The Royal Society of Medicine with the Ciba Foundation held a one-day conference on 28 January 1993, in which different types of gifted peoples were discussed, such as those with an IQ greater than 150. ‘‘Gifted people’’, however, are not just those who are deemed gifted, as one member of the audience ventured to think, such as the many sons of J S Bach, apparently gifted because they were their father’s sons, and because the music of two of them is still occasionally played. All six speakers were professors of psychology and, with one exception, came from the United States, including the Chairman, Professor Richard Atkinson, University of California at San Diego. It was a delight that the hero of the meeting was Sir Francis Galton. (The book on Galton, the subject of the Institute’s symposium for 1991, should appear shortly.)
R J Sternberg of Yale University was the first speaker on ‘‘Defining and measuring giftedness’’, but whose real subject was ‘‘Creative Giftedness’’, about which he spoke with a cheerful enthusiasm, letting slip that creativity was not limited to the gifted. The six overlapping factors on which creativity depends are intelligence, knowledge, thinking style, personality, motivation and environment. Creativity needs the ability to redefine and think of problems in an unconventional way, a wide understanding of the field of knowledge, with the avoidance of the rigidity of mind that so often comes with increasing knowledge. Creative giftedness requires hard work and persistence at overcoming obstacles, with a personal need for success, willingness to take sensible risks and love of what is being done. It also depends on an environment that fosters, creates and sustains creative ideas.
D K Detterman of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, spoke next on ‘‘Giftedness and intelligence: at the extremes’’, in which Spearman’s g, ‘‘general intelligence’’ or ‘‘general cognitive ability’’, came under focus; both g and achievement are accounted for by genetic endowment. For Galton, g was a single thing. He believed that love of an interest led to development of intellectual ability in a particular line.
The speaker however, saw g as several things, that could be assessed by a combination of tests that did not necessarily interrelate. Intelligence tests can be either ‘‘verbal’’ or ‘‘spacial’’: verbal scoring depended on memory and attention, while spatial scoring depended on sensation and perception. He found human intelligence as a complex system of interrelated but independent parts, with intelligence tests as a measure of global system functioning, which did not however explain mental ability in terms of either more basic cognitive abilities or underlying brain functioning. Correlations among intellectual abilities are lowest for persons of high intelligence, and specific skills will be less highly correlated among the gifted. Heritability of cognitive abilities may also differ across the intelligence range. Discrepancies between intelligence and achievement, which are different things, appear to be affected by the environment, and this is in accord with the idiosyncratic development of giftedness.
To me, the third paper was the most interesting of the meeting. It was given by Robert Plomin of Pennsylvania State University on ‘‘Genetics and giftedness’’. More is known about the genetics of cognitive ability(g) than any other trait in psychology, and g is the most hereditable thing in behavioural sciences, where two thirds of the variance of intelligence test scores can be explained by genetic influence. Recent findings on the genetics of g have suggested that its heritability increases throughout the lifespan - in adults at 80% level for IQ but in infants 20%; that heritabilities of performance in cognitive tests are strongly correlated with the tests’ loadings on a g factor; and genetic effects on cognitive ability largely overlap with those on scholastic achievement.
In his current genetic research, Plomin is working at the aetiology of individual differences in the normal range and much less is known about the genetics at the gifted end of the distribution. Finding heritability in the normal range of cognitive ability does not imply that giftedness is also genetic in origin. However, the first twin study of high IQ in children, which uses a new technique that analyses the average differences between extreme groups and the rest of the population, suggests that high IQ is as heritable as individual differences in the normal range.
M J A Howe of Exeter University wondered ‘‘What can we learn from the early lives of child prodigies?’’ and asked about the ways in which childhood experiences contribute to adult achievements. Whether or not a highly able child is called a prodigy depends partly on arbitrary factors. A child whose abilities are fairly obvious, such as a pianist, is more likely to be called one than a comparably able child whose abilities are not so apparent. It appears that it is exceptional for an adult who shows creativity to have been a child prodigy. Most prodigies are taught by their parents, and I thought of Mozart. A prodigy will mostly need a family that is enthusiastic about education, as well as supportive parents who are attentive, authoritative but not authoritarian, and interested in sustaining the exceptionality of their child.
The fifth lecture was given by M Csikszentmihalyi, University of Chicago, on ‘‘Family influences and the development of giftedness’’. Although a family giving support might be thought to be a helpful necessity, the lives of those later showing great creativity have often been full of early trauma and tragedy. It seems that the two extremes of good and bad experience are disproportionately represented in the backgrounds of creative individuals, and although a difficult childhood might be conducive to creative achievement, it does not necessarily lead to a serene adulthood. Creative persons have tended to re-cast the accounts of their childhood from time to time, making it difficult to separate objectivity from subjective versions, and the past from the present. Curiously, the lecturer had found that it had been helpful for the father to have died before the child was aged eight; in the discussion I was able to comment that Isaac Newton’s father had made the supreme sacrifice by dying three months before his birth. To succeed, a gifted person needed motivation and a single minded concentration, with satisfaction as the reward, rather than for any concern for other recompense. And, of course, an emotionally involved and integrated family, who organised a smooth and harmonious background, was helpful, along with stimulating parents who freely made any necessary modifications to family plans to aid the success!
The final speaker, K A Ericsson, Florida State University, Tallahassee, spoke on ‘‘Can we create gifted people?’’, making particular reference to Galton and his pioneering research. Galton claimed that innate ability, zeal, natural capacity and eagerness to work, with ‘‘an adequate power of doing a great deal of very laborious work’’ were all necessary for attaining eminent achievements. Natural capacity, or talent, was a major reason limiting gifted and superior performance so that, if such ability is inherited, all one can do is to identify ‘‘gifted’’ children and provide them with the necessary time, motivation, support and training to allow them to realise their superior potential, to acquire the knowledge to become expert. However, research on expert performance has been remarkably unsuccessful in identifying any superiority in basic abilities and capacities, and the acquisition of relevant expertise appears paradoxically to be only moderately related to the amount of experience in a domain. Instead of concentrating on general experience, it is suggested that one should focus on deliberate activities aimed toward improving performance. Expert performance skills can be taught, but unfortunately the provision of optimal opportunities for deliberate practice does not necessarily produce, but needs as well, the stimulation to reach superior achievement.
From the foregoing, and as I personally feared before its start, too much of the illumination at this potentially interesting meeting, devoted to a discussion of gifted individuals, was concerned with the largely obvious. From the presentation we were given, the subject hardly appears to have advanced in the last 120 years. For clarity of definitions and actual research, Galton was further along in his book Hereditary Genius than much exposed at this fairly poor event.
Milo Keynes