The Prodigy's Cousin

by Joanne Ruthsatz

  One of the psychologists William had seen was heartbroken for him. Sure, she was blown away by his academic abilities. But who could be his friend? Who could possibly keep up with him? At best, she thought he might find a peer group in graduate school. She told Lucie that her job was to get him there as fast as possible. But was that really the best she could do for her son?

  The parenting books, of course, were still no help. Trying to hash out these questions with friends was difficult. The usual give-and-take of swapping parenting stories, offering and receiving advice from people navigating parallel developmental milestones, was almost impossible. As far as Lucie knew, no one else’s kids were on this path.

  That January, when Lucie watched a recording of a 60 Minutes episode that had recently aired, she found someone who was. The episode featured a child prodigy, Jacob Barnett, who could’ve been William’s twin.

  Around the time Jacob turned two, he had stopped speaking; he stopped making eye contact, just as William had. He, too, was diagnosed with autism. Jacob and his parents had been through the same assembly line of therapists; they had endured the same devastation as their little boy disappeared into a world of his own.

  There was the same turnaround. Language developed. Jacob began scouring books for new information, anything to keep his brain stimulated. He loved talking about physics but couldn’t keep his shoes tied. He had a copy of the periodic table hanging in his bedroom and memorized digits of pi for fun. Lucie thought Jacob even looked like William.

  About two-thirds of the way through the segment, the reporter introduced Joanne Ruthsatz, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who had been studying child prodigies for more than a decade. She talked about the prodigies’ astounding memories; she believed there was a connection between prodigy and autism. Finally, someone Lucie could talk to.

  After watching the rest of the piece, Lucie posted a link to the story on Facebook and then did a little Internet research. She tracked down Joanne’s bio and a description of her work; then she sent Joanne a message telling her a bit about her children. She provided her contact information in case Joanne wanted to get in touch.

  Within half an hour, Joanne dialed her number. Lucie described all that had happened to her boys. Joanne listened carefully. She asked questions and never doubted Lucie’s story. She was convinced that William was a child prodigy. But what did that term really even mean?

  That turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer—even for the experts.

  Chapter 2

  What Is a Prodigy?

  David Henry Feldman has gray hair, dark, round glasses, and a knack for storytelling—pause here for emphasis; home in on dramatic moments. For the last four decades, he’s been a child development professor at Tufts University. His office sits on the outskirts of campus in a small, unassuming building in Medford, Massachusetts. There, Feldman pursues his studies with the zeal of the academic convert he became more than fifty years ago during a college class with a particularly charismatic professor.

  Feldman has been a leading authority on child prodigies since the 1970s. He’s also the first person to define what, exactly, a child prodigy is. As articulated by Feldman in 1979 (and slightly modified in the 1980s), a prodigy is a child who has reached professional status in a demanding field before the age of ten. For nearly forty years, academics have used this definition to gauge prodigiousness. How Feldman came up with it, though, is a story in itself.

  Feldman has always been a bit of an academic maverick. He often ignored the details of assignments as a graduate student and the demands of department politics as a professor in favor of chewing on whatever academic puzzle consumed him at the time. When he was a young assistant professor at Yale, that puzzle had to do with the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, a man made famous, in part, by his theory about the phases of childhood development. Piaget believed that all children marched through a number of developmental stages before eventually reaching the formal operational stage of development—a stage characterized by the ability to reason abstractly.

  Feldman was convinced that Piaget had missed something. He was certain that there were exceptions to Piaget’s theory. Surely child prodigies, for example, progressed through Piaget’s stages of development more quickly in their fields of expertise than they did in other, unrelated areas. “So, I thought, okay, I’ll go and read the literature on child prodigies, and I’ll fill that in with a little empirical finding. I went and looked in the literature, and I could find nothing—virtually,” Feldman recalled from his office. “It turned out that there hadn’t been anything done by way of what we would call social science research, or any kind of science research, on child prodigies for more than fifty years.”

  Still, Feldman was determined to proceed with his project. He wanted to find some prodigies and give them a handful of psychological tests to prove his anti-Piaget point about child development.

  But what is a child prodigy? The few academic papers Feldman had found didn’t offer much guidance. Everyone seemed to recognize that there was something distinctive about these children, but early researchers resisted laying out precise criteria. Instead, these pioneers of the field took an “I know it when I see it” approach to identifying prodigies.

  In one of the earliest of these studies, Géza Révész, a lecturer at the University of Budapest, wrote of his work with Erwin Nyiregyházi, a Budapest-born child piano player who gained local acclaim for his musical abilities in the early twentieth century. Erwin was exceptionally pale and slender with a long, thin nose and full lips. He tried to imitate singing before he was one and could reproduce melodies before his second birthday. By the time he turned three, he could play any song he heard on the piano. He began piano lessons and learned to read music at four. While he was still a child, his playing was heralded in Budapest, he sought training in Berlin, and he performed several times in Copenhagen and London for audiences that included the British prime minister and the royal family.

  Révész viewed Erwin as an exceptionally rare breed, a child who defied nearly all categories. The one person to whom Révész thought Erwin was very similar was Mozart, perhaps the most famous of all child prodigies. Like Mozart, Erwin took to music at an early age, and his abilities developed rapidly. Both were of above-average intelligence and displayed a passion for music and remarkable creative ability. From Révész’s descriptions, the reader gets the sense that Erwin and Mozart were something entirely different, a breed all their own, the contours of which science had not yet begun to define. It was perhaps for this reason that Révész referred to Erwin as a musical prodigy but skipped out on specifying what that term meant.

  The next notable contribution to prodigy studies was a book-length examination of a child artist, a geographer, a dancer, a chess prodigy, and five music prodigies published in 1930. The study’s author, Franziska Baumgarten, linked the term to talent and achievement, but just like Révész, she never formally defined it.

  Leta Hollingworth, an early twentieth-century researcher, somewhat accidentally became another leader in the field. She didn’t necessarily see herself as engaged in the study of child prodigies; her objective was to study high-IQ children. Some of her subjects certainly sound prodigious, though, and her work is generally included in the canon of child prodigy literature. Perhaps not surprisingly then, her research put a high-IQ spin on child prodigies, but she never actually defined the term (at least not in any scientific sense).

  Hollingworth’s journey with these children began during a psychology course on the mentally impaired that she taught at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1916. For the sake of contrast, Hollingworth decided to put an exceptionally bright child through a round of intelligence tests in front of her class. Two of her students nominated an eight-year-old boy, Edward Rochie Hardy Jr., who had an excellent academic record.

  Hollingworth tested Edward using the Stanfor
d revision of the Binet-Simon intelligence scales. The original Binet-Simon version had been created to identify children of “subnormal intelligence.” But over time, the test, which eventually became known as the Stanford-Binet, was revised to measure high as well as low levels of intelligence. In the modern version, scores fall along a smoothed-out bell curve. But the version that Hollingworth used compared the subject’s “mental age” (a calculation based on the quality of the answers given) with the subject’s actual age to calculate an intelligence quotient, or IQ.

  Hollingworth began testing Edward in front of the approximately thirty students in her class. As soon as Edward answered the first question for his age-group, Hollingworth realized that she had gotten more than she bargained for. She immediately jumped forward to the questions for older children, which Edward also answered easily. It took two full class periods to test Edward, and even then he exhausted the scale without being fully measured, reflecting an IQ of at least 187.

  As Hollingworth grew more familiar with Edward’s background, she learned that he didn’t speak until he turned two, but when he did begin to talk, he could say all the words he knew in German, French, Italian, and English. He was reading books like Peter Rabbit before he was three. By the time Edward was eight, he had picked up several more languages, worked out the Greek alphabet from an astronomical chart, and thought the ultimate in fun would be to have statistics for a country he had imagined on Venus.

  Hollingworth began searching for other children with IQs above 180. Over the course of twenty-three years, she found only eleven others who hit her skyscraping IQ benchmark; she eventually deemed it “nearly useless to look for these children, because so few of them exist.” According to Hollingworth’s estimation, such children were fewer than one in a million.

  Hollingworth described Edward as “prodigious.” But when asked to clarify what she meant by that, she said that she merely meant that his abilities were “wonderful” or “extraordinary.” For future prodigy scholars, it wasn’t much to go on.

  For Feldman’s anti-Piaget purposes, selecting participants was critical. He needed something more specific than “wonderful” or “extraordinary.”

  Piaget thought that children didn’t typically demonstrate the highest level of cognitive development—formal operational thought—until they were eleven. Feldman had his heart set on finding children doing just that in their field of expertise before Piaget thought it possible. So, in his initial prodigy study, he decided to include only children who performed at the level of a professional (which, he thought, clearly evidenced formal operational thought) before reaching double digits. In doing so, he laid the groundwork for what would become the leading definition of a child prodigy.

  Feldman found three children who met his prodigy threshold—two eight-year-old chess aficionados and a nine-year-old composer. He gave them each four psychological tests that measured traits ranging from spatial reasoning to moral judgment. Then he declared victory: The prodigies’ abilities with respect to these “general developmental regions” were in no way as exceptional as their skills in their areas of specialty. They were performing at the highest Piaget level in their area of expertise but thinking like their age-mates in all other ways. At the time, Feldman felt that he had proven his point (though he would later change his mind regarding whether the prodigies were actually demonstrating formal operational thought).

  Feldman’s prodigy definition served his purposes well. As the guiding threshold for an entire field of study, though, there were some bugs to work out. Child prodigies presumably have unique internal wiring that leads to their astounding abilities. Any study of child prodigies would ideally screen for children with such wiring and exclude others. But according to Feldman’s definition, the ultimate yardstick for prodigiousness is a child’s level of achievement—an imprecise indicator of the child’s intrinsic abilities.

  Still, Feldman’s definition provided an anchor for a field that had long drifted through the scientific backwaters. With a definition in place, other researchers had somewhere to start. They could use Feldman’s definition, critique it, or argue for alternative criteria; a more rigorous scientific debate could begin.

  Feldman had meant to move on from child wonders once he finished his initial experiment. “I said it many times, that I don’t care about child prodigies. I’m not particularly interested in them,” Feldman recalled. “But that was just denying what was really true at another level.”

  He couldn’t resist the inherent mystery of children with remarkably advanced abilities. He expanded his initial prodigy study to include three additional children: a writer, a mathematician, and a jack-of-all-trades prodigy who inhaled languages, math, science, and music. This last prodigy, Adam Konantovich (a pseudonym), didn’t technically satisfy Feldman’s prodigy criteria. Adam seemed preternaturally talented in many areas (one psychology professor said Adam was the most gifted child ever to take the Stanford-Binet) but didn’t yet have a single area of specialty. Feldman reckoned with his definition of prodigiousness and decided that it was the sort of rule that could bend a little bit. As he put it in Nature’s Gambit, the book he and his collaborator, Lynn T. Goldsmith, wrote about their prodigy research, “any theory worth its salt should be able to say something about talents like Adam’s.” So he included him in his study.

  The difficulty of using such criteria to identify prodigies is further illustrated in a dissertation written by one of Feldman’s students. The author, Martha Morelock, studied two children who she believed had IQs higher than 200—one of whom was a prodigy, and one of whom was (technically speaking) not.

  Bethany Marshall (a pseudonym) qualified as a child prodigy. Bethany was born limp and not breathing. The doctors revived her, but she stopped breathing again later that night. The doctors discovered blood in her spinal fluid—the product, they said, of a blood vessel bursting under her skull during her rapid delivery. The doctors warned her parents that she might have suffered other damage.

  Bethany began speaking at eight months, and when she was nine months old, she grew captivated by letters. She began memorizing verse at eighteen months and whole books from the library around the time she turned two. She wrote stories at three and poetry at six. The words seemed to come to her mind spontaneously; initially, they were accompanied by music. An adult writer judged the poetry Bethany had produced from the time she was eight equal to that of an adult professional—hence a prodigy, according to Feldman’s definition.

  Michael Kearney, on the other hand, technically missed the prodigy cutoff. Like Bethany, Michael had a traumatic birth. His birth weight was a mere four pounds, and he had an APGAR (the score used to assess a baby’s condition after birth) of two out of a possible ten. His parents were told that he would be developmentally retarded.

  Michael began talking at four months. At eight months, he told his parents when pears were on sale at the grocery store and requested that they buy Campbell’s soup. His parents asked him not to speak while they were shopping because people looked at them strangely. Michael gave his mother driving directions before he turned two. He reported that he composed songs in his head, sometimes improvisations on entire symphonies, but he didn’t know how to write the music down. Michael graduated from high school at six and college at ten. He went on to earn master’s degrees in chemistry and computer science before enrolling in a chemistry Ph.D. program.

  Bethany and Michael were both extraordinarily talented. Both endured traumatic birth experiences, evidenced a voracious hunger for knowledge, developed at breakneck speed, and spontaneously heard—and maybe even composed—music. But because Bethany had a specialty in which she reached professional status before the age of ten, she qualified as a prodigy, while Michael, who graduated from college at ten (not technically a professional), did not.

  It’s an imperfect definition. It’s based on accomplishments (an external rather than an internal guidepost), and the a
ge cutoff—which was eventually softened—is somewhat arbitrary. Feldman didn’t even really mean for it to set the bar for prodigiousness—at least not initially. “I think it had some value,” he said. “I didn’t do it for the purpose of having it be a definition that would work for the field for all time. I did it because of what I was up to.”

  After Joanne met Garrett James and his autistic cousin Patrick, she graduated from Case Western and then hopscotched through a series of academic positions. Along the way, she wrote up her work with Garrett, but she kept quiet about any potential link between prodigy and autism. After all, her idea that the two were somehow connected was little more than a hunch.

  That hunch was a highly unorthodox one. In 2005, when Joanne was on the cusp of initiating a small prodigy study, no one searching for the underpinnings of child prodigies’ talents had suggested that they might have something to do with autism.

  But Joanne was determined to test the waters. Over the years, she had contacted the families of talented children she read about online or in the newspapers. She spoke with the mother of a child who was memorizing books at fourteen months and began adding at eighteen months. She reached out to the parents of a little girl whose paintings were selling for tens of thousands of dollars before she hit double digits. They were fascinating cases, but were they prodigies?

  Feldman’s prodigy definition was a good starting point. But Joanne thought that any connection between prodigy and autism was likely genetic, so she wanted to use a standard that was more closely focused on factors intrinsic to the child and less oriented around a particular level of achievement.

  The thing that seemed most critical, she thought—the dagger that cut to the heart of what it meant to be a prodigy—was the accelerated development of talent during childhood. That insatiable drive, which the psychologist Ellen Winner has described as a “rage to master,” seemed less dependent on attributes of the child’s field or parents; it seemed more likely to have a distinct biological engine behind it.