People with dyslexia have trouble decoding words. Symptoms include transposing characters, drawing mirror images of letters, and severe difficulty in learning to read. Dyslexics make up significantly higher student populations at art schools than at universities. Is the wetware that’s used for interpreting written words in non-dyslexics dedicated to more artistic visual processing in dyslexic brains? Or are people with dyslexia driven to art because of their difficulty with written symbols? The answer to both questions is, of course, yes. The feedback/feed-forward nature of firing and wiring together means that the two answers are their own causes.
4.5.1 Child prodigies
Serena and Venus Williams, Mozart, and Tiger Woods were all offspring of people who immersed their children in a craft. Not every child born of parents who try to cram them into a talent corner emerges as a gifted genius.
Todd Marinovich was born to play quarterback. His father was an NFL coach who began teaching his son the nuances of the position as soon as little Todd could stand. Todd was a star quarterback in high school, starter for the University of Southern California, and, after his sophomore (second) year, a first-round draft choice for the Los Angeles Raiders. Despite the training and a desire to please his father, Todd didn’t have the passion to dedicate his waking hours to improving. He never excelled at the sport’s highest level. Todd preferred skating around Southern California beaches.
Being the child of a parent with passion for a field can have a huge effect on that child, but if the child never acquires the passion, none of the early signs of talent will benefit from the positive practice feedback required for the skill-talent loop to form.
When I was eight years old, my family went to the Oakland Coliseum Arena for some sort of exhibition. We came upon a golf club company exhibit that included a putting green. I knocked the ball in from thirty feet on the first try. A dozen men surrounded me in awe. They had me try again, and again, and again. And the damn ball never even got close to the hole. I was a grain of sand but not the sand they wanted me to be. It’s just as well though; I don’t look good in plaid pants.
4.5.2 Adult prodigies
Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school varsity team until he was a junior. Albert Einstein got a job at the patent office instead of a faculty gig at a university. Jerry Rice wasn’t offered a scholarship to a Division I college.
Adult prodigies are far more interesting and encouraging than child prodigies because they demonstrate that you and I still have a chance!
At 6-foot-6 (1.98 m), Michael Jordan had garden-variety physical endowments by basketball standards. At age fifteen, in his sophomore year of high school, he and his buddy tried out for basketball. He was denied, but his friend made the team. His Airness took it personally and went on a practicing tirade that allowed his talent to emerge.
Similarly, Jerry Rice was never the fastest man on the field, but the fastest man hardly ever caught him, unless the fastest guy waited around until all the other players had gone home and caught up with Jerry still out on the practice field.
Vincent van Gogh took up painting at the age of twenty-seven. He led a troubled life, always clinging to and fighting with his brother on whom he was dependent for both moral and financial support. He worshipped his friend Paul Gauguin, and the two of them shared a tempestuous relationship.
In other words, van Gogh had the ideal temperament for an artist!
He cranked out over two thousand works of art in ten years and then died, probably by committing suicide. Van Gogh serves as an excellent example of talent and skill. He tried every approach to oil painting, watercolors, and sketching that he could find. He worked hours that would make a twenty-something engineer at a high-tech startup seem like part-time help. Van Gogh took whatever talent he had and plied it with skill and an open mind and produced post-impressionist art of a quality that had never been seen before. His broad brush strokes with excessive paint accumulation produced images on canvas that appear to be three-dimensional because they literally poke out from the canvas.
4.6 SKALENT FUEL
The talent-skill feedback loop is tied as tight as any we’ll see. I think that the spectrum from Manute Bol to Muggsy Bogues demonstrates how impossible it is to unfold one from the other, but there is a single driving force that unites them: passion.
Muggsy Bogues got shot in the arm when he was five years old. As a boy, he watched one man beat another to death with a baseball bat. At twelve, his father was imprisoned for robbery and drugs. And, at 5-foot-3 (1.6 m) tall—4 inches (10 cm) shorter than the global average height for a male human and 16 inches (41 cm) shorter than the average NBA player—Muggsy Bogues worked his way from the mean streets of Baltimore to professional basketball, the twelfth man chosen in the 1987 draft.
How the hell did a little dude like Muggsy play basketball at its highest level for fifteen years? Of course, he wasn’t a prolific shot blocker like Manute Bol, though he did block thirty-nine shots during his career. He could jump 44 inches (112 cm), so he would have been able to dunk the ball if his hands were big enough to hold it.
Muggsy used every tool he had and practiced and practiced. We could lean back in our chairs and ruminate on Muggsy’s incredibly talented dexterity and agility—he was one of the fastest players of his era, a prolific ball stealer, and an ace passer—but we’d be kidding ourselves. Practice is how the hell a little dude like Muggsy made it to the highest level of professional basketball.
Motivation comes in every stripe; for Muggsy, basketball was an island of safety in a world of brutality. Some kids get all the breaks. Maybe it helped that he grew up with three buddies who also ended up playing pro basketball—or did it? Which weighs more in determining success? Having three tall friends to practice with could help, but having three superstar basketball players in the same talent pool dramatically reduces the odds of a little guy ever getting time on the court. Unless, of course, that level of difficulty encouraged him to raise his game to levels that no one could ever have guessed possible.
Johnny’s mother told him that someday he would be the leader of a band that people would come from miles around to hear. Having his mother believe in him made it easier for him to believe in himself.
Remember Starla’s rainbow? Talent and skill don’t form a spectrum with talent at one end and skill at the other and combinations of the two forming different colors between them. As skill is acquired, talent is revealed. As talent is revealed, skill is acquired. One doesn’t come without the other.
Yogi Berra said, “Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.” If Yogi were keeping score, he’d say that this chapter barely touches half the question! How does intellectual talent differ from physical talents like being tall or having double eyelashes?
We need to investigate how we learn new things, especially really abstract things that would never help Butch take down a hippo. More than that, we need some idea of how we know whether or not we know something.
Nurturing talent requires plenty of passion, but it needs something else too. Our first hint of this missing ingredient comes from the story of Vanessa Mommylove and her son Vinnie.
5
INTELLIGENCE & INTUITION
HIGH-POWERED ATTORNEY VANESSA MOMMYLOVE faces an exhausting day of depositions, client meetings, and a jury trial after lunch followed by a meeting of partners. As she drops her four-year-old son Vinnie at Kiddie Care, we can forgive her distraction.
She walks Vinnie through the rainbow-arch entrance and into a classroom abuzz with children in various states of anxiety and glee. She kneels down, face-to-face with little Vinnie, and takes in his big brown eyes. Each day, Vinnie acquires greater responsibility for himself, and Vanessa feels the heart-wrenching mix of pride in his growth and yearning for time to slow down. This morning Vinnie buttoned up his violet-checked shirt all by himself—but he didn’t quite line up the buttons. Vanessa checks her watch and makes a decision that she feels good about. The deposition can wait a
few minutes for her to button her son’s shirt properly.
She unbuttons the shirt and aligns each panel. “See how they line up, Vinnie?” she says. Vinnie looks straight down and his adorable pudgy cheeks contrast with his slightly furrowed brow as he concentrates on the shirt-buttoning process. She says, “I’ll hold it while you button.” And Vinnie attaches the buttons in the proper order. There are five buttons, and it takes every second of a minute for him to attach each one. She checks her watch several times but does her best to convey patience.
Around them, Kiddie Care maintains its state of limited chaos. Vanessa can feel the kindhearted gazes of other parents and preschool teachers, but none of that compares to the feeling of time slipping away—both the immediacy of being late to work and the looming bittersweet nostalgia for her son making the transition from toddler to boy to man.
As Vinnie attaches the top button, all the way up under his chin, his eyelashes turn up and Vanessa swims in those brown eyes again. Vinnie’s cheeks puff out as he grins and holds his arms out as wide as he can, proud of himself and certain of the approving hug he’s about to receive.
Vanessa takes him up in her arms, squeezes him tight, and says, just as she does every workday morning, “I love you so much; I could just eat you up!”
And he responds the same way that he has since he learned to talk: “Don’t eat me mommy!”
She sets him down. He turns his head and pushes his cheek against her lips, and she pretends to bite him.
Their daily ritual complete, Vinnie launches into the fray of children, toy cars, balls, dolls, and stuffed animals.
Vanessa rises, smoothes her suit and turns toward the door. She stops at the rainbow arch and looks back. Vinnie has climbed on a beanbag chair and is pushing a plastic dump truck into another child’s toy tiger. The cluster of children moves this way and that, and Vinnie’s violet-checked shirt, black hair, and sweet cheeks move with them, an island of affection on a continent of youth.
Now ten minutes late, Vanessa rushes to work.
Her day provides no respite, no chance to ponder her mortality, no opportunity to reflect, just the constant rush of busy interaction, argument, and a brutal afternoon headache. As evening approaches, she rushes back to Kiddie Care intent on getting there before six o’clock, at which time late fines accumulate. The fines are nothing compared to the guilt of seeing Vinnie there alone.
But traffic is light today, and she pulls into the parking lot at 5:30 p.m., peak pickup time.
She walks under the rainbow arch into the high-pitched cacophony of children playing and scans the melee for Vinnie.
A child in a violet-checked shirt runs up to her. He has black hair, huge brown eyes, and when he gets to her, he holds out his arms and turns his head to the side—precisely the ritual that Vanessa shares with her son.
But this isn’t Vinnie. Oh yes, this child looks exactly like Vinnie, wears the very clothes she left him in nine hours ago, and portrays the motions of her son, but Vanessa knows this is not her son.
The child waits several seconds, as though he expects Vanessa to kneel down and pretend to bite his cheek. Instead, Vanessa scans the crowd for Vinnie. She figures that he must have swapped clothes with this tiny imposter, so she examines each child’s face. None of them look like Vinnie. The child at her feet wraps his arms around her legs, and she tries to shake him off.
Shards of panic stab Vanessa’s heart.
The child at her feet starts to wail, “Mommy, bite my cheek!”
Vanessa peels the boy’s arms away from her and takes his hand. She walks the boy, who is now sobbing, to a teacher and asks, “Where is Vinnie, and why is this child wearing my son’s clothes?”
“What?” the teacher replies. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”
“Where is my son?”
And the child screams, “Mommy, it’s me!”
Vanessa looks at the teacher and then the child. She turns away and tries to concentrate. You see, Vanessa is a woman of extraordinary intelligence and self-discipline. She’s got that feeling of alarms going off in her head not just because she can’t find Vinnie, but because she knows that she’s overlooking something. Combing through her undergraduate studies, she finds it. In a lecture she attended a decade ago, her psychology professor described Capgras syndrome.
Capgras syndrome is a rare neurological disorder caused when part of the inner puppy is separated from the inner Feynman. You see, when Vanessa looks at Vinnie, she doesn’t get that rush of emotion she expects upon seeing her son. She doesn’t want to bite his cheek or hug him tight. He’s cute, but try as she might, the disconnect between her feelings and her intellect runs so deep that she is incapable of perceiving him as her son.
Vanessa takes a breath, reviews her day, and recalls that headache after lunch. It laid her out for an hour, complete with loss of breath and a shallow pulse. She started to feel better and made it through the day, but now she realizes that she must have had a stroke.
Once Vanessa’s intellect overcomes her intuition, she understands that this crying child who looks identical to her son is indeed Vinnie. She kneels down and holds her arms out as she would for Vinnie. He launches into them, and she carries him through the rainbow arch. By the time they reach the parking lot, Vanessa finds a substitute for her own affection. She has made the conscious decision to treat Vinnie as she would any child who has been separated from his parents. She shakes her head at the thought because Vinnie has, most certainly, been separated from her.
5.1 WE CAN’T SEPARATE INTELLECT AND EMOTION
Vanessa expected to recognize her son at a glance. She freaked out when her ability to immediately identify him failed. She had to make a deliberate effort, a Herculean effort. Few people could hold back their panic and concentrate enough to come to a well-reasoned conclusion, but Vanessa is a woman of tremendous intellect.
Just as we enjoy the delusion that we can observe culture, politics, science, and even art with cool objectivity, we like to think that our intellectual inner Feynmans can make decisions without consulting our emotional inner puppies. We’re equally full of shit in every case.
We expect to know some things without thinking. We learn to trust our gut reactions. How many times have you been out walking around and gotten a feeling of impending doom? When you make a major purchase, your gut has a big say, doesn’t it? Some people intuit trouble with astounding accuracy. Others, like me, have stupid guts. I’m deeply impressed by people whose intuition gets it right, but I’m never surprised when they get it wrong.
My prejudice is that we’re better off thinking things through, at least when we have the time to do so. There’s a big hole in that logic, though. My prejudice has led me into the trap of thinking that intelligence and intuition are different things.
Intuition boils up with that feeling of understanding, of knowing you’re right even when you’re not. We get the same feeling when we deliberately think our way through to the answer. Vanessa remembered the lecture on Capgras syndrome, the pieces came together, she identified the pattern, and got the feeling of knowing. With no emotional attachment to Capgras syndrome, the feeling of knowing wasn’t so inhibited. She couldn’t identify her son because her Vinnie pattern was built on affection, and the stroke distorted it beyond recognition.
To learn, to know, to believe, all these experiences rest on feelings. If you’re not certain, you’ll never “get it,” and getting it is sort of what it’s all about, so even our inner Feynmans rely on their guts.
The question is: How did our guts get so damn smart?
5.2 LEARNING
Since the brain is a raw, physical thing, it stands to reason that brains come with different types and levels of talents, just as legs, hands, fingers, faces, and eyelashes do.
Intellectual talent is dicey for lots of reasons. Around the end of the eighteenth century, a physiologist named Joseph Gall developed phrenology. Phrenology proposed that the skull is like any other body cavity and that the
brain that fills it is composed of separate organs that tend to separate tasks. Just as a competent eighteenth-century physician could diagnose the performance of organs by examining eighteenth-century bellies, Gall analyzed the shape and size of people’s skulls to determine their mental capacities and even their criminal potential.
Measuring the bumps and size of someone’s skull to judge their capacity to create art, practice medicine, or invent stuff doesn’t work nearly as well as measuring someone’s height and weight to guess how they might perform on a basketball court.
Most art forms combine the physical and intellectual. Creating physical objects, like paintings, sculptures, cabinets, and making music require elements of agility and manual dexterity, as well as the gray matter required to create. Mathematics, on the other hand, I think, is as close as we can get to a case where physical prowess hardly plays a role at all.
The venerable IQ test attempts to combine everything we think of as intellectual talent into a single number. We can probably agree that intelligence includes the ability to learn and understand, reason and communicate, innovate and create. Measuring a complicated, multidimensional, multifaceted, and not particularly well-defined entity with a single yardstick is sort of like measuring a football field by the height of the grass. You learn something important but risk the delusion that you know the whole story.
The best-known predictor of future success is not a high IQ; it’s the ability to forgo immediate gratification, that is to say, self-discipline kicks IQ’s ass. If you’re trawling for future Nobel laureates, doctors, judges, and presidents, assemble your candidates and offer them a deal: You get one cookie right now, or you can wait ten minutes and get two. The kids who can wait will dominate the greedy little bastards.
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 10