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

I really like how you put that, Shari.

Had to highlight this from another poster, though-- it made me chuckle:


Exactly. These were students that theoretically had the proficiency by virtue of having completed the prereq... but the reality was quite another matter. A matter that I was, as a professor, somehow supposed to 'work around.' So if I had to teach beginning algebra instead of, say... quantitative analysis the way the ACS envisioned it... that was apparently what I should do. In other words, I was not to require mastery of the prerequisite. (This still boggles my mind.)

In the college environment, "testing out" of prerequisites has a long history. The prerequisites are much less about "do A and then B because that is how it's done" than they are pragmatic needs for particular skills. "You need to be able to use integral calculus to understand this physics course." Credit for a course is sometimes even given via exam.

At least it used to be so; there has definitely been pressure on higher ed to propogate the philosophy that has taken hold in K through 12. Even worse is the attitude that students are "customers" and that the institution should be run as a business to please them. I don't think that's sound at all, FWIW.

Not everyone can be a particle physicist, a great jazz pianist, a charismatic talk show host, or a poet laureate. I think that it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. That's not to say that most people couldn't develop some skill in physics, piano, public speaking, or creative writing with sufficient practice, or that luminaries in those endeavors don't work hard.

They do; they MUST or they wouldn't have that level of accomplishment. But enough of the one ingredient doesn't substitute for the other. The Mozarts of the world are not "made" but neither are they "born." They're BOTH. The reason that they are so seemingly rare has to do with right-place-right-time-right-child-right-parents-right-passion.

I think that is the essential meaning behind Gladwell's premise, and perhaps also the subtext of Chua's. Both err in overestimating the contribution of time/practice/sweat equity to true genius, however. Einstein, Picasso, Oprah, Robert Frost and Jellyroll Morton are special above and beyond hard work and opportunity. History is filled with examples of children who were given VERY special opportunities by virtue of birth-- but most become 'proficient' and not more, and we never know their names the way we do their more talented relatives. Most of JS Bach's many children, all but one of the Barrymores' many great-grandchildren-- there are a few who stand out as "talented" but most weren't able to make use of those opportunities to the fullest. If environment were everything, then family dynasties should be much more common in areas of performance-based prestige, and most fail after a couple of generations.

It bemuses me that while most fully concede that not everyone can become, say, a professional athlete, there is still the durable belief that environment is 100% of intellectual performance, and that with the right environment, neural plasticity is infinite. It's just not so. There's "neurotypical" and then there is "other." Functional MRI and PET scanning studies have shown for nearly two decades that there are real differences.


There are fields where neurotypical people are the minority; is that solely due to lack of interest? Can everyone who WANTS to be a brain surgeon or test pilot do so? Most high school quarterbacks will never become Peyton Manning. Is it lack of nurturing?
Is 'everyone' college material? If so, then is 'everyone' (everyone with the desire) Medical School material, too? Is it really just a matter of effort?


____________________________________

I think I've already answered the nature v. nurture question. Probably several times over.

In my DD's case in particular, I'd guess 80/20. Like Shari's child, mine would need to be in a sensory deprivation chamber to prevent learning. Actually, that's not even true. At this point, she'd probably do thought experiments even there. LOL. But she has been given the opportunity to exist "unmasked" for much of her school day since she is educated at home.

In my own case, I think that the answer is more like 90-10. I did not have a nurturing upbringing, nor a well-to-do one. On the other hand, that does make for greater tenacity and resilience when the mixture is just right, so who knows.

This has got to be something like ten cents at this point. I guess I just find this topic to be compelling.

Oh, and one other thing that I find just intriguing as all get-out is the notion of "savant" abilities or cognitive singularity/exceptionality.

I think that most people have some sort of savant ability (and a mirror image weakness, too, often as not), even if it isn't extreme. I think that we only really recognize them when they are extreme or in particular areas such as music, visual arts, or mathematics. Perfect pitch, for example, or the ability to memorize pages of numbers at a glance; those are the things that we notice and label as "savant" abilities.

Just as remarkable (to me) are the people that 'just know' what a baby is thinking when it cries, can identify a particular blend of seasonings on food at a restaurant, or reproduce a conversation verbatim from memory.

If you talk to people, a lot of them even know what their particular savant ability is. It's fascinating.

I can't recall a phone number long enough to dial it without looking at it again. (Completely true) My savant ability is color memory/discrimination. It's not a very useful savant ability, as these things go, and I'd probably trade it for being able to remember a phone number long enough to find a pen and paper when I need to take a message, but hey...



I think that most people just assume that everyone shares their savant ability, so they don't think of it as remarkable unless it comes up in conversation. I only realized in my thirties that most people can't pick a paint sample/color out from memory.

(I think the waters have been muddied somewhat by the term "nurture" and the subsequent use of the term by laypeople in these sorts of discussions. It would be simpler to call it the "environment vs. genetics" debate, to rule out the need to discuss whether a child is a self-teacher, as that's not very relevant in my opinion).


I'm amazed that you would lump a charismatic talk show host in with a particle physicist and poet laureate. (I also don't think that the word "disingenuous" means what you think it means. :P )


Sure; though they can compensate somewhat, one certainly can't completely substitute for not enough of the other. "Perfect" instruction couldn't turn a person with a defective brain into a great thinker, just as a John von Neumann-type brain can't teach itself particle physics from scratch, nor can it invent a language to think about abstract concepts from scratch. The brain of a John von Neumann, as with anyone, would actually physically atrophy, as I understand it, if he/she were raised by wild dogs.


Come on, seriously?


Well, I think it's pretty well-accepted (by most in this thread at least) that an extremist viewpoint is bound to be wrong. I do think it's a fallacy, however, to liken abstract intellectual pursuits to athletics. I can see why it would be tempting, of course-- physical limitations are easy to understand on a gut level, and easy to prove-- but running a marathon is not just like doing advanced math. I don't know of any proof of the maximum level of ability of the human brain, and believe that we are still in the beginnings of our journey of understanding about the brain.


Hyperbole, of course. No one seriously thinks that.


Are you saying that these fields are packed with autistic people? I am amazed at that, especially at the test pilots. In any event, does the existence of that minority tend to prove or to disprove that an improved environment can make a biologically normal person perform at what we today consider to be a very high level? (That's rhetorical-- I already know the answer.)

Anyway, I don't think that merely becoming a brain surgeon or test pilot, or scientist for that matter, means that one is particularly brilliant. But if achieving membership in such a role is how you define very high mental ability, I am guessing that any born-normal person could fairly easily be educated to perform at that level, with the right know-how. I even think one could be trained to be a charismatic talk show host! I may just be a disingenuous sort of person to feel this way, but we can agree to disagree.

I wasn't actually drawing any sort of comparison between those disparate fields, for whatever that is worth. Hopefully the inclusion of Oprah provided some amusement, at least.

Setting aside judgements about the relative worth of endeavors, my point there was that each requires a set of specialized skills beyond that possessed by most (average) laypersons. Worth noting that not everything that LOOKS easy actually is. That's as close as I'll come to defense of television personalities, I promise. LOL.

Are there not people for whom one or more of those occupations would be entirely unsuitable? Is the reason for that due to "defect" or is it "difference" in cognition? I'd argue yes, just as some children are born introverts, others are born 'mathy,' musical, or with exceptional language acquisition skills.

I'm perfectly willing to grant that a greater number of people may be suited to some endeavors than to others. The pool of people who would be marvelous electricians may well be significantly larger than the pool of those that are innately well-suited to be astronauts, for example. I'm also perfectly willing to cede that there is no person that is destined for a single outcome from birth (even though in the case of singularities, it's difficult to envision)-- someone who eventually becomes a stellar neurosurgeon might well have been outstanding as something else, instead.

I was pointing out that pretty much ANY broad endeavor/occupation has its "singular" success stories. They are by definition anecdote, and therefore, broadening one's definition of "success" to include more cases may be useful in terms of determining underlying contributing factors.

When examined, as Malcom Gladwell has done, one finds what one looks for, it seems to me; that might be passion/drive, it might be innate ability (genetic potential, if you will), it might be effort (hard work, 10,000 hours, Chinese parenting, or whatever else one chooses to call it) or it might be environment/opportunity. The real question in my mind is whether or not any of those correlations would exist if one could examine the phenomenon with objective tools.

It seems most probable to me that the truth owes something to all of them. Perhaps being merely average in any of those areas is enough to doom a person to relative mediocrity/obscurity, regardless of compensation in the others. As long as it is a happy and meaningful obscurity, I don't know too many people that wouldn't be perfectly fine with that outcome.

I was using examples to show that successes are definitely not just individuals for whom that level of success was entirely due to situational advantage or hard work, or even the two in combination-- both are necessary, in other words, but not sufficient. There may be endeavors for which superlative performance has no relationship to innate ability, but I am hard-pressed to think of any examples.

As for some fields drawing disproportionately from particular types of non-neurotypical folks, I didn't mention Aspies in particular precisely because the phenomenon is broader than that. Elementary and SpEd teaching tends to draw people with what I would term empathetic gifts, as does veterinary medicine. Engineering, of course, draws Aspies so reliably that Aspie traits have almost come to represent the engineering archetype, but it is NOT necessarily the case that "most Aspies are engineers." I seriously doubt that.

In my opinion, it is disingenuous to appeal to egalitarianism using untapped cognitive potential/environment as a means of sidestepping the possibility of being labeled elitist, or at the very least, fatalistic ("my genes made me who I am"). This strikes me as very close in sentiment to "all children are gifted," without SAYING it.

I mean, sure, it sounds nice to think that the bell curve doesn't exist as anything but an artifact created by circumstance alone, but problematically, it seems to persist no matter how one looks at population data, and most of the people that I hear using that kind of rhetoric certainly should know this full well. It only holds up if one is willing to redefine the terms. Ergo, disingenuous.

I have no idea if any of that was what Iucounu intended. I would be astonished if it were. I wasn't trying to be provocative or inflammatory with that statement, in any case, and it wasn't directed at anyone in particular. My apologies if that wasn't clear. I ramble, in case nobody has noticed.



I'm not suggesting that possessing a sufficiently high IQ score makes one "special" in any sense of the word. What I am suggesting is that a particular set of cognitive quirks is fairly fixed for most people from birth, and that this probably has pragmatic consequences related to occupational "fit" later. Even so, traditional IQ is probably not the best description of that phenomena. The language here is imperfect, I am afraid. (And yes, I'm well aware of studies done on "training" children's brains to be more neurotypical as interventions for ADHD and specific visual processing disorders-- but the jury is still out on whether or not this is simply a learned skill like reading phonetically or doing long division, or if it's truly a functional cognitive change.)

It's probably better to note that some fields seem to be best suited for a particular cognitive arrangement/toolbox. That's undoubtedly somewhat independent of IQ, but it dovetails with the evidence that some occupations/fields seem to draw particular types of people who are cognitively quite similar to one another.

Being verbally quick on one's feet and having terrific people skills probably makes one a good salesperson-- or talk show host. I know that I don't have the ability to be Oprah-- or David Letterman, if you prefer. Now, that may not matter much to me since I am also not disappointed by that particular shortcoming. One could argue that I could be better at the required skills if I were passionately interested, which is, I gather, what Iucounu is suggesting; that with sufficient training and motivation (hot-housing), an average person (such as myself) could match David Letterman or Oprah. I'm skeptical of that conclusion, and it's largely because I simply don't think that hot-housing is capable of that sort of shift in potential.

Then again, maybe I'm just looking at my part of the elephant.


(I really try to be brief. I do. It's just that... well... it's a cognitive limitation. If brevity is the soul of wit, however, I think I know where this leaves me. LOL.)

There's an old saw about "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree". And that's true...to a point. All the bending in the world won't turn that tree into a pepperoni pizza. OTOH, if I don't prune and bend the darn thing, it grows over my roof and turns into a raggedy old termite highway.

So, having beaten that metaphor to death, I will take credit for contributing to some of my children's success, but also have to acknowledge that I had amazing material to work with.

And as for percentage amounts...depends on what we're talking about, and what day.

Quote:
that with the right environment, neural plasticity is infinite


Well, I kind of believe that literally. I read it on a cereal box once that we only use 10% of our brain. I'm assuming they mean on average because even my light bill fluctuates.

I personally think that I think either:
1)we are born with a variety of individual "ceilings" and we each fluctuate around 10% of our max rpm. The iq test should be multiplied by 100. (shows lack of understanding of the iq test). And since we hang out around 10% of our brainpower that's why the test is only a picture in time. Or
2)we all have the same "ceiling" and some of us are comfortably firing six cylinders while others of us are eight cylinder beasts. I think they make twelve and sixteen cylinder cars now. Enough of that analogy. I've been hanging out with the hubby too much and I don't know the first thing about cars. That saying some of us like to use 20% of our brain 24/7, others, whatever. This is why sometimes you can bring others to your depth or height (nd, +/-) but they keep their own depth when you're not around. Of course you can always walk down a path with a friend for a while, regardless of the depth, yours, theirs, or wherever's fine. ((unless, like me you have installed a stubbornness firewall))

I haven't found out which I believe yet, and it might end up being something else. I also think whichever one it is we swim in different lakes with different groups of people.

Howler Karma,, no!, don't throw me into your rambles mr. Brer Rabbit.

Don't remember who posted "how the twig is bent is how the tree grows", because I read it at the krispy kreme. But I had to tell the hubby when we got back in the car because he always says it's all in the upbringing. I don't think he means ultimate potential, or maybe he does. I think he means wether they go to college or be a hoodlum, or wether the are respectful, popular, hardworking, likable..hey, even my dad said something like that, "if you want people to care about you all you have to do is be someone people would care about.".

And regarding brain surgeons and Opera Winfrey, supposedly successful people, people who contribute, produce, and are happy with it are the navel-gazers who have found "something to do as much as I like this. Find something you love to do and find someone to pay you to do it..."... But people end up growing out of what they thought they wanted sometimes. That's why we should learn to recognize when work, friends, debatably even trouble (according to the nurtured heart thread) rewards us by leaving us feel energized for doing it. That's probably why sometimes you hear about people that don't want to retire. We should learn to recognize opportunities for energizing activities so we can see them in every situation. I think. Right now I think that.

Ok, so the definition of nurture, vs environment, vs opportunity. Figure that out we can balance the school budget and chose between books, teachers, or more classes.
So what was the original question? Was it nature vs. Nurture or was it 100007 hours vs. Guidence and direction. Granted you could be on a path of your own then guidence would be a sideshow. But, if you're on a path of your own that's a pretty big thing. I don't think following,... well this post is getting too long and I'm turning rambelyer than the howler monkey now.

P.s. ss21 said, "but what if you break the branch when you're bending the twig?".

Now there's another question. The iPhone just put a (.) after that sentence even though I already put a (?). Was it because the (?) was inside the (")'s, so it was for the quoted sentence and the iPhone added the (.) after the (") because it was for the quoting sentence?

I just read this whole thread through and my question is: nature vs nurture what?

If you are talking about innate talents, which many are, then nature wins. But if you are talking about long term success, my vote is on nurture.

And to be nice, what do Einstein, Picasso and Oprah have in common? Hard work. All applied themselves to what they were doing to be a success.

All the really contented adults, and I am going with contented since I have no broad swath of psychological insight, have good work habits, stayed in their jobs, whether they were NG, MG, or PG. They are disciplined. And one of the things we commonly complain or are concerned about is the lack of challenge gifted children find in regular schoolwork and the long term problems of bad habits that lead to unsuccessful long term outcomes.

So my kid is a whiz at math. I could do my engineering math without homework, it came easily to me, but I didn't learn anything. I did not have good habits. When in a job, I got into it, skimming, treading water, and when I could achieve easily, got bored. I got lucky after many bad decisions and a career that peaked early by a husband that had really good habits, which got him into Harvard and medical school. He has taught me good habits, which now I teach DD.

So nature made me a whiz at math, nurture made me long term unsuccessful. I don't care if DD can play the piano better than 90% of the kids her age. I want her to learn to practice, to do it the way her teacher wants -- which requires practice. Right now she has to do one piece with a pizzicato staccato. She has to train her fingers to be able to play this technique on the piano. It isn't about talent, it is about practice, training, building the muscles. Just like she has to build muscle strength to do her chin ups and pullovers in gymnastics.

And I make her to do it for good habits, not to be a concert pianist. And that is what I tell her. She can't quit piano, not until she learns to apply herself and work to do her very best. That is the lesson from taking piano lessons.

Because, in my opinion, nature gives her options, not long term success.

Ren

That does not make sense, because in some alternate universe where you had given up DS for adoption, his adoptive parents still would have fed him. Do you think your cooking has some special qualities leading to high IQ? What you (and your husband) have given your son that is likely more distinctive are your genes. My reading of the IQ literature is that unless parents are outright negligent or abusive, their childrearing cannot boost IQ appreciably in a way that lasts until adulthood.

That's why I was saying the nurture has more with direction, with how to find your place in this world, and feeling like you belong. The genes are there, it's going to be an apple tree, orange, or oak already. The nurture still matters.