwin pointed out, it's only one ingredient.

And my point was, that for memory in particular, there appears to be no point beyond which practice won't help in the face of insufficient talent. If you read the article, there's scientific evidence that top memorizers aren't people with inherently good memories - they're average people with training.

Same here.

Same here too. Grade skip plus mid-year switch to HG school working faster and a year ahead seems to have addressed this issue. For now...

Same here, as well; radical acceleration (even 4+ grades) hasn't really helped EITHER problem for my DD. The underlying problem of pacing and repetition is just too much for EG/PG kids in most regular academic environments, I think. Of course, we don't have a magnet option, so that may color our perspective.

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I actually think that Outliers is a terrific book. BUT. What I find disappointing about that book is that so many people who read it seem to lose sight of the subtext that these anecdotes and loose collections of (admittedly cherry-picked) data can obscure-- that these radical success stories are, as others have noted, about BOTH time and underlying ability/talent. It truly does take about 10,000-16,000 hours of study to earn both a bachelor's degree and a PhD in a subject. We've done the math there, and this tallies with our personal experiences and with those of numerous colleagues. So there really is something to it, though I am not sure that the number is 10,000 for everything, and I will also say (from personal experience again) that no matter HOW much you want something or work hard at it-- there really ARE things which are simply beyond one's scope of natural talent.

I can't CREATE a Tiger Woods or Midori-- not starting with just any child, that is. There is genetic potential involved. I knew very hard-working graduate students that simply were not going to succeed at earning doctoral degrees in chemistry or physics, no matter how much more time they put in than the rest of their peers.

My daughter is a pretty reasonable example of this in action. Sure, she's a rock-star in terms of being almost so uniformly/evenly "gifted" academically that she truly SEEMS like a very bright college student trapped in the body of a pre-teen.

Have we 'coached' her to be that smart? While some people may think that Tiger Parenting can produce kids like that (hot-housing, I suppose one might say); I categorically do NOT believe that it is possible. That's genetics-- my daughter's legacy is not unlike that of Amy Chua's daughters. She has a family littered with scientists, mathematicians and musical prodigies and parents with PhD's in the physical sciences. Her smarts are just natural and mostly genetic. That is potential.

Then there is the environmental factors that go into whether or not that potential will be met, and to what degree...

I push my child pretty hard to apply herself and give some things her "all." Piano has been one of those things (though I've never resorted to the lengths that Dr. Chua reports, I'm happy to note)... as has a 4H project that my daughter chose to do, and at one time, swimming lessons. The message is "don't be a quitter just because this is HARD. It's supposed to be HARD. It's hard for most people-- mastery in the face of difficulty makes the victory that much sweeter."

My reasons have to do with several things and my desire to be a good parent to the child that I have. (As opposed to my ideal of what it means to be "a good mother.") My daughter, like another poster's child, would willingly apply herself to not much if left entirely to her own devices. Goldilocks would automatically avoid ALL tasks that are not "ideal" from her perspective, in terms of difficulty and stimulation... and when the going gets tough, I have given my child a very NO-NONSENSE 'follow through' lecture and insisted in no uncertain terms that she WILL follow through on a committment she made.

We as loving parents want her to learn that effort is, in many ways, directly proportional to results-- no matter HOW incredible your brain is; that's like understanding that a formula one racecar needs as much care in the driver's seat as a used Yugo. She, as I noted at first, is NOT learning this particular lesson from school. And also as another poster noted, PhD programs are filled with people who are smart-smart-smart just like her... and the successful people in them are the ones that have learned that secret-- coasting isn't how to make your dreams become reality.


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Also worth noting-- my ten year old read Outliers. I encouraged her to. LOL.

She has also read Nickel and Dimed. Just saying... we felt that was an educational choice, too.

Hmm. I don't think the answer is quite so cut-and-dried.

When I did a search for the Nature article mentioned in the Times, I found other papers on the subject. The first one I looked at was Wilding & Valentine (1994) Memory Champions British Journal of Psychology May 1:231. The authors studied winners of the same memory competition and found evidence that their memories were superior outside of the use of mnemonic techniques. They also had very good long-term retention and relatives with good memories (last trait self-reported). I didn't look at any of their other papers.

The Nature Neuroscience paper (Maguire et al; (2003) 6:90-95) had some intriguing results about self-teaching. It implied that the subjects all had average IQs, yet they didn't do full IQ tests. They just did an assortment of subtests. I'm not in the field and can't judge the validity of these results as broad measures, though using a test of reading ability, for example, seems a bit odd to me.

The reigning world champion of memory is a guy named Ben Pridmore. He has said that his IQ is 159. The literature has many references to IQ being correlated with short-term memory.

Maybe people with average memories can learn to memorize a deck of cards in 30 seconds by using mnemonics, but I'm not sure. to answer the question, you'd have to run tests on two groups: those with high IQs and those with average IQs. If both use mnemonic techniques, can the people with average IQs beat the high IQ group? Dunno.

What I do know is that it's super-frustrating when the media oversimplifies a complex problem and writes a report implying that some broad idea has been definitely proven by a single study, when reality is way more nuanced.

All this stuff about whether having a good memory is correlated with high IQ is beside your original point, though. You don't need to do an experiment as complicated as this to confirm or refute your claim, which was: "there's a point [and earlier you put this point at 14 digits of backwards recall] beyond which practice won't help in the face of insufficient talent."

I've put in the 14 digits you mentioned earlier, because without some specified point, there is a danger that your claim becomes uninterestingly true: for example, if you take someone who is so severely learning disabled that they cannot communicate a sequence of digits, practice won't help that person to demonstrate backwards recall of 14 digits; but that's not a very interesting example of "insufficient talent". You clearly intended something more like "most people of around average IQ will not be able to learn to recall 14 digits in reverse, regardless of how much they practise". That's an easily testable claim. I expect it's false, for the reasons I already described drawing on the article, but I don't know for sure.

In this nature vs nurture field, it seems particularly easy to allow loaded language to get in the way; that's why it's important to make claims precise. Nobody doubts that humans have different capabilities, and nobody doubts that many of those capabilities can be improved by practice. Cf my earlier comment about "parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities" being probably true, but maybe no more true than "genes do matter, but parenting constrains possibilities".

No argument there.