write a 2 pages response paper based on assigned readings, double spaced, more instruction are below. Thanks.

1 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 200

6

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1 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

UNCOMMON GENIUS
Millions of years of evolution have endowed Homo sapiens with remarkable intellect. But not all human brains are created equal.

From the great powers of memory seen in savants to the skills of chess grandmasters, unusual talents can offer a unique window on how
the mind works. This exclusive online issue examines genius in some of its most intriguing forms.
Meet Kim Peek, whose abilities provided the inspiration for the character Raymond Babbit in the movie Rain Man. Peek’s severe
developmental disabilities prevent him from managing the chores of daily life, but he has learned 9,000 books by heart so far, among
other astonishing feats of memory. Other savants have musical or artistic talents.
Less well known than savant syndrome is Williams syndrome, a disorder in which affected individuals generally score below
average on standard IQ tests, but often possess startling language and music skills, as another article in this issue describes. Mood
disorders, too, have been linked to genius: it seems that manic-depressive illness and major depression can enhance creativity in some
people.
Other articles focus on gifted children. These youngsters fascinate with their precocious intellect, but they often suffer ridicule
and neglect. They also tend to be keenly aware of the potential risk of failure, which can prove emotionally paralyzing for them. Studies of
such children have provided key insights into brain development—and revealed how best to nurture their extraordinary minds.
Our fi nal article in the issue considers whether some geniuses are made, not born. Dissections of the mental processes of chess
grandmasters have shown that their skills arise from years of “effortful study”—continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond their
competence. Could comparable training turn any one of us into such an expert? Food for thought.–The Editors

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Scientifi cAmerican.com
exclusive online issue no. 3

1

2

Islands of Genius

BY DAROLD A. TREFFERT AND GREGORY L. WALLACE; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND JANUARY 200

4

Artistic brilliance and a dazzling memory can sometimes accompany autism and other developmental disorders

7

Inside the Mind of a Savant

BY DAROLD A. TREFFERT AND DANIEL D. CHRISTENSEN SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE; DECEMBER 200

5

Kim Peek possesses one of the most extraordinary memories ever recorded. Until we can explain his abilities, we cannot pretend to under-
stand human cognition

11

Williams Syndrome and the Brain

BY HOWARD M. LENHOFF, PAUL P. WANG, FRANK GREENBERG AND URSULA BELLUGI; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 199

7

To gain fresh insights into how the brain is organized, investigators are

turning to a little known disorder

16

Manic-Depressive Illness and Creativity

BY KAY REDFIELD JAMISON; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN PRESENTS: MYSTERIES OF THE MIND
Does some fi ne madness plague great artists? Several studies show that creativity and mood disorders are linked

21

Uncommon Talents: Gifted Children, Prodigies and Savants

BY ELLEN WINNER; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN PRESENTS: EXPLORING INTELLIGENCE
Possessing abilities well beyond their years, gifted children inspire admiration, but they also suffer ridicule,

neglect and misunderstanding

25

Watching Prodigies for the Dark Side

BY MARIE-NOËLLE GANRY-TARDY; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND APRIL 2005

Gifted children who are not challenged can quickly grow bored with school, but a hidden fear of failure can lead to far greater problems

27

The Expert Mind

BY PHILIP E. ROSS; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE AUGUST 2006

Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fi elds as well

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2 S C I E N T I F I C A M E R I C A N E X C L U S I V E O N L I N E I S S U E A U G U S T 2 0 0 6

By Darold A. Treffert and Gregory L. Wallace
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 2004

OF GENIUS
Islands

Artistic brilliance and a dazzling memory can sometimes
accompany autism and other developmental disorders

L
eslie Lemke is a musical virtuo-
so. At the age of 14 he played,
flawlessly and without hesi-
tation, T chaikovsky’s Piano
Concerto No. 1 after hearing
it for the fi rst time while listen-
ing to a television movie sev-

eral hours earlier. Lemke had never had a piano
lesson—and he still has not had one. He is blind
and developmentally disabled, and he has cere-
bral palsy. Lemke plays and sings thousands of
pieces at concerts in the U.S. and abroad, and he
improvises and composes as well.

Richard Wawro’s artwork is internationally

renowned, collected by Margaret Thatcher and
Pope John Paul II, among others. A London art
professor was “thunderstruck” by the oil crayon
drawings that Wawro did as a child, describing
them as an “incredible phenomenon rendered
with the precision of a mechanic and the vision
of a poet.” Wawro, who lives in Scotland, is au-
tistic.

Kim Peek is a walking encyclopedia. He has
memorized more than 7,600 books. He can re-
cite the highways that go to each American city,
town or county, along with the area and zip codes,
television stations and telephone networks that
serve them. If you tell him your date of birth, he

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can tell you what day of the week it fell on and
what day of the week it will be when you turn 65
“and can retire.” Peek can identify most classical
compositions and knows the date the music was
published or fi rst performed as well as the com-
poser’s birthplace and dates of birth and death.
He is also developmentally disabled and depends
on his father for many of his basic daily needs. His
abilities provided the inspiration for the character
Raymond Babbitt, whom Dustin Hoffman played
in the 1988 movie Rain Man.

Lemke, Wawro and Peek all have savant syn-
drome, an uncommon but spectacular condition
in which people with various developmental dis-
abilities, including autism, possess astonishing is-
lands of ability and brilliance that stand in jarring
juxtaposition to their overall mental handicap.
Savant syndrome is seen in about one in 10 people
with autism and in approximately one in 2,000
people with brain damage or mental retardation.
Of the known savants, at least half are autistic
and the remainder have some other kind of de-
velopmental disorder.

Much remains mysterious about savant syn-
drome. Nevertheless, advances in brain imaging
are permitting a more complete view of the con-
dition, and a long-standing theory of left hemi-
spheric damage has found support in these imag-
ing studies. In addition, new reports of the sudden
appearance of savant syndrome in people with
certain forms of dementia have raised the intrigu-
ing possibility that some aspects of such genius lie
dormant in all of us.

Down’s Defi nition
Descriptions of savant syndrome appear in

the scientifi c literature as early as 1789. Benja-
min Rush, the “father of American psychiatry,”
described the lightning-quick calculating ability
of Thomas Fuller, who understood little math
more complex than counting. When Fuller was
asked how many seconds a man had lived by the
time he was 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old,
he gave the correct answer of 2,210,500,800 a
minute and a half later—and he had taken into
account 17 leap years.

It was not until 1887, however, that the re-
markable coexistence of defi ciency and superior-
ity was more completely laid out. That year J.
Langdon Down, who is best known for having
identifi ed Down syndrome, described 10 people
with savant syndrome. He had met these fasci-
nating individuals during his 30 years as superin-
tendent of the Earlswood Asylum in London. He
coined the now discarded term “idiot savant,”

using the then accepted classifi cation of an idiot
as someone with an IQ of less than 25, combined
with a derivative of the French word savoir, which
means “to know.”

More than a century has passed since Down’s
description. Today we know much more about
this perplexing set of abilities from the 100 or
so cases described in the scientifi c literature. Sa-
vant syndrome generally occurs in people with
IQs between 40 and 70—although it can occur in
some with IQs up to 114 or even higher. It dispro-
portionately affects males, with four to six male
savants for every one female. And it can be con-
genital or acquired later in life following disease
(such as encephalitis) or brain injury.

Narrow Repertoire
The skills that savant syndrome gives rise to

are limited for the most part, and they tend to
be based in the right hemisphere. That is, they
are predominantly nonsymbolic, artistic, visual
and motor. They include music, art, mathematics,
forms of calculating, and an assortment of other
abilities, such as mechanical aptitude or spatial
skills. In contrast, left hemisphere skills are more
sequential, logical and symbolic; they include lan-
guage and speech specialization [see “The Split
Brain Revisited,” by Michael S. Gazzaniga; Sci-
entifi c American, July 1998].

Most musical savants have perfect pitch and
perform with amazing ease, most often on the
piano. Some are able to create complex composi-
tions. And for some reason, musical genius often
seems to accompany blindness and mental retar-
dation, as it does for Lemke. One of the most
famous savants was “Blind Tom” Bethune, who
lived from 1849 to 1908. In his time, he was re-
ferred to as “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Although he could speak fewer than 100 words,
he could play beautifully more than 7,000 pieces
on the piano, including many of his own works.
(Some of his compositions were recorded by mu-
sician John Davis and released in 2000.

)

For their part, savant visual artists use a variety
of media, although they most frequently express
themselves through drawing and sculpture. Artis-
tic savant Alonzo Clemons, for example, can see a
fl eeting image of an animal on a television screen
and in less than 20 minutes sculpt a perfect replica
of that animal. His wax model will be correct in
every detail, every fi ber and muscle and propor-
tion.

Mathematical savants calculate incredibly
rapidly and often have a particular facility with
prime numbers. Curiously, the obscure skill of

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calendar calculating that Peek demonstrates is
not confi ned to mathematical savants; it seems to
coexist with many different skills.

Several other abilities appear less frequently. A
rare savant may have extensive language ability—
that is, the capacity to memorize many languages
but not to understand them. Other unusual traits
include heightened olfactory, tactile and visual
sensitivity; outstanding knowledge in fi elds such
as history, neurophysiology, statistics or naviga-
tion; and spatial ability. For instance, a musical
and blind savant named Ellen can navigate in
thick forests or other unfamiliar spaces without
running into objects. Ellen also has a perfect ap-
preciation of passing time despite the fact that she
doesn’t have access to a watch or clock, even in
Braille. This ability was discovered one day when
her mother let her listen to the “time lady” on
the telephone. After listening for a short while to
the recorded voice intone the hour and seconds,
Ellen apparently set her own internal clock. Since
then, she has been able to tell what time it is to the
second, no matter the season.

Savant skills are always linked to a remark-
able memory. This memory is deep, focused and
based on habitual recitation. But it entails little
understanding of what is being described. Some
early observers aptly called this “memory with-
out reckoning.” Down himself used the phrase
“verbal adhesion” to characterize it. One of his
patients was a boy who had read the six-volume
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-
pire, by Edward Gibbon, and could recite it back
word for word, although he did so without any
comprehension.

Although they share many talents, including
memory, savants vary enormously in their levels
of ability. So-called splinter-skill savants have a
preoccupation and mild expertise with, say, the
memorization of sports trivia and license plate
numbers. Talented savants have musical or artis-
tic gifts that are conspicuously above what would
be expected of someone with their handicaps.
And prodigious savants are those very uncom-
mon people whose abilities are so advanced that
they would be distinctive even if they were to oc-
cur in a normal person. Probably fewer than 50
prodigious savants are alive at the moment.

Whatever their talents, savants usually main-
tain them over the course of their life. With contin-
ued use, the abilities are sustained and sometimes
even improve. And in almost all cases, there is no
dreaded trade-off of these wonderful abilities with
the acquisition of language, socialization or daily
living skills. Instead the talents often help savants

to establish some kind of normal routine or way
of life [see box on page 6].

Looking to the Left Hemisphere
Although specialists today are better able to

characterize the talents of savants, no overarching
theory can describe exactly how or why savants
do what they do. The most powerful explana-
tion suggests that some injury to the left brain
causes the right brain to compensate for the loss.
The evidence for this idea has been building for
several decades. A 1975 pneumoencephalogram
study found left hemispheric damage in 15 of 17
autistic patients; four of them had savant skills.
(A pneumoencephalogram was an early and pain-
ful imaging technique during which a physician
would inject air into a patient’s spinal fl uid and
then x-ray the brain to determine where the air
traveled. It is no longer used.)

A dramatic study published by T. L. Brink
in 1980 lent further credence to the possibility
that changes to the left hemisphere were impor-
tant to savant syndrome. Brink, a psychologist at
Crafton Hills College in California, described a
normal nine-year-old boy who had become mute,
deaf and paralyzed on the right side when a bul-
let damaged his left hemisphere. After the acci-
dent, unusual savant mechanical skills emerged.
He was able to repair multigeared bicycles and to
design contraptions, such as a punching bag that
would weave and bob like a real opponent.

The fi ndings of Bernard Rimland of the Au-
tism Research Institute in San Diego support this
idea as well. Rimland maintains the largest data-
base in the world on people with autism; he has
information on more than 34,000 individuals.
He has observed that the savant skills most of-
ten present in autistic people are those associated
with right hemisphere functions and the most de-
fi cient abilities are associated with left hemisphere
functions.

In the late 1980s Norman Geschwind and
Albert M. Galaburda of Harvard University of-
fered an explanation for some causes of left hemi-
spheric damage—and for the higher number of
male savants. In their book Cerebral Lateraliza-
tion, the two neurologists point out that the left
hemisphere of the brain normally completes its
development later than the right and is therefore
subject to prenatal infl uences—some of them det-
rimental—for a longer period. In the male fetus,
circulating testosterone can act as one of these
detrimental infl uences by slowing growth and im-
pairing neuronal function in the more vulnerable
left hemisphere. As a result, the right brain often

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compensates, becoming larger and more domi-
nant in males. The greater male-to-female ratio
is seen not just in savant syndrome but in other
forms of central nervous system dysfunction, such
as dyslexia, delayed speech, stuttering, hyperac-
tivity and autism.

Newly Savant
In recent years, more data have emerged to

support the left hemisphere hypothesis. In 1998
Bruce L. Miller of the University of California at
San Francisco examined fi ve elderly patients with
frontotemporal dementia (FTD), one form of pre-
senile dementia. These patients had developed
artistic skills with the onset and progression of
their dementia. They were able to make meticu-
lous copies of artworks and to paint beautifully.
Consistent with that in savants, the creativity in
these fi ve individuals was visual, not verbal. Single-
photon-emission computed tomography (SPECT)
showed that injury was predominantly on the left
side of the brain. Miller examined seven other
patients who had developed musical or artistic
ability after the appearance of FTD. He found
damage on the left as well.

Miller, Craig Hou, then at Washington Uni-
versity, and others then compared these images
with those of a nine-year-old artistic autistic sa-
vant named DB. SPECT scans of DB revealed
a higher-than-normal blood fl ow in part of his
neocortex but decreased fl ow in his left temporal
lobe. (The neocortex is involved with high-level
cognitive function; the temporal lobe is respon-
sible for some aspects of memory and emotion.)
Miller is hoping to study other artistic savants
to see if the fi ndings hold true for them as well.
But the fact that DB and older FTD patients with
newfound savant skills have the same pathology
is quite striking and suggests that researchers will
soon be able to identify precisely the neurological
features associated with savant syndrome.

The seemingly limitless memory of savants
will most likely be harder to pinpoint physiologi-
cally. Mortimer Mishkin of the National Institute
of Mental Health has proposed different neural
circuits for memory, including a higher-level cor-

ticolimbic circuit for what is generally referred to
as explicit, semantic or cognitive memory, and
a lower-level corticostriatal circuit for the more
primitive habit memory referred to as implicit
or procedural memory. The memory of savants
seems to be the noncognitive habit form.

The same factors that produce left hemispheric
damage may be instrumental in producing dam-
age to higher-level memory circuits. As a result,
savants may be forced to rely on more primitive,
but spared, habit memory circuits. Perhaps brain
injuries—whether they result from hormones, dis-
ease, or prenatal or subsequent injury—produce
in some instances certain right-brain skills linked
with habit memory function. In those situations,
savant syndrome may appear.

Rain Man in Us All?
The emergence of savantlike skills in people

with dementia raises profound questions about
the buried potential in all of us. Accordingly, sev-
eral researchers are seeking to unlock what has
been called the “little Rain Man in each of us.”
One group has used a technique called repetitive
trans cranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in 17
normal individuals, eight male and nine female.
Tracy Morrell of the University of South Austra-
lia, Robyn L. Young of Flinders University in Ad-
elaide and Michael C. Ridding of Adelaide Uni-
versity applied magnetic stimulation to the area
in the left temporal lobe that Miller identifi ed as
damaged in his FTD patients.

In its study, the team reports that only two
of the participants experienced a series of short-
lived skills, such as calendar calculating, artistic
ability and enhanced habit memory. Other sub-
jects discovered a new skill here and there, also
lasting just a few hours. The researchers suggest
that savant skills may be limited to a small per-
centage of the normal population, much as they
are limited to a small percentage of the disabled
population.

Nevertheless, many experts believe that real
potential exists to tap into islands of savant intelli-
gence. Allan Snyder and John Mitchell of the Aus-
tralian National University in Canberra argue that
savant brain processes occur in each of us but are
overwhelmed by more sophisticated conceptual
cognition. Autistic savants, they conclude, “have
privileged access to lower levels of information not
normally available through intro spection.”

Our view is also that all of us have some of the
same circuitry and pathways intrinsic to savant
functioning but that these are less accessible—in
part because we tend to be a left-brain society.

(The Authors)

DAROLD A. TREFFERT and GREGORY L. WALLACE share a long-standing
interest in savant syndrome. Treffert (dtreffert@pol.net) is a clinical professor
of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has done research
on autism and savant syndrome since 1962, the year he met his fi rst savant.
Wallace (gregwallace@mail.nih.gov) is a research fellow in the Child Psychiatry
Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. He is conducting studies on
why individuals with autism are more likely to develop savant skills.

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Sometimes, though, we can fi nd elements of the
savant in ourselves. At certain moments, we just
“get” something or discover a new ability. And
some procedures—including hypnosis; interviews
of subjects under the infl uence of the barbiturate
sodium amytal, which induces relaxation; and
brain stimulation during neurosurgery—provide
evidence that a huge reservoir of memories lies
dormant in every individual. Dreams can also re-
vive those memories or trigger new abilities.

No model of brain function will be complete
until it can explain this rare condition. Now that
we have the tools to examine brain structure and
function, such studies can be correlated with de-
tailed neuropsychological testing of savants. We
hope the anecdotal case reports that have charac-
terized the literature on this topic for the past cen-
tury will soon be replaced by data comparing and
contrasting groups of normal and disabled people,
including prodigies, geniuses and savants.

A Window into the Brain
Savant syndrome provides a unique window

into the brain with regard to questions of general
intelligence versus multiple forms of intelligence.
It may also shed light on brain plasticity and cen-
tral nervous system compensation, recruitment

and repair—areas of research that are vital in un-
derstanding and treating such diverse conditions
as stroke, paralysis and Alzheimer’s disease.

But savant syndrome has relevance outside
the scientifi c realm. Many lessons can be learned
from these remarkable people and their equally
remarkable families, caretakers, therapists and
teachers. One of the greatest lessons is that they
have been shaped by far more than neural cir-
cuitry. The savants thrive because of the reinforce-
ment provided by the unconditional love, belief
and determination of those who care for them.
Savant syndrome promises to take us further than
we have ever been toward understanding both the
brain and human potential.

(Living with Savant Syndrome)

A
few reports in the literature suggest that when sa-
vants are encouraged to acquire better language
skills they lose their special artistic talents. Per-

haps the most famous of these cases is that of Nadia,
a girl with autism who by the age of three was producing
astounding drawings. When she turned seven, Nadia en-
tered a school for autistic children that focused on verbal
abilities; by the time she was a teenager, Nadia was more
verbal but could no longer create brilliant and intricate
drawings.

This trade-off between talent and language or so-
cialization is not something we have witnessed. Instead
the exceptional abilities of savants have proved to be
strengths that are built on and used as a conduit toward
normalization; these skills have helped individuals de-
velop improved social skills, better language acquisition
and greater independence. Savants gain a sense of ac-
complishment because of their talent; that sense, in turn,
allows them to participate more fully in the world. Musical
prodigy Leslie Lemke has become more animated, per-
forming concerts and interacting with audiences. Painter

Richard Wawro feels delight and excitement when he fi n-
ishes a work, and he seeks out celebration. And memory
wizard Kim Peek has emerged from the social isolation
that characterized him before the movie Rain Man was
made; he now travels the country talking to hundreds of
school groups.

Fortunately, simultaneously encourag ing savant
abilities and normal ization is now the generally accepted
approach to such individuals’ care. Savants are being
placed in some classes for the gifted and talented, an
opportunity that promotes social growth for both them
and their classmates. Some new programs, such as the
one at Hope University in Anaheim, Calif., cater entirely
to these exceptional individuals. Others include people
with similar disorders as well; for example, music and art
camps have been established for those with Williams syn-
drome, many of whom have savantlike musical skills [see
“Wil liams Syndrome and the Brain,” by Howard M. Len-
hoff, Paul P. Wang, Frank Greenberg and Ursula Bellugi;
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, December 1997]. Nurturing the tal-
ent of these people is the most fulfi lling approach.

—D.A.T. and G.L.W.

(Further Reading)
◆ Emergence of Artistic Talent in Frontotemporal Dementia.

B. Miller, J. Cummings and F. Mishkin et al. in Neurology, Vol. 51, No. 4,
pages 978–982; October 1, 1998.

◆ Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome.
Darold A. Treffert. iUniverse.com, Inc., 2000.

◆ www.savantsyndrome.com

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7 S C I E N T I F I C A M E R I C A N E X C L U S I V E O N L I N E I S S U E A U G U S T 2 0 0 6

When J. Langdon Down fi rst described savant
syndrome in 1887, coining its name and noting its

association with astounding powers of memory, he

cited a patient who could recite Edward Gibbon’s

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

verbatim. Since then, in almost all cases, savant

memory has been linked to a specifi c domain, such

as music, art or mathematics. But phenomenal

memory is itself the skill in a 54-year-old man

named Kim Peek. His friends call him “Kim-puter.”

Kim Peek possesses one of the most extraordinary
memories ever recorded. Until we can explain his abilities,

we cannot pretend to understand human cognition

By Darold A. Treffer t and Daniel D. Christensen
Originally published in December 2005

Inside the MindMind
of a SavantSavant

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He can, indeed, pull a fact from his mental library as fast
as a search engine can mine the Internet. He read Tom Clan-
cy’s The Hunt for Red October in one hour and 25 minutes.
Four months later, when asked, he gave the name of the Rus-
sian radio operator in the book, referring to the page describ-
ing the character and quoting several passages verbatim. Kim
began memorizing books at the age of 18 months, as they
were read to him. He has learned 9,000 books by heart so far.
He reads a page in eight to 10 seconds and places the memo-
rized book upside down on the shelf to signify that it is now
on his mental “hard drive.”

Kim’s memory extends to at least 15 interests— among
them, world and American history, sports, movies, geogra-
phy, space programs, actors and actresses, the Bible, church
history, literature, Shakespeare and classical music. He knows
all the area codes and zip codes in the U.S., together with the
television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps
in the front of phone books and can provide Yahoo-like trav-
el directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair
of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions,
tell when and where each was composed and fi rst performed,
give the name of the composer and many biographical details,
and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the mu-
sic. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new
skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about
music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it.

It is an amazing feat in light of his severe developmental
problems— characteristics shared, in varying extents, by all
savants. He walks with a sidelong gait, cannot button his
clothes, cannot manage the chores of daily life and has great
diffi culties with abstraction. Against these disabilities, his tal-
ents—which would be extraordinary in any person— shine all
the brighter. An explanation of how Kim does what he does
would provide better insight into why certain skills, including

the ordinarily obscure skill of calendar calculating (always
associated with massive memory), occur with such regularity
among savants. Recently, when an interviewer offered that he
had been born on March 31, 1956, Kim noted, in less than a
second, that it was a Saturday on Easter weekend.

Imaging studies of Kim’s brain thus far show considerable
structural abnormality [see box on page 10]. These fi ndings
cannot yet be linked directly to any of his skills; that quest is
just beginning. Newer imaging techniques that plot the brain’s
functions—rather than just its structure—should provide more
insight, though. In the meantime, we believe it is worthwhile
to document the remarkable things that Kim can do. People
like him are not easily found, and it is useful to record their
characteristics for future research. Savantism offers a unique
window into the mind. If we cannot explain it, we cannot
claim full understanding of how the brain functions.

An Unusual Brain
k i m wa s b o r n on November 11, 1951 (a Sunday, he will
tell you). He had an enlarged head, on the back of which was
an encephalocele, or baseball-size “blister,” which spontane-
ously resolved. But there were also other brain abnormalities,
including a malformed cerebellum. One of us (Christensen)
did the initial MRI brain scans on Kim in 1988 and has fol-
lowed his progress ever since.

The cerebellar fi ndings may account for Kim’s problems
with coordination and mobility. But more striking still is the
absence of a corpus callosum, the sizable stalk of nerve tissue
that normally connects the left and right halves of the brain.
We do not know what to make of this defect, because al-
though it is rare, it is not always accompanied by functional
disorders. Some people have been found to lack the structure
without suffering any detectable problems at all. Yet in people
whose corpus callosum has been severed in adulthood, gener-
ally in an effort to prevent epileptic seizures from spreading
from one hemisphere to the other, a characteristic “split-
brain” syndrome arises in which the estranged hemispheres
begin to work almost independently of each other.

It would seem that those born without a corpus callosum
somehow develop back channels of communication between
the hemispheres. Perhaps the resulting structures allow the
two hemispheres to function, in certain respects, as one giant
hemisphere, putting functions normally rather separate under
the same roof, as it were. If so, then Kim may owe some of his
talents to this particular abnormality. In any case, the fact
that some people lacking a corpus callosum suffer no dis-
abilities, whereas others have savant abilities, makes its pur-
pose less clear than formerly thought. Neurologists joke that
its only two certain functions are to propagate seizures and
hold the brain together.

Theory guides us in one respect. Kim’s brain shows abnor-
malities in the left hemisphere, a pattern found in many sa-
vants. What is more, left hemisphere damage has been in-
voked as an explanation of why males are much more likely

■ Great powers of memory run through every known
manifestation of savant skill. In the case of Kim Peek,
memory is itself the skill.

■ Kim’s brain exhibits many abnormalities, including an
absent corpus callosum. The role of that par ticular
abnormality in Kim’s case remains to be explained, but it
evokes a question raised by the skills of all savants:
Does brain damage stimulate compensatory
development in some other area of the brain, or does it
simply allow other wise latent abilities to emerge?

■ Kim’s rote learning later developed into a form of
associative thinking, with clear evidence of creativity.
His success then helped him engage the wider world.
The authors conclude that savant skills should never be
dismissed but should be cultivated for the patient’s
intellectual and social development.

Over view/Peek’s Peaks

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than females to display not only savantism but also dyslexia,
stuttering, delayed speech, and autism. The proposed mecha-
nism has two parts: male fetuses have a higher level of circu-
lating testosterone, which can be toxic to developing brain
tissue; and the left hemisphere develops more slowly than the
right and therefore remains vulnerable for a longer period.
Also supporting the role of left hemisphere damage are the
many reported cases of “acquired savant syndrome,” in which
older children and adults suddenly develop savant skills after
damage to the left hemisphere.

What does all this evidence imply? One possibility is that
when the left hemisphere cannot function properly, the right
hemisphere compensates by developing new skills, perhaps by
recruiting brain tissue normally earmarked for other purpos-
es. Another possibility is that injury to the left hemisphere
merely unveils skills that had been latent in the right hemi-
sphere all along, a phenomenon some have called a release
from the “tyranny” of the dominant left hemisphere.

Kim underwent psychological testing in 1988. His overall
IQ score was 87, but the verbal and performance subtests
varied greatly, with some scores falling in the superior range
of intelligence and others in the mentally retarded range. The
psychological report concluded, therefore, that “Kim’s IQ
classifi cation is not a valid description of his intellectual abil-
ity.” The “general intelligence” versus “multiple intelligences”
debate rages on in psychology. We believe that Kim’s case
argues for the latter point of view.

Kim’s overall diagnosis was “developmental disorder not
otherwise specifi ed,” with no diagnosis of autistic disorder.
Indeed, although autism is more commonly linked with sa-
vantism than is any other single disorder, only about half of
all savants are autistic. In contrast with autistic people, Kim
is outgoing and quite personable. One thing that does seem
necessary for the full development of savant skills is a strong
interest in the subject matter in question.

Memory and Musi

c

i n k i m ’s c a s e , all the interests began in rote memorization
but later progressed to something more. Although Kim gener-
ally has a limited capacity for abstract or conceptual think-
ing— he cannot, for example, explain many commonplace
proverbs—he does comprehend much of the material he has
committed to memory. This degree of comprehension is un-
usual among savants. Down himself coined the interesting
phrase “verbal adhesion” to describe the savant’s ability to
remember huge quantities of words without comprehension.
Sarah Parker, a graduate student in psychology at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, in a description of a savant named Gor-
don stated it more colorfully when she noted that “owning a
kiln of bricks does not make one a mason.” Kim not only
owns a large kiln of bricks, he has also become a strikingly
creative and versatile word mason within his chosen areas of
expertise.

Sometimes his answers to questions or directions are quite
concrete and literal. Once when asked by his father in a res-

taurant to “lower his voice,” Kim merely slid lower into his
chair, thus lowering his voice box. In other cases, his answers
can seem quite ingenious. In one of his talks he answered a
question about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by
responding, “Will’s house, 227 North West Front Street. But
he stayed there only one night—he gave the speech the next
day.” Kim intended no joke, but when his questioner laughed,
he saw the point; since then, he has purposely recycled the
story with humorous intent and effect.

Yet Kim does have an undeniable power to make clever
connections. He once attended a Shakespeare festival spon-
sored by a philanthropist known by the initials O.C., whose
laryngitis threatened to keep him from acknowledging a tes-
timonial. Kim—a fan of Shakespeare, and like him, an incor-
rigible punster— quipped, “O.C., can you say?”

Such creative use of material that had originally been
memorized by rote can be seen as the verbal equivalent of a
musician’s improvisation. Like the musician, Kim thinks
quickly, so quickly that it can be diffi cult to keep up with his
intricate associations. Often he seems two or three steps
ahead of his audiences in his responses.

A rather startling new dimension to Kim’s savant skills has
recently surfaced. In 2002 he met April Greenan, director of
the McKay Music Library and professor of music at the Uni-
versity of Utah. With her help, he soon began to play the piano
and to enhance his discussion of compositions by playing pas-
sages from them, demonstrating on the keyboard many of the
pieces he recalled from his massive mental library. Kim also
has remarkable long-term memory of pitch, remembering the
original pitch level of each composition.

He possesses complete knowledge of the instruments in
the traditional symphony orchestra and readily identifi es the
timbre of any instrumental passage. For example, he present-
ed the opening of Bedrich Smetana’s orchestral tone poem
The Moldau, by reducing the fl ute and clarinet parts to an
arpeggiated fi gure in his left hand and explaining that the
oboes and bassoons enter with the primary theme, which he
then reduced to pitches played singly and then in thirds by his
right hand (the left-hand fi gure continuing as it does in the
score). His comprehension of musical styles is demonstrated
in his ability to identify composers of pieces he had not previ-
ously heard by assessing the piece’s musical style and deduc-
ing who that composer might be.

DAROLD A . TREFFERT and DANIEL D. CHRISTENSEN have long
been fascinated by savantism. Treffer t, a psychiatrist in Wis-
consin, has done r esear ch on autism and savant syndr ome
since 1962, the year he fi rst met a savant. He was consultant
to the movie Rain Man and is author of Ex traordinary People:
Understanding Savant Syndrome. Christensen is clinical profes-
sor of psychiatry, clinical professor of neurology and adjunc t
professor of pharmacology at the Univer sity of Utah Medical
School. His work focuses on Alzheimer ’s disease, but following
Kim Peek for more than two decades has given him an ongoing
interest in savant syndrome.

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Though Kim is still physically awkward, his manual dex-
terity is increasing. When seated at the piano, he may play the
piece he wishes to discuss, sing the passage of interest or de-
scribe the music verbally, shifting seamlessly from one mode
to another. Kim pays attention to rhythm as well, lightly tap-
ping the beat on his chest with his right hand or, when play-
ing, tapping his right foot.

Greenan, a Mozart scholar, makes these observations:
“Kim’s knowledge of music is considerable. His ability to re-
call every detail of a composition he has heard—in many cas-
es only once and more than 40 years ago—is astonishing. The
connections he draws between and weaves through composi-
tions, composer’s lives, historical events, movie soundtracks
and thousands of facts stored in his database reveal enormous
intellectual capacity.” She even compares him to Mozart, who
also had an enlarged head, a fascination with numbers and
uneven social skills. She wonders whether Kim might even
learn to compose.

Life af ter Rain Man
i t i s n o t s u r p r i s i n g that Kim’s prodigious memory
caught the attention of writer Barry Morrow at a chance
meeting in 1984 and inspired him to write the screenplay for

Rain Man, whose main character, Raymond Babbitt, is a sa-
vant played by Dustin Hoffman. The movie is purely fi ctional
and does not tell Kim’s life story, even in outline. But in one
remarkably prescient scene, Raymond instantly computes
square roots in his head, and his brother, Charlie, remarks,
“He ought to work for NASA or something.” For Kim, such a
collaboration might well happen.

NASA has proposed to make a high-resolution 3-D ana-
tomical model of Kim’s brain architecture. Richard Boyle,
director of the NASA BioVIS Technology Center, describes the
project as part of a larger effort to overlay and fuse image data
from as wide a range of brains as possible— and that is why
Kim’s unusual brain is of particular value. The data, both
static and functional, should enable investigators to locate
and identify changes in the brain that accompany thought and
behavior. NASA hopes that this detailed model will enable
physicians to improve their ability to interpret output from
far less capable ultrasound imaging systems, which are the
only kind that can now be carried into space and used to
monitor astronauts.

The fi lming of Rain Man and the movie’s subsequent suc-
cess proved to be a turning point in Kim’s life. Before then, he
had been reclusive, retreating to his room when company
came; afterward, the confi dence he gained from his contacts
with the fi lmmakers, together with the celebrity provided by
the movie’s success, inspired him and his father, Fran Peek, to
share Kim’s talents with many audiences. They became en-
thusiastic emissaries for people with disabilities, and over the
years they have shared their story with more than 2.6 million
people.

We believe that Kim’s transformation has general appli-
cability. Much of what scientists know about health comes
out of the study of pathologies, and certainly much of what
will be learned about normal memory will come from the
study of unique or unusual memory. In the meantime, we
draw some practical conclusions for the care of other persons
with special needs who have some savant skill. We recom-
mend that family and other caregivers “train the talent,”
rather than dismissing such skills as frivolous, as a means for
the savant to connect with other people and mitigate the ef-
fects of the disability. It is not an easy path, because disability
and limitations still require a great deal of dedication, pa-
tience and hard work— as Kim’s father, by his example, so
convincingly demonstrates.

Further exploration of savant syndrome will provide both
scientifi c insights and stories of immense human interest. Kim
Peek provides ample evidence of both.

M O R E T O E X P L O R E
The Real Rain Man. Fran Peek. Harkness Publishing Consultants, 1996.
E x tr aor dinar y People : Under s tanding Savant S yndr ome. Reprint
edition. Darold A . Treffer t. iUniverse, Inc., 2000.
Islands of Genius. Darold A . Treffer t and Gregory L. Wallace in
Scientifi c American, Vol. 286, No. 6, pages 76–85; June 2002.
w w w.savantsyndr ome.com, a Web site maintained by the Wisconsin
Medical Society.

A MIS SING CONNEC TION?
Kim Peek’s brain differs from typical brains in several
ways. Kim’s brain and head are very large, each in the 99th
percentile. Most striking is the complete absence of the
corpus callosum, which normally connects the left and right
hemispheres. Missing, too, are the anterior and posterior
commissures, which also usually link the hemispheres.
The cerebellum, responsible for certain motor functions,
is smaller than usual and malformed, with fl uid occupying
much of the surrounding space; this may explain some
of Kim’s diffi culties with coordination. What role these
abnormalities play in his mental abilities is the subject of
investigation.

Corpus
callosum

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When a teenager with an IQ of just 49 was asked to draw an elephant and
tell what she knew about the animal,
her sketch was almost indecipherable.
But her description was impressively
rich, even lyrical. As part of that de-
scription, she noted, “It has long, gray
ears, fan ears, ears that can blow in the
wind….”

In her verbal ability, that young wom-
an is fairly typical of people who have
Williams syndrome, a rare condition
that has recently started to draw the at-
tention of a range of scientists. Affected
individuals, sometimes called Williams
people, are not all alike but often are
similar to one another. They are fre-
quently diagnosed as mildly to mod-
erately “retarded” and generally score
below average on standard IQ tests.
They usually read and write poorly and
struggle with simple arithmetic. Yet
they display striking strengths in some
realms. They generally demonstrate a
facility not only for spoken language
but also for recognizing faces. And, as
a group, they tend to be empathetic, lo-
quacious and sociable.

What is more, anecdotal evidence
implies that some Williams people
possess extraordinary musical talent.
Even though their attention span for
most tasks is short, many will listen to
music, sing and play instruments with
astonishing persistence. Most can-
not read musi cal notes, yet some have
perfect or nearly perfect pitch and an
uncanny sense of rhythm. One boy
quickly learned to play an extremely
complex drumbeat in 7/4 time with
one hand while drumming in 4/4 time
with the other hand. A number of indi-
viduals retain complex music for years,
remembering melodies and verses of
long ballads; one even sings songs in 25
languages. Experienced Wil liams musi-
cians also sing harmonies, improvise
and compose lyrics readily.

Such anecdotes have recently led to
the first systematic study of musical abil-
ity in Williams children. The results in-
dicate that the youngsters discriminate
melodies well; they also show signifi-
cant ly more interest in and emotional
responsivity to music than do subjects
from the general population. As one
Williams child said, “Music is my favo-
rite way of thinking.”

Investigators are attracted to Wil-
liams syndrome in part because they
suspect the dramatic peaks and valleys
in the abilities of affected individuals
will provide a new window to the or-
ganization and adaptability of the nor-
mal brain. Some groups are attempting
to pinpoint characteristic properties of
the Williams brain and to determine
how those properties influence perfor-
mance in intellectual and other realms.
At the same time, researchers are trying
to uncover the genetic abnormalities re-
sponsible for Wil liams syndrome.

In 1993 they learned that the disorder
is caused by loss of a tiny piece from
one of the two copies of chromosome
7 pres ent in every cell of the body. The
de let ed piece can contain 15 or more
genes. As the lost genes are identified,
scientists can begin to determine how
their absence leads to the neuro ana tom-
ical and behavioral features already
observed. This integrated approach to
the study of Wil liams syndrome—con-
necting genes to neurobiology and, ul-
timately, to behavior—may become a
model for exploring how genes affect
brain development and function.

Medical scientists are interested in
Williams syndrome in its own right
as well. Analysis of the genes in the
deleted region has already explained
why Wil liams people commonly suffer
from certain physical ailments. It has
also provided a means of prenatal test-
ing and is helping to diagnose the dis-
order earlier, so that children who are
affected can be helped from infancy to

live up to their fullest potential; lack of
familiarity with Williams syndrome in
medical circles and the absence of reli-
able tests have hindered prompt diag-
nosis in the past.

Understanding Grew Slowly

Although Williams syndrome, which occurs in an estimated one in
20,000 births worldwide, has gained
increased attention lately, it is not by
any means new. An investigation by
one of us (Lenhoff) suggests that Wil-
liams people were the inspiration for
some age-old folktales about elves, pix-
ies and other “wee people” [see box on
page 15].

The medical community became
aware of the syndrome fairly recently,
however—only about 40 years ago.
In 1961 J.C.P. Williams, a heart spe-
cialist in New Zealand, noted that a
subset of his pediatric patients shared
many characteristics. Beyond having
related cardiovascular problems, they
also had elfin facial features (such as a
turned-up nose and a small chin) and
seemed to be mentally retarded. The
cardiac problems Williams observed
often included heart murmurs and nar-
rowing of major blood vessels. In par-
ticular, Williams people frequently suf-
fer from supra val vular aortic stenosis
(SVAS), a mild to severe constriction of
the aorta.

Since that time, physicians have
noted other traits, some of which can
be seen quite early in life. In infancy,
babies may have difficulty feeding and
may suffer from stomach pains, consti-
pation and hernias. They may also sleep
poorly and can be irritable and colicky,
behavior sometimes caused by anoth-
er frequent sign: elevated amounts of
calcium in the blood. As the children
get older, they reveal hoarse voices and
show delayed physical and mental de-
velopment. They begin walking at an

Williams Syndrome and the Brain
To gain fresh insights into how the brain is organized, investigators are

turning to a little known disorder

by Howard M. Lenhoff, Paul P. Wang, Frank Greenberg and Ursula Bellugi

originally published in December 1997

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average of 21 months, often on the
balls of their feet and usually with an
awkwardness that persists throughout
life. Fine motor control is disturbed as
well. In addition, Williams people are
extremely sensitive to noise, are often
short compared with their peers and
seem to age prematurely (for instance,
their hair grays and their skin wrinkles
relatively early).

Description began to give way to ge-
netic understanding about four years
ago, thanks in part to a study of SVAS
in people who did not have Williams
syndrome. In 1993 Amanda K. Ewart
and Mark T. Keating of the University
of Utah, Colleen A. Morris of the Uni-
versity of Nevada and other collabora-

tors discovered that for a segment of
this population, SVAS stemmed from
an inherited mutation in one copy of
the gene that gives rise to elastin—a
protein that provides elasticity to many
organs and tissues, such as the arteries,
lungs, intestines and skin.

Missing Genes Are Identified

Aware that SVAS is common in Wil – liams people and that individu-
als with familial SVAS alone and indi-
viduals with Williams syndrome both
suffer disturbances in organs that re-
quire elasticity, the workers wondered
whether Williams syndrome, too, in-
volved some kind of change in the gene

for elastin. Sure enough, they found
the gene was deleted from one of the
two copies of chromosome 7 in cells.
Today it is evident that the deletion of
the gene occurs in approximately 95
percent of patients with Williams syn-
drome. The loss is harmful presumably
because both gene cop ies are needed to
make adequate amounts of the elastin
protein.

The investigators knew that a re-
duction in the elastin supply could
contrib ute to various physical features
of Wil liams syndrome (such as SVAS,
hernias and premature wrinkling), but
it could not by itself account for the
cognitive and behavioral signatures.
After all, their first subjects, who had

“What an elephant is, it is one of the animals.
And what an elephant does, it lives in the jun-
gle. It can also live in the zoo. And what it has,
it has long, gray ears, fan ears, ears that can
blow in the wind. It has a long trunk that can
pick up grass or pick up hay. If they’re in a bad
mood, it can be terrible. If the elephant gets
mad, it could stomp; it could charge. Some-
times elephants can charge. They have big
long tusks. They can damage a car. It could
be dangerous. When they’re in a pinch, when
they’re in a bad mood, it can be terrible. You
don’t want an elephant as a pet. You want a
cat or a dog or a bird.”

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Drawing and Description of an Elephant by a Teen with Williams Syndrome

Folktales from many cultures feature magical “little people”—pixies, elves, trolls and other fairies. A number of physical and behavioral
similarities suggest that at least some of the fairies in the early yarns were
modeled on people who have Wil liams syndrome. Such a view is in keep-
ing with the contention of historians that a good deal of folklore and my-
thology is based on real life.

The facial traits of Williams people are often described as pixielike. In
common with pixies in folklore and art, many with Wil liams syndrome have
small, upturned noses, a depressed nasal bridge, “puffy” eyes, oval ears and
broad mouths with full lips accented by a small chin. Indeed, those features
are so common that Williams children tend to look more like one another
than their relatives, especially as children. The syndrome also is accompa-
nied by slow growth and development, which leads most Williams indi-
viduals to be relatively short.

The “wee, magical people” of assorted folktales often are musicians and
storytellers. Fairies are said to “repeat the songs they have heard” and can
“enchant” humans with their melo dies. Much the same can be said of peo-
ple with Williams syndrome, who in spite of typically having subnormal
IQs, usually display vivid narrative skills and often show talent for music.
( The large pointed ears so often associated with fairies may symbolically

represent the sensitivity of those mythical individuals—and of Williams
people—to music and to sound in general.)

As a group, Williams people are loving, trusting, caring and extremely
sensitive to the feelings of others. Similarly, fairies are frequently referred to
as the “good people” or as kind and gentle-hearted souls. Finally, Williams
individuals, much like the fairies of leg end, require order and pre dict ability.
In Williams people this need shows up as rigid adherence to daily routines
and a constant need to keep abreast of future plans.

In the past, storytellers created folktales about imaginary beings to help
explain phenomena that they did not understand—perhaps including
the distinguishing physical and behavioral traits of Williams syndrome.
Today researchers turn to Williams people in a quest to understand the
unknown, hoping to decipher some of the secrets of how the brain func-
tions.—H.M.L.

Williams Syndrome: An Inspiration for Some Pixie Legends?

THE DEPICTION OF an elf at the left is
the 19th-century work of Richard Doyle,
an uncle of the Sherlock Holmes creator.

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SVAS alone without cognitive impair-
ment, would also have had low IQs if a
dim i nution of elastin could unilaterally
produce all the symptoms of Williams
syndrome. This awareness led them to
suspect that more genes were affected.
In support of that idea, direct examina-
tions of chromosomes from Williams
patients indicated that the region de-
leted from chromosome 7 extended be-
yond the bound aries of the gene for elas-
tin and probably encompassed many
genes.

Several of those other genes are now
being uncovered. Among them are three
(LIM-kinase 1, FZD3 and WSCR1)
that are active in the brain—a sign that
they could influence brain develop-
ment and function. The exact activities
carried out by the encoded proteins are
not known, although Ewart and her
colleagues have proposed that LIM-ki-
nase 1 (which is invariably deleted with
the gene for elastin) may be involved
in the ability to grasp spatial relation-
ships. This role could help explain why
Williams people have diffi culty draw-
ing simple com mon objects accurately
from memory. Another gene from the
deleted area, RFC2, specifies a protein
involved in replication of DNA, but its
contribution to Wil liams syndrome has
not been established.

The genetic understanding of Wil-
liams syndrome is far from complete.
Still, discovery of the deletion in chro-
mosome 7 has yielded some practical
rewards. That the deletion occurs in all
cells of the body in Williams people tells
mothers nothing they did or failed to do
during pregnancy caused their child’s
condition. The disorder stems from a
sperm or egg that, by chance, suffers
a loss of genes from chromosome 7 be-
fore donating its chromosomes to the
crea tion of an embryo. That knowledge
also tells healthy siblings of Williams
people that their copies of chromo-
some 7 are free of the deletion; there-
fore, any children they bear are no

more likely than other children to ac-
quire Williams syndrome. Finally, the
microscopic technique that originally
revealed the deletion of the gene for
elastin—fluorescent in situ hybridiza-
tion, or FISH—has now been adapted
for use as a diagnostic tool.

A Cognitive Profile Emerges

Work on the genetics of Williams syndrome is complementing
efforts to specify the neurobiologi-
cal hallmarks of the disorder. That
research, which today involves sev-
eral laboratories, began about 15 years
ago, when one of us (Bel lugi) answered
a late-night telephone call in her labo-
ratory at the Salk Institute for Biologi-
cal Studies in La Jolla, Calif. The caller
knew that Bel lugi investigated the neu-
robiological underpinnings of language
and believed her daughter, who had
Williams syndrome, would interest the
Salk group. The girl, then 13, had an IQ
near 50 and was considered mentally
retarded. Consistent with that profile,
she read and wrote at the level of a first
grader. Yet she spoke beautifully.

Then, as now, scientists had difficulty
distinguishing the brain processes con-
trolling language from those control-
ling reasoning, because in the general
population, adeptness at language and
cognition usually go hand in hand. The
dichotomy in the caller’s daughter sug-
gested that study of Wil liams people
might help tease apart those processes.

Fascinated, Bellugi agreed to meet
the girl and then continued to see her
regularly. She also sought literature
detailing the cognitive strengths and
weaknesses of Williams people but
found little beyond general assertions.
Before Bellugi could hope to uncover
the areas of the brain and the neuro-
logical processes that accounted for
the unique cognitive characteristics
of Williams people, she would need a
finer-grained profile of the traits distin-

guishing that population from others.
She and her colleagues therefore began
to devise tests of spe cific abilities and to
compare the scores of Williams people
with those of the general population
and of another cognitively impaired
group: people with Down syndrome.

The investigations, which continue,
examine populations of adolescents
matched for sex, age and IQ level. (Wil-
liams people range in IQ from 40 to
100, but their mean score is about 60.)
Early on, the team saw that Williams
subjects, in contrast to their generally
weak performance on overall tests of
cognitive ability, commonly used well-
formed grammar in their spontaneous
speech. On the whole, they also per-
formed significantly better than the
group with Down syndrome did on all
tasks of grammatical comprehension
and production.

Many also did well at the rather
complex task of constructing tag ques-
tions, such as adding “does n’t she?” to
the statement “Leslie likes fish.” The
person being tested must first take the
original statement (“Leslie likes fish”)
and substitute a matching pronoun
for the subject (“She likes fish”). Then
the individual must add a conjugated
auxiliary verb, negate it and contract it
(“She doesn’t like fish”), omit the origi-
nal verb and object (leaving only “She
doesn’t”) and invert the word order to
form a question (“. . . , doesn’t she?”).

The Salk researchers further found,
as others did later, that the Williams
subjects frequently had vocabularies
larger than would be expected for their
mental age. When asked to list some
ani mals, they often did not stick to easy
words but chose such exotic examples
as yak, Chihuahua, ibex, condor and
unicorn.

Beyond possessing richer vocabular-
ies, subjects with Williams syndrome
tended to be more expressive than even
normal children were. This animation
was demonstrated amusingly when Wil-

BAND 7q11.23 TINY DELETION from one of the
two copies of chromosome 7 in cells
is the cause of Williams syndrome
(drawing). The excised region can
contain 15 or more genes, only
some of which have been identified.
A diagnostic test is based on the dis-
covery that the gene for elastin is
usually among those lost. The test
flags copies of chromosome 7 with
a fluorescent green tag and flags the
gene for elastin with a fluorescent
red tag.

Known Genes in Deleted Segment

FZD

3

WSCR1

ELASTIN
LIM-KINASE 1

NORMAL COPY OF
CHROMOSOME 7

DAMAGED COPY OF
CHROMOSOME 7

APPROXIMATE
POSITION
OF DELETION

TO
M

O
N

A
R

A
S

H
IM

A
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14 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

liams chil dren were asked to provide a
story for a series of wordless pictures.
As they told their tale, they often al-
tered their pitch, volume, length of
words or rhythm to enhance the emo-
tional tone of the story. Similarly, they
added more drama to engage their au-
dience (“And suddenly, splash!”; “And
BOOM!”; “Gadzooks!”) than subjects
with Down syndrome did. (Sadly, the
gift of gab and sociability of Wil liams
children can mislead teachers into
thinking the children have better rea-
soning skills than they actually possess;
in those cases, the children may not get
the academic support they need.)

One possible explanation for the
strong verbal performance of Williams
individuals is that their chromosomal
defect, in contrast to that of Down
subjects, may not significantly disrupt
certain faculties that support language
processing. Other researchers, for in-
stance, have reported that short-term
memory for speech sounds, or “phono-
logical working memory”—a form that
seems to assist in language learning and
comprehension—is relatively preserved
in the Williams population.

Interestingly, recent studies of French
and Italian Williams subjects suggest
that one aspect of language known as
morphology—the facet of grammar
that deals with verb conjugation, gen-
der assignment and pluralization—may
not be completely preserved in Wil-
liams people. (These languages are
much richer in morphology than Eng-
lish is.) This discovery implies that the
brain regions preserved in Williams
syndrome and the presence of an intact
short-term memory for speech sounds
support many verbal aptitudes but may
not suffice for full mastery of language.

In contrast to their generally good
showing on verbal tests, Williams sub-
jects typically do poorly on tasks in-
volving visual processing, such as copy-
ing drawings. But they often fail on
such tasks in different ways than Down
subjects do, suggesting that the deficits
in the two groups may stem from dif-
ferences in brain anatomy. For exam-
ple, Williams people, in common with
patients who have suffered a stroke in
the right hemisphere of the brain, may
attend to components of images but
fail to appreciate the overall pattern
(the gestalt). Down people, however,
are more likely to perceive the global
organization but to overlook many de-
tails, just as individuals do who have
suffered left-hemisphere strokes.

In some ways, the general profile
revealed by the various cognitive tests
implies that the chromosomal defect in
Williams syndrome essentially spares
the left hemisphere (the region most
important to language in the large ma-
jority of people) and disrupts the right
(the more visual-spatial hemisphere).
But the emotional expressiveness of
Wil liams people (also thought to be a
right-sided function) and at least one
other finding cast doubt on that sim-
plistic view. Williams people recognize
and discriminate among pictures of un-
familiar faces (a skill that requires the
right hemisphere) remarkably well.
In fact, they perform as well as adults
from the general population.

Neurological Studies Add Clarity

The Salk group’s examination of brains by magnetic resonance imag-
ing and by autopsy supports the prob-
ability that the chromosomal deletion
responsible for Wil liams syndrome
alters the brain in a more complicated
way. The deletion seems to produce
anatomical changes (such as abnormal
clustering of neurons in visual areas)
that yield deficits in visual-spatial abili-
ties. But the chromosomal defect ap-
pears to spare a network that includes
structures in the frontal lobes, the tem-
poral lobe and the cerebellum. This
preserved network, then, may serve as
a neuroanatomical scaffolding for the
unexpectedly strong language abilities
of Williams people.

To be more specific, the neuro ana-
tom ical studies indicate that the overall
cortical volume in both Williams and
Down people is smaller than that of

age-matched normal subjects. But the
volumes of individual regions differ be-
tween the two groups. For instance, the
frontal lobes and the limbic region of
the temporal lobes are better preserved
in Williams people. The limbic system,
which also includes other structures, is
important for brain activities involving
memory and emotions; sparing of the
limbic region may help explain why Wil-
liams people are quite expressive and
empathetic.

Analyses of the cerebellum uncov-
ered further differences between the
Wil liams and Down groups. Whereas
its volume in Down subjects was small,
that in Wil liams subjects was normal.
And in Wil liams subjects the neocere-
bellum (considered to be the evolution-
arily young est region of the cerebel-
lum) was equal to or larger than that in
age-matched individuals in the general
population but was reduced in Down
subjects.

The finding that the neocerebellum
is preserved in Williams people is par-
ticularly intriguing when placed in the
context of other research. Until recent-
ly, the cerebellum was thought to be
concerned primarily with movement.
Yet Steven E. Petersen and his col-
leagues at Washington University have
shown that the neo cer ebellum becomes
active when subjects try to think of a
verb that fits with a given noun (such
as “sit” for “chair”). Further, tests of
patients with cerebellar injuries reveal
deficits in cognitive function, not just in
motor abilities. And anatomists report
that the neo cere bel lum communicates
extensively with a part of the frontal
cortex that, in common with the neo-
cerebellum, is larger in humans than in

The Making of a Cognitive Profile

As part of an effort to pinpoint cognitive features that are characteristic of Wil liams people, in-vestigators have compared subjects with Williams and with Down syndrome on tests of spe-
cific abilities. One test (top)—which asked adolescents to copy from memory a letter D that was built
from a collection of small Y’s—revealed impairment in integrating details into a larger configuration.
The Williams group tended to draw only Y’s, whereas the Down group tended to maintain the overall
configuration but omit local details. Another test (bottom)—in which subjects had to invent a story
for a series of wordless pictures—revealed that Williams people can often generate well-structured
narratives.

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y
O
F
U
R
S
U
LA
B
E
LL
U
G
I

Williams subjects Down subjects

Task:
REPRODUCE
IMAGE

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15 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

apes.
Given that humans have language

and apes do not, some observers have
proposed that the neocerebellum and
the connected region of the frontal cor-
tex evolved together to support the flu-
ent processing of speech and may fall
under the control of the same genes.
The relative preservation of the fron-
tal cortex and the enlargement of the
neocerebellum in Williams people, to-
gether with the rather spared fluency
in language, lend some credence to this
last notion and to the idea that the cer-
ebellum plays a part in language pro-
cessing.

Recent anatomical analyses have ad-
ditionally identified features that could
help explain the apparent musical tal-
ent of Williams people. The primary au-
ditory cortex (located in the temporal
lobe) and an adjacent auditory region,
the planum temporale (thought to be
important to language as well as mu-
sicality), are proportionately enlarged
in the few Williams brains examined
so far. In addition, the planum tempo-
rale is normally more extensive in the
left hemisphere than in the right, but in
some Williams people the left region is
unusually big, to an extent character-
istic of professional musicians. These
findings mesh well with observations
by Audrey Don of the University of
Windsor in Ontario, the investiga-

tor who carried out the first studies of
musical ability in Williams people. She
concludes that intact perception of au-
ditory patterns may account for much
of the strength in music and language
seen in Williams subjects—a result that
implies the related brain structures
should also be intact.

Physiological probes comparing elec-
tri cal activity in the brains of Williams
people and others during specific tasks
offer more insights into how the brain
develops. In response to grammatical
stimuli, for example, normal subjects
show greater activity from the left hemi-
sphere than from the right, as would be
expected for language tasks. But Wil-
liams people show symmetrical respons-
es in the two hemispheres, a sign that
the typical language specialization of
the left hemisphere has not occurred.
Further, whereas normal adults gener-
ally show greater activity from the right
hemisphere than the left when process-
ing images of faces, Williams people
show the opposite pattern. Such work
favors the possibility that when normal
developmental processes go awry, the
brain often redistributes responsibili-
ties, forming new circuits to carry out
the functions of the disrupted ones.

Research into Williams syndrome is
just now taking off, but it is already
helping to clarify how the brain is or-
ganized. It is also making investigators
see “mentally retarded” individuals
in a new light. Close study of Wil-
liams syndrome has shown that low IQ
scores can mask the existence of excit-
ing capacities. And it warns that other
so-called mentally retarded individuals
could have untapped potentials wait-
ing to be uncovered—if only research-
ers, and society, will take the trouble to
look for and cultivate them.

The Authors

HOWARD M. LENHOFF, PAUL P. WANG, FRANK GREENBERG
and URSULA BELLUGI offer several perspectives on Williams syndrome.
Lenhoff is professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of
California, Irvine, the father of a 42-year-old Williams syndrome musi-
cian and co-organizer of the Williams Syndrome Music and Arts Camp,
held in Massachusetts. He is also principal investigator of a team com-
paring music cognition in Williams people with other populations. Wang,
assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School
of Medicine, studies the neurobehavioral manifestations of Williams syn-
drome and other genetic disorders. Greenberg, clinical consultant with the
National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes
of Health, has worked with Williams syndrome individuals for 20 years.
Bellugi is director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neurosciences at the
Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She heads a multidisciplinary team
that has been examining the cognitive, neuroanatomical and neurophysi-
ological characteristics of Williams syndrome for more than a decade.

Further Reading

Hemizygosity at the Elastin Locus in a Developmen-
tal Disorder: Wil liams Syndrome. A. K. Ewart et al.
in Nature Genetics, Vol. 5, No. 1, pages 11–16; September
1993.

Cognitive and Neural Development: Clues from Ge-
netically Based Syn dromes. U. Bellugi, E. S. Klima and
P. P. Wang in The Lifespan Development of Individuals:
Behavioral, Neurobiological, and Psychosocial Perspec-
tives: A Synthesis. Nobel Symposium. Edited by D. Mag-
nusson. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Real-World Source for the “Little People”: The Re-
lationship of Fairies to Individuals with Wil liams
Syndrome. Howard M. Lenhoff in Nursery Realms: Chil-
dren in the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.
Edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser. University of
Georgia (in press).

BASIC ANATOMY OF BRAIN in
people with Williams syndrome is nor-
mal, but the total volume is somewhat
reduced. The areas that seem to be best
preserved include the frontal lobes and a
part of the cerebellum called the neocer-
ebellum (a), as well as parts of the tem-
poral lobes known as the limbic area (b),
the primary auditory area and the pla-
num temporale (c).

TO
M
O
N
A
R
A
S
H
IM
A

a SIDE OF BRAIN

c CUT IN PLANE OF SYLVIAN FISSURE

SYLVIAN
FISSURE

NEO

CEREBELLUM

TEMPORAL
LOBE

OCCIPITAL
LOBE

PARIETAL
LOBE

FRONTAL
LOBE

PLANUM
TEMPORALE

CUT LINE

LEFT HEMISPHEREPRIMARY
AUDITORY

CORTEX

LIMBIC
AREAS OF

TEMPORAL
LOBES

LEFT HEMISPHERE

b UNDERSIDE

CEREBELLUM
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16 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

Men have called me mad,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of mind exalted at
the expense of the general intellect.”

Many people have long shared Poe’s suspicion that genius and insanity are entwined.
Indeed, history holds countless examples of “that fine madness.” Scores of in fluential
18th- and 19th-cen tury poets, not ably Wil liam Blake, Lord Byron and Alfred, Lord Ten-
nyson, wrote about the extreme mood swings they endured. Modern American poets
John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Syl via Plath, Theodore Roethke, Del more
Schwartz and Anne Sexton were all hospitalized for either mania or depression during
their lives. And many painters and composers, among them Vincent van Gogh, Georgia
O’Keeffe, Charles Min gus and Robert Schumann, have been similarly afflicted.

Judging by current diagnostic criteria, it seems that most of these artists—and many
others besides—suffered from one of the major mood disorders, namely, manic-depressive
illness or major depression. Both are fairly common, very treatable and yet frequently
lethal diseases. Major depression induces intense melancholic spells, whereas manic-de-
pression, a strongly genetic disease, pitches patients repeatedly from depressed to hyper-
active and euphoric, or intensely irritable, states. In its milder form, termed cyclothymia,
manic-depression causes pronounced but not totally debilitating changes in mood, behav-
ior, sleep, thought patterns and energy levels. Advanced cases are marked by dramatic,
cyclic shifts.

Could such disruptive diseases convey certain creative advantages? Many people find
that prop osition counterintuitive. Most manic-de pressives do not possess extraordinary
imagination, and most accomplished artists do not suffer from recurring mood swings. To
assume, then, that such diseases usually promote artistic talent wrongly reinforces simplis-
tic notions of the “mad genius.” Worse yet, such a generalization trivializes a very serious
medical condition and, to some degree, discredits in dividuality in the arts as well. It would
be wrong to label anyone who is unusually accomplished, energetic, intense, moody or
eccentric as manic-depressive. All the same, recent studies indicate that a high number of
established art ists—far more than could be expected by chance—meet the diagnostic crite-
ria for manic-depression or major depression given in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). In fact, it seems that these dis eases
can sometimes enhance or otherwise contribute to creativity in some people.

By virtue of their prevalence alone, it is clear that mood disorders do not necessarily
breed genius. Indeed, 1 percent of the general population suffer from manic-depression,
also called bi po lar disorder, and 5 percent from a major depression, or unipolar disorder,
during their lifetime. Depression affects twice as many women as men and most often,
but not always, strikes later in life. Bipolar disorder afflicts equal num bers of women and
men, and more than a third of all cases surface before age 20. Some 60 to 80 percent of all
adolescents and adults who commit suicide have a history of bipolar or uni polar illness.
Before the late 1970s, when the drug lithi um first became widely available, one per son in
five with manic-depression com mit ted suicide.

Manic-Depressive Illness
and Creativity
Does some fine madness plague great artists?
Several studies now show that creativity
and mood disorders are linked

by Kay Redfield Jamison Originally published in February 1995

The Author

KAY REDFIELD JAMISON
is professor of psychiatry at
the Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity School of Medicine. She
wrote Touched with Fire:
Manic-Depressive Illness and
the Artistic Temperament
and co-authored the medi-
cal text Manic-Depressive
Illness. Jamison is a member
of the National Advisory
Council for Hu man Genome
Research and clinical di rect or
of the Dana Consortium on
the Genetic Basis of Manic-
Depressive Illness. She has
also written and produced a
series of public television spe-
cials about manic-depressive
illness and the arts.

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17 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

Major depression in both unipolar
and bipolar disorders manifests itself
through apathy, lethargy, hopeless-
ness, sleep disturbances, slowed physi-
cal movements and thinking, impaired
memory and concentration, and a
loss of pleasure in typically enjoyable
events. The diagnostic criteria also in-
clude suicidal thinking, self-blame and
inappropriate guilt. To distinguish clin-
ical depression from normal periods of
un hap piness, the common guidelines
further require that these symptoms
persist for a minimum of two to four
weeks and also that they significantly
interfere with a person’s everyday func-
tioning.

Mood Elevation

During episodes of mania or hypo-ma nia (mild mania), bipolar pa-
tients expe rience symptoms that are in
many ways the opposite of those as-
sociated with depression. Their mood
and self-esteem are elevated. They
sleep less and have abundant energy;
their productivity increases. Manics
frequently become para noid and irri-
table. Moreover, their speech is often
rapid, excit able and intrusive, and their
thoughts move quickly and fluidly from
one topic to another. They usually hold
tre men dous conviction about the cor-
rectness and importance of their own
ideas as well. This grandi osity can con-
tribute to poor judg ment and impulsive
behavior.

Hypomanics and manics generally

have chaotic personal and professional
relationships. They may spend large
sums of money, drive recklessly or pur-
sue questionable busi ness ventures or
sexual liaisons. In some cases, manics
suffer from violent agitation and de-
lusional thoughts as well as visual and
auditory hallucinations.

Rates of Mood Disorders

For years, scientists have documented some kind of connection between
mania, depression and creative output.
In the late 19th and early 20th centur ies,
researchers turned to accounts of mood
disorders written by prominent artists,
their physicians and friends. Although
largely anecdotal, this work strongly
suggested that renowned writers, art-
ists and composers—and their first-
degree relatives—were far more likely
to experience mood disorders and to
commit suicide than was the general
population. During the past 20 years,
more systematic studies of artistic pop-
ulations have confirmed these findings
[see illustration on page 19]. Diagnos-
tic and psychological analyses of living
writers and artists can give quite mean-
ingful estimates of the rates and types
of psychopathology they experience.

In the 1970s Nancy C. Andreasen of
the University of Iowa completed the
first of these rigorous studies, which
made use of structured interviews,
matched control groups and strict di-
agnostic criteria. She examined 30
creative writers and found an extraor-

dinarily high occurrence of mood dis-
orders and alco hol ism among them.
Eighty per cent had experienced at least
one epi sode of major depression, hypo-
mania or mania; 43 percent reported a
history of hypomania or mania. Also,
the relatives of these writers, compared
with the relatives of the control sub-
jects, generally performed more creat ive
work and more often had a mood dis-
order.

A few years later, while on sabbatical
in England from the University of Cali-
fornia at Los Angeles, I began a study
of 47 distinguished British writers and
visual artists. To select the group as
best I could for creativity, I purpose-
fully chose painters and sculptors who
were Royal Academicians or Associates
of the Royal Academy. All the play-
wrights had won the New York Drama
Critics Award or the Evening Standard
Drama (London Critics) Award, or
both. Half of the poets were already
represented in the Oxford Book of
Twentieth Century English Verse. I
found that 38 percent of these artists
and writers had in fact been previous-
ly treated for a mood disorder; three
fourths of those treated had required
medication or hospitalization, or both.
And half of the poets—the largest frac-
tion from any one group—had needed
such extensive care.

Hagop S. Akiskal of the University of
California at San Diego, also affiliated
with the University of Tennessee at
Memphis, and his wife, Kareen Akis-
kal, subsequently interviewed 20 award-

The Case of Vincent van Gogh

Many clinicians have reviewed the medical and psychiatric problems of the painter Vin-
cent van Gogh posthumously, diagnosing him with a
range of disorders, including epilepsy, schizophrenia,
digitalis and absinthe poisoning, manic-depressive
psy chosis, acute intermittent porphyria and Mé nière’s
disease.

Richard Jed Wyatt of the National Institute of Men-
tal Health and I have argued in detail that van Gogh’s
symptoms, the natural course of his illness and his
family psychiatric history strongly indicate manic-
depressive illness. The extent of the artist’s purported
use of absinthe and convulsive behavior remains
unclear; in any event, his psychiatric symptoms long
predate any possible history of seizures. It is possible
that he suffered from both an epileptic disorder and
manic-depressive illness. —K. R. J. M

ET
RO

PO
LI

T

A
N

M
US

E

U
M

O
F

AR
T,

G
IF

T
OF

A
DE

LE
R

. L
EV

Y,
1

95
8

Irises, 1889

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18 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

win ning Europe an writers, poets, paint-
ers and sculptors. Some two thirds of
their subjects exhibited recurrent cyclo-
thy mic or hypomanic tendencies, and
half had at one time suffered from a
major depression. In collaboration with
Da vid H. Evans of the University of
Mem phis, the Akis kals noted the same
trends among living blues musicians.
More re cently Stuart A. Montgomery
and his wife, Deir dre B. Montgomery,
of St. Mary’s Hos pital in London ex-
amined 50 modern British poets. One
fourth met current di agnostic criteria
for depression or manic-depression; sui-
cide was six times more frequent in this

com mu nity than in the general popula-
tion.

Ruth L. Richards and her colleagues
at Harvard University set up a sys-
tem for assessing the degree of original
thinking required to perform certain
crea tive tasks. Then, rath er than screen-
ing for mood disorders among those
already deemed highly inventive, they
attempted to rate creativity in a sample
of manic-depressive patients. Based on
their scale, they found that compared
with individuals having no personal or
family history of psychiatric disorders,
manic-depressive and cyclo thymic pa-
tients (as well as their un af fected rela-

tives) showed great er crea tiv ity.
Biographical studies of earlier gener-

ations of artists and writers also show
consistently high rates of suicide, de-
pression and manic-depression—up to
18 times the rate of suicide seen in the
general population, eight to 10 times
that of depression and 10 to 20 times
that of manic-depressive illness and its
milder variants. Joseph J. Schildkraut
and his co-workers at Harvard con-
cluded that approximately half of the
15 20th-century abstract-ex pressionist
art ists they studied suffered from de-
pressive or manic-depressive illness; the
suicide rate in this group was at least

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who experienced recurrent, debilitating depressions and probable hypomanic spells, often ex-
pressed fear that he might inherit the madness, or “taint of blood,” in his family. His father, grandfather, two of his great-
grandfathers as well as five of his seven brothers suffered from insanity, mel ancholia, uncontrollable rage or what is today
known as manic-depressive illness. His brother Edward was confined to an asylum for nearly 60 years before he died from
man ic exhaustion. Lionel Tennyson, one of Alfred’s two sons, displayed a mercurial temperament, as did one of his three
grandsons.

Modern medicine has confirmed that manic-depression and creativity tend to run in cer tain families. Studies of twins pro-
vide strong evidence for the heritability of manic-depres sive illness. If an identical twin has manic-depressive illness, the
other twin typically has a 70 to 100 percent chance of also having the disease; if the other twin is fraternal, the chances are
considerably lower (approximately 20 percent). A review of pairs of identical twins reared apart from birth—in which at least
one had been diagnosed as manic-depressive—found that in two thirds or more of the sets, the illness was present in both
twins. —K. R. J.

LI

SA

B
U

R
N

ET
T

The Tainted Blood of the Tennysons

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19 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

13 times the current U.S. national rate.
In 1992 Arnold M. Ludwig of the

University of Kentucky published an
extensive biographical survey of 1,005
famous 20th-century artists, writers
and other professionals, some of whom
had been in treatment for a mood dis-
order. He discovered that the artists
and writers experienced two to three
times the rate of psycho sis, sui cide at-
tempts, mood disorders and sub stance
abuse that com parably successful peo-
ple in business, science and public life
did. The poets in this sample had most
often been manic or psychotic and hos-
pitalized; they also proved to be some
18 times more likely to commit suicide
than is the general public. In a com-
prehensive biographical study of 36
major British poets born between 1705
and 1805, I found similarly ele vat ed
rates of psy cho sis and severe psycho-
pathology. These poets were 30 times
more likely to have had manic-depres-
sive illness than were their contempo-
raries, at least 20 times more likely to
have been com mitted to an asylum and
some five times more likely to have
taken their own life.

These corroborative studies have con –
firmed that highly creative individuals
experience major mood disorders more
often than do other groups in the gener-
al population. But what does this mean
for their work? How does a psychiatric
illness contribute to creative achieve-
ment? First, the common features of
hypomania seem highly conducive to
original thinking; the diagnostic cri-

teria for this phase of the disorder in-
clude “sharpened and unusually creative
thinking and increased productivity.”
And accumulating evidence suggests
that the cognitive styles associated with
hypomania (expansive thought and
gran di ose moods) can lead to increased
fluency and frequency of thoughts.

Mania and Creativity

Studying the speech of hypomanic patients has revealed that they tend
to rhyme and use other sound asso-
ciations, such as alliteration, far more
often than do unaffected individuals.
They also use idiosyncratic words near-
ly three times as often as do control
subjects. Moreover, in specific drills,
they can list synonyms or form other
word associations much more rapidly
than is consid ered normal. It seems,
then, that both the quantity and quality
of thoughts build during hypomania.
This speed increase may range from a
very mild quickening to complete psy-
chotic incoherence. It is not yet clear
what causes this qualitative change in
mental processing. Nevertheless, this
altered cog ni tive state may well facili-
tate the formation of unique ideas and
associations.

People with manic-depressive ill-
ness and those who are creatively ac-
complished share certain noncognitive
features: the ability to function well on
a few hours of sleep, the focus needed
to work intensively, bold and restless
attitudes, and an ability to experience

a profound depth and variety of emo-
tions. The less dramatic daily as pects
of manic-depression might also provide
creative advantage to some individuals.
The manic-depressive temper ament is,
in a biological sense, an alert, sensitive
system that reacts strongly and swiftly.
It responds to the world with a wide
range of emotional, perceptual, intel-
lectual, behavioral and energy chang es.
In a sense, depression is a view of the
world through a dark glass, and mania
is that seen through a kaleidoscope—
often brilliant but fractured.

Where depression questions, rumi-
nates and hesitates, mania answers
with vigor and certainty. The constant
transitions in and out of constricted and
then expansive thoughts, subdued and
then violent responses, grim and then
ebullient moods, withdrawn and then
outgoing stances, cold and then fiery
states—and the rapidity and fluidity of
moves through such contrasting expe-
riences—can be painful and confusing.
Ideally, though, such chaos in those
able to transcend it or shape it to their
will can provide a familiarity with tran-
sitions that is probably useful in artistic
endeavors. This vantage readily accepts
ambiguities and the counteracting forc-
es in nature.

Extreme changes in mood exaggerate
the normal tendency to have conflicting
selves; the undulating, rhythmic and
transitional moods and cognitive
changes-so characteristic of manic-de-
pressive illness can blend or harness
seemingly contradictory moods, ob-

LI
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ET
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INCREASED RATES OF SUICIDE, depression and manic-de-
pression among artists have been established by many separate
studies. These investigations show that artists experience up to

18 times the rate of suicide seen in the general population, eight
to 10 times the rate of depression and 10 to 20 times the rate of
manic-depression and its milder form, cyclothymia.

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20 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

servations and perceptions. Ultimately,
these flux es and yokings may reflect
truth in humanity and nature more ac-
curately than could a more fixed view-
point. The “consistent attitude toward
life” may not, as Byron scholar Jerome
J. McGann of the University of Virginia
points out, be as insightful as an abil-
ity to live with, and portray, constant
change.

The ethical and societal implica-
tions of the association between mood
disorders and creativity are important
but poorly understood. Some treat-
ment stra tegies pay insufficient heed
to the ben e fits manic-depressive illness
can be stow on some individuals. Cer-
tainly most manic-depressives seek re-
lief from the disease, and lithium and
anticonvulsant drugs are very effective
therapies for manias and depressions.
Never theless, these drugs can dampen
a person’s general intellect and limit his
or her emotional and perceptual range.
For this reason, many manic-depressive
pa tients stop taking these medications.

Left untreated, however, manic-
de pres sive illness often worsens over

time—and no one is creative when se-
verely depressed, psychotic or dead.
The attacks of both mania and depres-
sion tend to grow more frequent and
more severe. Without regular treatment
the disease eventually becomes less re-
sponsive to medication. In addition, bi-
polar and uni polar patients frequently
abuse mood-altering substances, such
as alcohol and illicit drugs, which can
cause secondary medical and emotion-
al burdens for manic-depressive and de-
pressed patients.

The Goal of Treatment

The real task of imaginative, com-pas sionate and effective treat-
ment, therefore, is to give patients more
meaningful choices than they are now
af ford ed. Useful intervention must
control the extremes of depression and
psychosis without sacrificing crucial
human emotions and experiences. Giv-
en time and increasingly sophisticated
research, psy chiatrists will likely gain
a better under standing of the complex
biological basis for mood disorders.

Eventually, the development of new
drugs should make it possible to treat
manic-depressive individuals so that
those aspects of temperament and cog-
nition that are essential to the creative
process remain intact.

The development of more specific
and less problematic therapies should
be swift once scientists find the gene,
or genes, responsible for the disease.
Prenatal tests and other diagnostic mea-
sures may then become avail able; these
possibilities raise a host of complicated
ethical issues. It would be irresponsible
to romanticize such a painful, destruc-
tive and all too often deadly disease.
Hence, 3 to 5 percent of the Human Ge-
nome Proj ect’s total budget (which is
conservatively es timated at $3 billion)
has been set aside for studies of the so-
cial, ethical and legal implications of
genetic research. It is hoped that these
investigations will examine the trou-
bling issues surrounding manic-depres-
sion and major depression at length. To
help those who have manic-depressive
illness, or who are at risk for it, must
be a major public health priority.

ROBERT SCHUMANN’S MUSICAL WORKS, charted by
year and opus number (above), show a striking relation be-
tween his mood states and his productivity. He composed the
most when hypomanic and the least when depressed. Both of

Schu mann’s parents were clinically depressed, and two other
first-degree relatives committed suicide. Schumann himself at-
tempted suicide twice and died in an insane asylum. One of his
sons spent more than 30 years in a mental institution.

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21 SCIENTIFIC AMERICANEXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

One evening a few years ago, while I was attending
a concert, a young boy in the audience caught my attention.
As the orchestra played a Mozart concerto, this nine-year-old
child sat with a thick, well-thumbed orchestral score opened
on his lap. As he read, he hummed the music out loud, in
perfect tune. During intermission, I cornered the boy’s father.
Yes, he told me, Stephen was really reading the music, not
just looking at it. And reading musical scores was one of his
preferred activities, vying only with reading college-level com-
puter programming manuals. At an age when most children
concentrate on fourth-grade arithmetic and the nuances of
playground etiquette, Stephen had already earned a prize in
music theory that is coveted by adults.

Gifted children like Stephen are fascinating but also
intimidating. They have been feared as “possessed,” they have
been derided as oddballs, they have been ridiculed as nerds.
The parents of such young people are often criticized for
pushing their children rather than allowing them a normal,
well-balanced childhood. These children are so different from
others that schools usually do not know how to educate them.
Meanwhile society expects gifted children to become creative
intellectuals and artists as adults and views them as failures
if they do not.

Psychologists have always been interested in those who
deviate from the norm, but just as they know more about psy-
chopathology than about leadership and courage, researchers
also know far more about retardation than about giftedness.
Yet an understanding of the most talented minds will provide
both the key to educating gifted children and a precious
glimpse of how the human brain works.

The Nature of Giftedness
Everyone knows children who are smart, hard-working

achievers—youngsters in the top 10 to 15 percent of all stu-
dents. But only the top 2 to 5 percent of children are gifted.
Gifted children (or child prodigies, who are just extreme ver-
sions of gifted children) differ from bright children in at least
three ways:

• Gifted children are precocious. They master subjects

earlier and learn more quickly than average children do.
• Gifted children march to their own drummer. They

make discoveries on their own and can often intuit the solu-
tion to a problem without going through a series of logical,
linear steps.

• Gifted children are driven by “a rage to master.” They
have a powerful interest in the area, or domain, in which they
have high ability—mathematics, say, or art—and they can
readily focus so intently on work in this domain that they lose
sense of the outside world.

These are children who seem to teach themselves to
read as toddlers, who breeze through college mathematics in
middle school or who draw more skillfully as second-graders
than most adults do. Their fortunate combination of obsessive
interest and an ability to learn easily can lead to high achieve-
ment in their chosen domain. But gifted children are more
susceptible to interfering social and emotional factors than
once was thought.

The first comprehensive study of the gifted, carried out
over a period of more than 70 years, was initiated at Stanford
University in the early part of this century by Lewis M. Terman,
a psychologist with a rather rosy opinion of gifted children.
His study tracked more than 1,500 high-IQ children over the
course of their lives. To qualify for the study, the “Termites”
were first nominated by their teachers and then had to score
135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet IQ test (the average score
is 100). These children were precocious: they typically spoke
early, walked early and read before they entered school. Their
parents described them as being insatiably curious and as hav-
ing superb memories.

Terman described his subjects glowingly, not only as
superior in intelligence to other children but also as superior
in health, social adjustment and moral attitude. This conclu-
sion easily gave rise to the myth that gifted children are happy
and well adjusted by nature, requiring little in the way of spe-
cial attention—a myth that still guides the way these children
are educated today.

In retrospect, Terman’s study was probably flawed. No
child entered the study unless nominated by a teacher as one
of the best and the brightest; teachers probably overlooked

Uncommon Talents:
Gifted Children, Prodigies and Savants

Possessing abilities well beyond their years, gifted
children inspire admiration, but they also suffer ridicule,

neglect and misunderstanding

by Ellen Winner
originally published in Scientific American Presents: Exploring Intelligence

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22 SCIENTIFIC AMERICANEXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

those gifted children who were misfits, loners or problematic
to teach. And the shining evaluations of social adjustment
and personality in the gifted were performed by the same
admiring teachers who had singled out the study subjects.
Finally, almost a third of the sample came from professional,
middle-class families. Thus, Terman confounded IQ with
social class.

The myth of the well-adjusted, easy-to-teach gifted child
persists despite more recent evidence to the contrary. Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago has shown that
children with exceptionally high abilities in any area—not just
in academics but in the visual arts, music, even athletics—are
out of step with their peers socially. These children tend to be
highly driven, independent in their thinking and introverted.
They spend more than the usual amount of time alone, and
although they derive energy and pleasure from their solitary
mental lives, they also report feeling lonely. The more extreme
the level of gift, the more isolated these children feel.

Contemporary researchers have estimated that about 20
to 25 percent of profoundly gifted children have social and
emotional problems, which is about twice the normal rate; in
contrast, moderately gifted children do not exhibit a higher
than average rate. By middle childhood, gifted children often
try to hide their abilities in the hopes of becoming more popu-
lar. One group particularly at risk for such underachievement
is academically gifted girls, who report more depression,
lower self-esteem and more psychosomatic symptoms than
academically gifted boys do.

The combination of precocious knowledge, social isola-
tion and sheer boredom in many gifted children is a tough
challenge for teachers who must educate them alongside their
peers. Worse, certain gifted children can leap years ahead
of their peers in one area yet fall behind in another. These
children, the unevenly gifted, sometimes seem hopelessly out
of sync.

The Unevenly Gifted
Terman was a proponent of the view that gifted children

are globally gifted—evenly talented in all academic areas.
Indeed, some special children have exceptional verbal skills as
well as strong spatial, numerical and logical skills that enable
them to excel in mathematics. The occasional child who com-
pletes college as an early teen—or even as a preteen—is likely to
be globally gifted. Such children are easy to spot: they are all-
around high achievers. But many children exhibit gifts in one
area of study and are unremarkable or even learning disabled
in others. These may be creative children who are difficult in
school and who are not immediately recognized as gifted.

Unevenness in gifted children is quite common. A recent
survey of more than 1,000 highly academically gifted adoles-
cents revealed that more than 95 percent show a strong dispar-
ity between mathematical and verbal interests. Extraordinarily
strong mathematical and spatial abilities often accompany
average or even deficient verbal abilities. Julian Stanley of
Johns Hopkins University has found that many gifted chil-
dren selected for special summer programs in advanced math
have enormous discrepancies between their math and verbal
skills. One such eight-year-old scored 760 out of a perfect
score of 800 on the math part of the Scholastic Assessment
Test (SAT) but only 290 out of 800 on the verbal part.

In a retrospective analysis of 20 world-class mathemati-
cians, psychologist Benjamin S. Bloom, then at the University

of Chicago, reported that none of his subjects had learned
to read before attending school (yet most academically gifted
children do read before school) and that six had had trouble
learning to read. And a retrospective study of inventors (who
presumably exhibit high mechanical and spatial aptitude)
showed that as children these individuals struggled with read-
ing and writing.

Indeed, many children who struggle with language
may have strong spatial skills. Thomas Sowell of Stanford
University, an economist by training, conducted a study
of late-talking children after he raised a son who did not
begin to speak until almost age four. These children tended
to have high spatial abilities—they excelled at puzzles, for
instance—and most had relatives working in professions that
require strong spatial skills. Perhaps the most striking finding
was that 60 percent of these children had engineers as first- or
second-degree relatives.

The association between verbal deficits and spatial gifts
seems particularly strong among visual artists. Beth Casey
of Boston College and I have found that college art students
make significantly more spelling errors than college students
majoring either in math or in verbal areas such as English or
history. On average, the art students not only misspelled more
than half of a 20-word list but also made the kind of errors
associated with poor reading skills—nonphonetic spellings
such as “physicain” for “physician” (instead of the phonetic
“fisician”).

The many children who possess a gift in one area and are
weak or learning disabled in others present a conundrum. If
schools educate them as globally gifted, these students will
continually encounter frustration in their weak areas; if they
are held back because of their deficiencies, they will be bored
and unhappy in their strong fields. Worst, the gifts that these
children do possess may go unnoticed entirely when frustrated,
unevenly gifted children wind up as misfits or troublemak-
ers.

Savants: Uneven in the Extreme
The most extreme cases of spatial or mathematical gifts

coexisting with verbal deficits are found in savants. Savants
are retarded (with IQs between 40 and 70) and are either
autistic or show autistic symptoms. “Ordinary” savants usu-
ally possess one skill at a normal level, in contrast to their
otherwise severely limited abilities. But the rarer savants—
fewer than 100 are known—display one or more skills equal
to prodigy level.

Savants typically excel in visual art, music or lightning-
fast calculation. In their domain of expertise, they resemble
child prodigies, exhibiting precocious skills, independent
learning and a rage to master. For instance, the drawing savant
named Nadia sketched more realistically at ages three and
four than any known child prodigy of the same age. In addi-
tion, savants will often surpass gifted children in the accuracy
of their memories.

Savants are like extreme versions of unevenly gifted
children. Just as gifted children often have mathematical
or artistic genius and language-based learning disabilities,
savants tend to exhibit a highly developed visual-spatial
ability alongside severe deficits in language. One of the most
promising biological explanations for this syndrome posits
atypical brain organization, with deficits in the left hemi-
sphere of the brain (which usually controls language) offset

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by strengths in the right hemisphere (which controls spatial
and visual skills).

According to Darold A. Treffert, a psychiatrist now in
private practice in Fond du Lac, Wis., the fact that many
savants were premature babies fits well with this notion of
left-side brain damage and resultant right-side compensation.
Late in pregnancy, the fetal brain undergoes a process called
pruning, in which a large number of excess neurons die off
[see “The Developing Brain,” by Carla J. Shatz; SCIENTIFIC
AMERICAN, September 1992]. But the brains of babies born
prematurely may not have been pruned yet; if such brains
experience trauma to the left hemisphere near the time of
birth, numerous uncommitted neurons elsewhere in the brain
might remain to compensate for the loss, perhaps leading to a
strong right-hemisphere ability.

Such trauma to a premature infant’s brain could arise
many ways—from conditions during pregnancy, from lack of

oxygen during birth, from the administration of too much
oxygen afterward. An excess of oxygen given to premature
babies can cause blindness in addition to brain damage; many
musical savants exhibit the triad of premature birth, blindness
and strong right-hemisphere skill.

Gifted children most likely possess atypical brain orga-
nization to some extent as well. When average students are
tested to see which part of their brain controls their verbal
skills, the answer is generally the left hemisphere only. But
when mathematically talented children are tested the same
way, both the left and right hemispheres are implicated in con-
trolling language—the right side of their brains participates in
tasks ordinarily reserved for the left. These children also tend
not to be strongly right-handed, an indication that their left
hemisphere is not clearly dominant.

The late neurologist Norman Geschwind of Harvard
Medical School was intrigued by the fact that individuals with

THOMAS ALVA EDISON exemplifies the unevenly gifted
individual. Edison was a prolific inventor, obtaining 1,093
patents for innovations ranging from the phonograph to the
incandescent light. As a child, he was obsessed with science
and spent much time tinkering in a chemistry laboratory
in his parents’ cellar. Edison had some difficulties learning,
though, especially in the verbal areas; he may have had
symptoms of dys lexia. The coexistence of strong spatial-
logical skills with a weakness in language is common in
the unevenly gifted.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART is among the best-
known child prodigies. He began picking out tunes on the
piano at three years of age; by four he could tell if a violin
was a quarter tone out of tune, and by eight he could
play without hesitation a complex piece he had never seen
before. Mozart began composing at the age of five, when
he wrote two minuets for the harpsichord. Even as a young
child, he could play pieces perfectly from memory, having
heard them only once, and improvise on a theme without
ever repeating himself.

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24 SCIENTIFIC AMERICANEXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE AUGUST 2006

pronounced right-hemisphere gifts (that is, in math, music,
art) are disproportionately nonright-handed (left-handed or
ambidexterous) and have higher than average rates of left-
hemisphere deficits such as delayed onset of speech, stuttering
or dyslexia. Geschwind and his colleague Albert Galaburda
theorized that this association of gift with disorder, which
they called the “pathology of superiority,” results from the
effect of the hormone testosterone on the developing fetal
brain.

Geschwind and Galaburda noted that elevated testoster-
one can delay development of the left hemisphere of the fetal
brain; this in turn might result in compensatory right-hemi-
sphere growth. Such “testosterone poisoning” might also
account for the larger number of males than females who
exhibit mathematical and spatial gifts, nonright-handedness
and pathologies of language. The researchers also noted that
gifted children tend to suffer more than the usual frequency
of immune disorders such as allergies and asthma; excess testos-
terone can interfere with the development of the thymus gland,
which plays a role in the development of the immune system.

Testosterone exposure remains a controversial explanation
for uneven gifts, and to date only scant evidence from the study
of brain tissue exists to support the theory of damage and com-
pensation in savants. Nevertheless, it seems certain that gifts
are hardwired in the infant brain, as savants and gifted children
exhibit extremely high abilities from a very young age—before
they have spent much time working at their gift.

Emphasizing Gifts
Given that many profoundly gifted children are unevenly

talented, socially isolated and bored with school, what is the
best way to educate them? Most gifted programs today tend to
target children who have tested above 130 or so on standard IQ
tests, pulling them out of their regular classes for a few hours
each week of general instruction or interaction. Unfortunately,
these programs fail the most talented students.

Generally, schools are focusing what few resources they
have for gifted education on the moderately academically
gifted. These children make up the bulk of current “pull-out”
programs: bright students with strong but not extraordinary
abilities, who do not face the challenges of precocity and
isolation to the same degree as the profoundly gifted. These
children—and indeed most children—would be better served if
schools instead raised their standards across the board.

Other nations, including Japan and Hungary, set much
higher academic expectations for their children than the U.S.
does; their children, gifted or not, rise to the challenge by suc-
ceeding at higher levels. The needs of moderately gifted children
could be met by simply teaching them a more demanding stan-
dard curriculum.

The use of IQ as a filter for gifted programs also tends to
tip these programs toward the relatively abundant, moderately
academically gifted while sometimes overlooking profoundly
but unevenly gifted children. Many of those children do poorly
on IQ tests, because their talent lies in either math or language,
but not both. Students whose talent is musical, artistic or ath-
letic are regularly left out as well. It makes more sense to iden-
tify the gifted by examining past achievement in specific areas
rather than relying on plain-vanilla IQ tests.

Schools should then place profoundly gifted children in
advanced courses in their strong areas only. Subjects in which
a student is not exceptional can continue to be taught to the
student in the regular classroom. Options for advanced classes
include arranging courses especially for the gifted, placing gifted
students alongside older students within their schools, register-
ing them in college courses or enrolling them in accelerated
summer programs that teach a year’s worth of material in a
few weeks.

Profoundly gifted children crave challenging work in their
domain of expertise and the companionship of individuals with
similar skills. Given the proper stimulation and opportunity, the
extraordinary minds of these children will flourish.

About the Author

ELLEN WINNER was a student of literature and
painting before she decided to explore developmental
psychology. Her inspiration was Harvard University’s
Project Zero, which researched the psychological
aspects of the arts. Her graduate studies allowed her
to combine her interests in art and writing with an
exploration of the mind. She received her Ph.D. in
psychology from Harvard in 1978 and is currently
professor of psychology at Boston College as well as
senior research associate with Project Zero.

One of Winner’s greatest pleasures is writing
books; she has authored three, one on the psychology
of the arts, another on children’s use of meta phor and
irony and, most recently, Gifted Children: Myths and

Realities. “I usually have several quite different
projects going at once, so I am always juggling,” she
remarks. She is especially intrigued by unusual chil-
dren—children who are gifted, learning disabled,
gifted and learning disabled, nonright-handed or
particularly creative. “The goal is to understand
cognitive development in its typical and atypical
forms.”

When she has time to play, Winner devours
novels and movies and chauffeurs her 13-year-old
son on snowboarding dates. She is married to the
psychologist Howard Gardner and has three grown
stepchildren.

TYPICAL DRAWING by a five-
year-old of average ability lacks
detail and is highly schematic.

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25 S C I E N T I F I C A M E R I C A N E X C L U S I V E O N L I N E I S S U E A U G U S T 2 0 0 6

(perspectives)

JEFFREY IS JUST NOT interested in
elementary school anymore. He doesn’t
retain what he is taught, and his grades
are bad. At recess he avoids classmates
and keeps to himself. He knows his
parents are disappointed in him, too.
His teacher fi nally recommends that he
be taken to a child psychiatrist for eval-
uation. The therapist administers a
special intelligence test, and Jeffrey
turns out to have an IQ of 150—far
above the average for his age. He is a
highly gifted child.

Two to 3 percent of children are
considered highly gifted, showing IQ
scores of at least 130. For many such
youngsters, their extraordinary intel-
lect gives them a real advantage in
school. They may shine in music, math
or science. Contrary to popular belief,
child prodigies do not on average have
more school or social problems than
their less gifted peers, according to
longitudinal studies. They may have
fewer friends, but that is usually be-
cause they make greater demands of
acquaintances.

And yet there is a dark side. For
some of the most talented—those with
IQs in the 140 to 150 range—their gifts
can turn out to be a trap. Because these
children are so insightful at such a
young age, able to make sense of adult
ideas, they are constantly aware of the
potential risk of failure. This awareness
can immobilize them to the point of
emotional paralysis, a quiet demon that
parents and teachers must watch for.

School tests pose one example. Un-
like classmates who typically approach
exams with a certain detachment and
answer one question at a time, some

highly gifted children relentlessly con-
sider the implications of each answer
and what the risks are of making an
error. Jeffrey’s behavior refl ected this
constant sense of imminent failure.
His fear caused his academic perfor-
mance to be barely average. He also
kept himself away from the other chil-
dren because he doubted they would
accept him.

Developmental disorders can exac-
erbate the trap. Dyslexia affects about
10 percent of children, regardless of
their intelligence. The consequences
are particularly severe for a highly gift-
ed child. From the moment such a child
enters school, he fi nds that he gets poor
grades even though he comprehends
everything easily. He therefore encoun-
ters diffi culty understanding why his
efforts meet with so little success. A
steady diet of frustration eats at his
self-esteem. The consequence is anxi-
ety that may even shade into depres-
sion. As a defense, the child gradually
loses interest in schoolwork and begins
to isolate himself from social interac-
tion. Punishment may only make mat-
ters worse. With their well-developed
sense of right and wrong, prodigies
consider punishment undeserved, and
they may withdraw further.

Moreover, with their heightened
self-awareness, gifted children keenly
feel a personal loss caused by any de-
velopmental disorders. For example,
highly gifted children may be acutely
aware of a lack of physical coordina-
tion or spatial orientation, which also
undermines their self-image.

In some cases, IQ tests mislead
parents and teachers as well. A gifted

child might excel in questions that
probe verbal intelligence, say, but per-
form miserably on spatial reasoning
skills in the labyrinth part of the test.
Because both scores are typically com-
bined, the overall result may be just
average. The discrepancy between the
child’s own high expectations and the
discouraging evaluation from the
adult world may lead a boy or girl up
a blind alley that is hard to resolve.
The ironic and unfortunate result is
that an extremely intelligent child may
fail dramatically in school.

Catch It Early
So what is to be done? The fi rst

step is to recognize exceptional intel-
ligence as well as developmental disor-
ders so that parents and teachers can
intervene. Earlier detection means
quicker correction. For instance, in
fi ve-year-olds, phonics training can
clear up dyslexia within six to 18
months. But if treatment begins only a
year later, the correction can take
twice as long— extending the chance
that the child gives up on school.

Whether a child’s spatial orienta-
tion is age-appropriate can be demon-
strated by comparing performance on
the verbal and nonverbal sections of
an IQ test. If the nonverbal result is
more than 10 points below the verbal
result, psychomotor training is recom-
mended. Drawings, games and sculpt-
ing can help a child learn to coordinate
his movements and improve spatial
orientation. This kind of training is
also most effective when begun by age
fi ve or six.

If the discrepancy between verbal

Gifted children who are not challenged can quickly grow bored with school, but a hidden fear of
failure can lead to far greater problems BY MARIE-NOËLLE GANRY-TARDY
originally published in April 2005

Watching Prodigies
for the Dark Side

(perspectives)
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26 S C I E N T I F I C A M E R I C A N E X C L U S I V E O N L I N E I S S U E A U G U S T 2 0 0 6

and nonverbal IQ tests is greater than
20 percent, family therapy should also
be considered, to improve interaction
among family members. During the
sessions, the therapist will try to assess
how the child has developed and how
the testing discrepancy might have
arisen. Sometimes a child with motor
or orientation problems will be afraid
of simple daily tasks, such as tying her
shoes. She knows she will probably
make mistakes and have to start over—
perhaps enduring ridicule from sib-
lings, parents or friends. If the parents
try to help, they are unwittingly in-
creasing her dependence on Mommy
or Daddy. Yet if they are not around,
she will quickly feel abandoned. To
help the child regain her sense of inde-
pendence, the therapist will try to get

her to understand that failure is a nor-
mal part of life and not a catastrophe.

Child prodigies may also distort
their own personalities to the point
where they become unrecognizable.
Psychiatrists call this the development
of a false self. This problem may occur
because these extraordinarily sensitive
young people often feel deeply the sub-
tle reactions of family members. As a
result, they may overinterpret even the
slightest sign of dissatisfaction. To
please their parents, they deny their
own needs and behave in a way they
think matches their parents’ expecta-
tions. They all but disappear behind a
mask of compliance. To prevent this
development of a false self, parents
should offer a highly gifted child sev-
eral varied activities and accept with-

out judgment whatever the child
chooses to pursue. It is important to
encourage a child’s special interests so
that she does not lose motivation or a
willingness to work.

Knowing the potential pitfalls
within a child prodigy’s world, and
how to counter them, can signifi cantly
improve each girl and boy’s chances
for success with their double-edged
gifts. And society will be more likely
to benefi t from their future contribu-
tions, whether in art, science, public
service or wherever their brilliance
leads them.

MARIE-NOËLLE GANRY-TARDY is a child psy-

chiatrist in private practice in Paris who spe-

cializes in solving the problems of young

gifted children.

C
E

R
V

E
A

U
&

P
S

Y
C

H
O

Computer labyrinth tests can unveil spatial orientation problems in gifted children. Even in
simple mazes, a child may not immediately recognize which path leads to the center, failing
to see dead ends until he tries them (a, b). A child without
a spatial defi cit solves the puzzle directly (c).

Some exceptional children are constantly wary of failure,
leading them to emotional paralysis. ⁾⁽

a
b
c
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27 S C I E N T I F I C A M E R I C A N E X C L U S I V E O N L I N E I S S U E A U G U S T 2 0 0 6

AA man walks along the inside of a circle of chess
tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before mak-
ing his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pon-
dering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is
1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result
is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was
part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.

How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead
could he calculate under such constraints? “I see only one
move ahead,” Capablanca is said to have answered, “but it is
always the correct one.”

He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological
research has subsequently established: much of the chess mas-
ter’s advantage over the novice derives from the fi rst few sec-
onds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception,
sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in oth-
er fi elds as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a
game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often
reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as
the chess master often fi nds the best move in a fl ash, an expert
physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within
moments of laying eyes on a patient.

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire
their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to in-
nate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists
have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collect-
ed results of a century of such research have led to new theo-
ries explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves infor-
mation. What is more, this research may have important im-
plications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by

chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the class-
room to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.

The Drosophila of Cognitive Science
t h e h i s t o r y of human expertise begins with hunting, a
skill that was crucial to the survival of our early ancestors. The
mature hunter knows not only where the lion has been; he can
also infer where it will go. Tracking skill increases, as repeated
studies show, from childhood onward, rising in “a linear rela-
tionship, all the way out to the mid-30s, when it tops out,” says
John Bock, an anthropologist at California State University,
Fullerton. It takes less time to train a brain surgeon.

Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over
the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with
imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigor-
ous studies in the past two decades have shown that profes-
sional stock pickers invest no more successfully than ama-
teurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better
than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric thera-
pists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced
degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists—as in,
say, teaching or business management— it is often hard to
measure, let alone explain.

Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into
components, subjected to laboratory experiments and read-
ily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall.
It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest
single test bed for theories of thinking— the “Drosophila of
cognitive science,” as it has been called.

The measurement of chess skill has been taken further

EEXXPPEERRTT M MIINNDD
THETHE

Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues
to how people become experts in other fi elds as well By Philip E. Ross
originally published in August 2006

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28 S C I E N T I F I C A M E R I C A N E X C L U S I V E O N L I N E I S S U E A U G U S T 2 0 0 6

than similar attempts with any other game, sport or com-
petitive activity. Statistical formulas weigh a player’s recent
results over older ones and discount successes according to
the strength of one’s opponents. The results are ratings that
predict the outcomes of games with remarkable reliability. If
player A outrates player B by 200 points, then A will on aver-
age beat B 75 percent of the time. This prediction holds true
whether the players are top-ranked or merely ordinary. Garry
Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster who has a rating of 2812,
will win 75 percent of his games against the 100th-ranked
grandmaster, Jan Timman of the Netherlands, who has a rat-
ing of 2616. Similarly, a U.S. tournament player rated 1200
(about the median) will win 75 percent of the time against
someone rated 1000 (about the 40th percentile). Ratings al-
low psychologists to assess expertise by performance rather
than reputation and to track changes in a given player’s skill
over the course of his or her career.

Another reason why cognitive scientists chose chess as their
model—and not billiards, say, or bridge—is the game’s reputa-
tion as, in German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s words,

“the touchstone of the intellect.” The feats of chess masters
have long been ascribed to nearly magical mental powers. This
magic shines brightest in the so-called blindfold games in
which the players are not allowed to see the board. In 1894
French psychologist Alfred Binet, the co-inventor of the fi rst
intelligence test, asked chess masters to describe how they
played such games. He began with the hypothesis that they
achieved an almost photographic image of the board, but he
soon concluded that the visualization was much more abstract.
Rather than seeing the knight’s mane or the grain of the wood
from which it is made, the master calls up only a general
knowledge of where the piece stands in relation to other ele-
ments of the position. It is the same kind of implicit knowledge
that the commuter has of the stops on a subway line.

The blindfolded master supplements such knowledge with
details of the game at hand as well as with recollections of
salient aspects of past games. Let us say he has somehow for-
gotten the precise position of a pawn. He can fi nd it, as it were,
by considering the stereotyped strategy of the opening— a
well-studied phase of the game with a relatively limited num-
ber of options. Or he can remember the logic behind one of
his earlier moves— say, by reasoning: “I could not capture his
bishop two moves ago; therefore, that pawn must have been
standing in the way. . . .” He does not have to remember every
detail at all times, because he can reconstruct any particular
detail whenever he wishes by tapping a well-organized system
of connections.

Of course, if the possession of such intricately structured
knowledge explains not only success at blindfold play but also
other abilities of chess masters, such as calculation and plan-
ning, then expertise in the game would depend not so much
on innate abilities as on specialized training. Dutch psycholo-
gist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confi rmed this
notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a
great international tournament in Holland to compare aver-
age and strong players with the world’s leading grandmasters.
One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their
thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tourna-
ment game. He found that although experts— the class just
below master— did analyze considerably more possibilities
than the very weak players, there was little further increase
in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grand-
master levels. The better players did not examine more pos-
sibilities, only better ones—just as Capablanca had claimed.

Recent research has shown that de Groot’s fi ndings re-
fl ected in part the nature of his chosen test positions. A posi-
tion in which extensive, accurate calculation is critical will
allow the grandmasters to show their stuff, as it were, and
they will then search more deeply along the branching tree of
possible moves than the amateur can hope to do. So, too, ex-
perienced physicists may on occasion examine more possi-
bilities than physics students do. Yet in both cases, the expert
relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of anal-
ysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted
with a diffi cult position, a weaker player may calculate for
half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the
right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move im-
mediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.

De Groot also had his subjects examine a position for a
limited period and then try to reconstruct it from memory.
Performance at this task tracked game-playing strength all
the way from novice to grandmaster. Beginners could not
recall more than a very few details of the position, even after
having examined it for 30 seconds, whereas grandmasters
could usually get it perfectly, even if they had perused it for
only a few seconds. This difference tracks a particular form
of memory, specifi c to the kind of chess positions that com-
monly occur in play. The specifi c memory must be the result
of training, because grandmasters do no better than others in

■ Because skill at chess can be easily measured and
subjected to laboratory experiments, the game
has become an impor tant test bed for theories in
cognitive science.

■ Researchers have found evidence that chess
grandmasters rely on a vast store of knowledge of
game positions. Some scientists have theorized that
grandmasters organize the information in chunks,
which can be quickly retrieved from long-term memory
and manipulated in working memory.

■ To accumulate this body of structured knowledge,
grandmasters typically engage in years of effor tful
study, continually tackling challenges that lie just
beyond their competence. The top performers in music,
mathematics and spor ts appear to gain their exper tise
in the same way, motivated by competition and the
joy of victory.

Overview / Lessons from Chess

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general tests of memory.
Similar results have been demonstrated in bridge players

(who can remember cards played in many games), computer
programmers (who can reconstruct masses of computer code)
and musicians (who can recall long snatches of music). Indeed,
such a memory for the subject matter of a particular fi eld is a
standard test for the existence of expertise.

The conclusion that experts rely more on structured
knowledge than on analysis is supported by a rare case study
of an initially weak chess player, identifi ed only by the initials
D.H., who over the course of nine years rose to become one
of Canada’s leading masters by 1987. Neil Charness, profes-

sor of psychology at Florida State University, showed that
despite the increase in the player’s strength, he analyzed chess
positions no more extensively than he had earlier, relying in-
stead on a vastly improved knowledge of chess positions and
associated strategies.

Chunking Theory
i n t h e 19 6 0 s Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, both
at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to get a better understand-
ing of expert memory by studying its limitations. Picking up
where de Groot left off, they asked players of various strengths
to reconstruct chess positions that had been artifi cially de-

E xperiments indicate that the memory of chess masters is
tuned to typical game positions. In 13 studies conducted
between 1973 and 1996 (the results were compiled in a
review ar ticle published in 1996), players at various skill
levels were shown positions from ac tual games (a) and

positions obtained by randomly shuff ling the pieces (b).
Af ter obser ving the positions for 10 seconds or less, the
players were asked to reconstruc t them from memory. The
results (graph at bottom) showed that chess masters (with
ratings of 2200 or higher) and grandmasters (generally 2500

25

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10

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um

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Player Rating

<1600 >23501600–
2000

2000–
23

50

Game

Random

A structured knowledge of chess
positions enables a grandmaster
to spot the correct move quickly.
The position at the right comes from
a famous 1889 game between
Emanuel Lasker (white) and Johann
Bauer (black). Although a novice
player would have to analyze the
position extensively to see the
winning move for white, any
grandmaster would immediately
recognize it. The correct move
is shown on page 71.

a b

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A GR A NDM A S TER ’ S MEMORY

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vised—that is, with the pieces placed randomly on the board—
rather than reached as the result of master play [see box on
preceding page]. The correlation between game-playing
strength and the accuracy of the players’ recall was much weak-
er with the random positions than with the authentic ones.

Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specifi c
than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself
but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated
earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability
in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psy-
chologist Edward Thorndike fi rst noted this lack of transfer-
ence over a century ago, when he showed that the study of
Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and
that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.

Simon explained the masters’ relative weakness in recon-
structing artifi cial chess positions with a model based on
meaningful patterns called chunks. He invoked the concept
to explain how chess masters can manipulate vast amounts of
stored information, a task that would seem to strain the work-
ing memory. Psychologist George Miller of Princeton Univer-
sity famously estimated the limits of working memory— the
scratch pad of the mind—in a 1956 paper entitled “The Mag-
ical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” Miller showed that
people can contemplate only fi ve to nine items at a time. By
packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon ar-
gued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because
by using this method, they could access fi ve to nine chunks
rather than the same number of smaller details.

Take the sentence “Mary had a little lamb.” The number

of information chunks in this sentence depends on one’s
knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most
native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larg-
er chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English
but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk.
For someone who has memorized the words but not their
meaning, the sentence is fi ve chunks, and it is 18 chunks for
someone who knows the letters but not the words.

In the context of chess, the same differences can be seen
between novices and grandmasters. To a beginner, a position
with 20 chessmen on the board may contain far more than 20
chunks of information, because the pieces can be placed in so
many confi gurations. A grandmaster, however, may see one
part of the position as “fi anchettoed bishop in the castled
kingside,” together with a “blockaded king’s-Indian-style
pawn chain,” and thereby cram the entire position into per-
haps fi ve or six chunks. By measuring the time it takes to
commit a new chunk to memory and the number of hours a
player must study chess before reaching grandmaster strength,
Simon estimated that a typical grandmaster has access to
roughly 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information. A
grandmaster can retrieve any of these chunks from memory
simply by looking at a chess position, in the same way that
most native English speakers can recite the poem “Mary had
a little lamb” after hearing just the fi rst few words.

Even so, there were diffi culties with chunking theory. It
could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the
ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted
(a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson
of Florida State University and Charness argued that there
must be some other mechanism that enables experts to em-
ploy long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says
Ericsson: “The mere demonstration that highly skilled players
can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold con-
ditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain
because you have to know the position, then you have to ex-
plore it in your memory.” Such manipulation involves chang-
ing the stored chunks, at least in some ways, a task that may
be likened to reciting “Mary had a little lamb” backward. It
can be done, but not easily, and certainly not without many
false starts and errors. Yet grandmaster games played quick-
ly and under blindfold conditions tend to be of surprisingly
high quality.

Ericsson also cites studies of physicians who clearly put
information into long-term memory and take it out again in
ways that enable them to make diagnoses. Perhaps Ericsson’s
most homely example, though, comes from reading. In a 1995
study he and Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado
found that interrupting highly proficient readers hardly
slowed their reentry to a text; in the end, they lost only a few
seconds. The researchers explained these fi ndings by recourse
to a structure they called long-term working memory, an al-
most oxymoronic coinage because it assigns to long-term
memory the one thing that had always been defi ned as incom-
patible with it: thinking. But brain-imaging studies done in

100

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1500 1800 2100 2400 2700

Player Rating

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(p
er

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)

Share of activity in frontal and parietal cortices
Share of activity in medial temporal lobe

BR A IN A C T I V I T Y in chess masters is different from the pattern obser ved in
novices. In a 2001 repor t researchers used magnetoencephalography—
the measurement of magnetic fi elds produced by electric currents in the
brain— on subjects playing chess against a computer. In weaker players
more activity occurred in the brain’s medial temporal lobe than in the
frontal and parietal cor tices, which suggests that the amateurs were
analyzing unusual new moves. In grandmasters, however, the frontal
and parietal cor tices were more active, indicating that they were
retrieving information from long-term memory (data points at right in
graph).

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2001 at the University of Konstanz in Germany provide sup-
port for the theory by showing that expert chess players acti-
vate long-term memory much more than novices do [see il-
lustration on previous page].

Fernand Gobet of Brunel University in London champions
a rival theory, devised with Simon in the late 1990s. It extends
the idea of chunks by invoking highly characteristic and very
large patterns consisting of perhaps a dozen chess pieces. Such
a template, as they call it, would have a number of slots into
which the master could plug such variables as a pawn or a
bishop. A template might exist, say, for the concept of “the
isolated queen’s-pawn position from the Nimzo-Indian De-
fense,” and a master might change a slot by reclassifying it as
the same position “minus the dark-squared bishops.” To re-
sort again to the poetic analogy, it would be a bit like memo-
rizing a riff on “Mary had a little lamb” by substituting rhym-
ing equivalents at certain slots, such as “Larry” for “Mary,”

“pool” for “school” and so on. Anyone who knows the origi-
nal template should be able to fi x the altered one in memory
in a trice.

A Proliferation of Prodigies
t h e o n e t h i n g that all expertise theorists agree on is that
it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind.
Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule,
which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy
labor to master any fi eld. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss
in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess,
must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting ear-
lier and working harder than others.

According to this view, the proliferation of chess prodigies
in recent years merely refl ects the advent of computer-based
training methods that let children study far more master
games and to play far more frequently against master-strength
programs than their forerunners could typically manage.
Fischer made a sensation when he achieved the grandmaster
title at age 15, in 1958; today’s record-holder, Sergey Karjakin
of Ukraine, earned it at 12 years, seven months.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se
but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling chal-
lenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. That is why it is
possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours
playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever
advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly
trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time.
It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in
tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a
player’s progress; the main training value of such games is to
point up weaknesses for future study.

Even the novice engages in effortful study at fi rst, which
is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say,
or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable perfor-
mance—for instance, keeping up with one’s golf buddies or
passing a driver’s exam— most people relax. Their perfor-
mance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to

further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep
the lid of their mind’s box open all the time, so that they can
inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby ap-
proach the standard set by leaders in their fi elds.

Meanwhile the standards denoting expertise grow ever
more challenging. High school runners manage the four-min-
ute mile; conservatory students play pieces once attempted only
by virtuosi. Yet it is chess, again, that offers the most convinc-
ing comparison over time. John Nunn, a British mathematician
who is also a grandmaster, recently used a computer to help
him compare the errors committed in all the games in two in-
ternational tournaments, one held in 1911, the other in 1993.
The modern players played far more accurately. Nunn then
examined all the games of one player in 1911 who scored in the
middle of the pack and concluded that his rating today would
be no better than 2100, hundreds of points below the grand-
master level—“and that was on a good day and with a follow-
ing wind.” The very best old-time masters were considerably
stronger but still well below the level of today’s leaders.

Then again, Capablanca and his contemporaries had neither
computers nor game databases. They had to work things out
for themselves, as did Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and if they
fall below today’s masters in technique, they tower above them
in creative power. The same comparison can be made between
Newton and the typical newly minted Ph.D. in physics.

At this point, many skeptics will fi nally lose patience.
Surely, they will say, it takes more to get to Carnegie Hall than
practice, practice, practice. Yet this belief in the importance
of innate talent, strongest perhaps among the experts them-
selves and their trainers, is strangely lacking in hard evidence
to substantiate it. In 2002 Gobet conducted a study of British
chess players ranging from amateurs to grandmasters and
found no connection at all between their playing strengths
and their visual-spatial abilities, as measured by shape-mem-
ory tests. Other researchers have found that the abilities of
professional handicappers to predict the results of horse races
did not correlate at all with their mathematical abilities.

Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will be-
come a great expert in any fi eld, a notable experiment has
shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. László Pol-
gár, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daugh-

W H I T E ’ S W I N N I N G M O V E is
bishop takes pawn on the h7
square. Black’s king then
captures the bishop, and the
white queen captures the
black knight at h5, with check,
forcing the black king back to
g8. White’s other bishop then
captures the pawn on g7,
where it is taken by the black
king. The double-bishop
sacrifi ce paves the way for a
queen-and-rook attack,
forcing black to give up his
queen to stave off mate. Emanuel Lasker, the game’s winner, went on
to become the world chess champion in 1894, a title he retained for
27 years before losing to José Raúl Capablanca.

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ters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day,
producing one international master and two grandmasters—
the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest
Polgár, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.

The Polgár experiment proved two things: that grandmas-
ters can be reared and that women can be grandmasters. It is
no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied
after László Polgár published a book on chess education. The
number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase af-
ter Mozart’s father did the equivalent two centuries earlier.

Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor
than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no
accident that in music, chess and sports— all domains in
which expertise is defi ned by competitive performance rather
than academic credentialing— professionalism has been
emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of
increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.

Furthermore, success builds on success, because each ac-
complishment can strengthen a child’s motivation. A 1999
study of professional soccer players from several countries
showed that they were much more likely than the general
population to have been born at a time of year that would
have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages
older than the average [see box above]. In their early years,
these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in
size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates.
Because the larger, more agile children would get more op-
portunities to handle the ball, they would score more often,
and their success at the game would motivate them to become
even better.

Teachers in sports, music and other fi elds tend to believe
that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In
fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There
is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young
violinist’s extraordinary performance stems from innate abil-

ity or from years of Suzuki-style training. Capablanca, re-
garded to this day as the greatest “natural” chess player,
boasted that he never studied the game. In fact, he fl unked out
of Columbia University in part because he spent so much time
playing chess. His famously quick apprehension was a prod-
uct of all his training, not a substitute for it.

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates
that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demon-
strated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert—in chess,
music and a host of other subjects— sets a clear challenge be-
fore the schools. Can educators fi nd ways to encourage stu-
dents to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve
their reading and math skills? Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an econo-
mist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering
monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming
schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing pro-
gram in New York, for example, teachers test the students
every three weeks and award small amounts— on the order of
$10 or $20—to those who score well. The early results have
been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the ques-
tion, “Why can’t Johnny read?” perhaps educators should
ask, “Why should there be anything in the world he can’t
learn to do?”

M O R E T O E X P L O R E
The Rating of Chessplayer s, Pas t and Pr esent. Arpad E. Elo.
Arco Publishing , 1978.

Thought and Choice in Chess. Adriaan de Groot. Mouton de Gruyter, 1978.

Exper t Performance in Spor ts: Advances in Research on Spor t
Exper tise. Edited by Janet L. Starkes and K . Anders Ericsson. Human
Kinetics, 2003.

Moves in Mind: The Psychology of Board Games. Fernand Gobet,
Alex de Voogt and Jean Retschitzki. Psychology Press, 2004.

The Cambridge Handbook of Exper tise and Exper t Performance. Edited
by K . Anders Ericsson, Paul J. Feltovich, Rober t R. Hoffman and
Neil Charness. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

A 1999 study of professional soccer
players suggests that they owe their
success more to training than to talent.
In Germany, Brazil, Japan and
Australia, the players were much more
likely than average to have been born
in the fi rst quar ter (Q1) af ter the cutoff
date for youth soccer leagues (graphs
at right). Because these players were
older than their teammates when they
joined the leagues, they would have
enjoyed advantages in size and
strength, allowing them to handle the
ball and score more of ten. Their
success in early years would have
motivated them to keep improving ,
thus explaining their dispropor tionate
representation in the professional
leagues.

40
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GERMANY, 1995/ ’96
Soccer players

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BRAZIL, 1995/ ’96
Soccer players

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General population
40
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JAPAN, 1993
Soccer players

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
General population
40
25
10

AUSTRALIA, 1995/ ’96
Soccer players

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
General population

N O T E : T h e c u t o f f d a t e s w e r e A u g u s t 1 f o r G e r m a n y , B r a z i l a n d A u s t r a l i a , a n d A p r i l 1 f o r J a p a n .

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TR A INING TRUMP S TA LENT

COP YRIGHT 2006 SCIENTIFIC A MERIC A N, INC.

• Cover
• Table of Contents

Islands of Genius
Inside the Mind of a Savant
Williams Syndrome and the Brain
Manic-Depressive Illness and Creativity
Uncommon Talents: Gifted Children, Prodigies and Savants
Watching Prodigies for the Dark Side
The Expert Mind

CARRIE BUCK’S DAUGHTER*

by Stephen Jay Gould**

The Lord really put it on the line in his preface to that proto-
type of all prescription, the Ten Commandments:

. . . for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers
upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me (Exod.
20:5).

The terror of this statement lies in its patent unfairness-its
promise to punish guiltless offspring for the misdeeds of their dis-
tant forebears.

A different form of guilt by genealogical association attempts
to remove this stigma of injustice by denying a cherished premise of
Western thought-human free will. If offspring are tainted not sim-
ply by the deeds of their parents but by a material form of evil
transferred directly by biological inheritance, then “the iniquity of
the fathers” becomes a signal or warning for probable misbehavior
of their sons. Thus Plato, while denying that children should suffer
directly for the crimes of their parents, nonetheless defended the
banishment of a man whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfa-
ther had all been condemned to death.

It is, perhaps, merely coincidental that both Jehovah and Plato
chose three generations as their criterion for establishing different
forms of guilt by association. Yet we have a strong folk, or vernac-
ular, tradition for viewing triple occurrences as mimimal evidence
of regularity. We are told that bad things come in threes. Two may
be an accidental association; three is a pattern. Perhaps, then, we
should not wonder that our own century’s most famous pronounce-
ment of blood guilt employed the same criterion-Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s defense of compulsory sterilization in Virginia (Supreme
Court decision of 1927 in Buck v. Bell): “three generations of imbe-
ciles are enough.”

Restrictions upon immigration, with national quotas set to dis-

• With permission from 93 NAT. HIST., July 1984, at 14. Copyright the American
Museum of Natural History, 1984.

•• Professor Gould teaches Biology, Geology and the History of Science at Harvard
University.

331

332 CONSTITUTIONAL COMMENTARY [Vol. 2:331

criminate against those deemed mentally unfit by early versions of
IQ testing, marked the greatest triumph of the American eugenics
movement-the flawed hereditarian doctrine, so popular earlier in
our century and by no means extinct today (see my column on Sin-
gapore’s “great marriage debate,” May 1984), that attempted to
“improve” our human stock by preventing the propagation of those
deemed biologically unfit and encouraging procreation among the
supposedly worthy. But the movement to enact and enforce laws
for compulsory “eugenic” sterilization had an impact and success
scarcely less pronounced. If we could debar the shiftless and the
stupid from our shores, we might also prevent the propagation of
those similarly afflicted but already here.

The movement for compulsory sterilization began in earnest
during the 1890’s, abetted by two major factors-the rise of eugen-
ics as an influential political movement and the perfection of safe
and simple operations (vasectomy for men and salpingectomy, the
cutting and tying of Fallopian tubes, for women) to replace castra-
tion and other obvious mutilation. Indiana passed the first steriliza-
tion act based on eugenic principles in 1907 (a few states had
previously mandated castration as a punitive measure for certain
sexual crimes, although such laws were rarely enforced and usually
overturned by judicial review). Like so many others to follow, it
provided for sterilization of afflicted people residing in the state’s
“care,” either as inmates of mental hospitals and homes for the
feebleminded or as inhabitants of prisons. Sterilization could be im-
posed upon those judged insane, idiotic, imbecilic, or moronic, and
upon convicted rapists or criminals when recommended by a board
of experts.

By the 1930’s, more than thirty states had passed similar laws,
often with an expanded list of so-called hereditary defects, including
alcoholism and drug addiction in some states, and even blindness
and deafness in others. It must be said that these laws were contin-
ually challenged and rarely enforced in most states; only California
and Virginia applied them zealously. By January 1935, some
20,000 forced “eugenic” sterilizations had been performed in the
United States, nearly half in California.

No organization crusaded more vociferously and successfully
for these laws than the Eugenics Record Office, the semiofficial arm
and repository of data for the eugenics movement in America.
Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office,
dedicated most of his career to a tireless campaign of writing and
lobbying for eugenic sterilization. He hoped, thereby, to eliminate
in two generations the genes of what he called the “submerged

1985] CARRIE BUCK’S DAUGHTER 333

tenth”-“the most worthless one-tenth of our present population.”
He proposed a “model sterilization law” in 1922, designed

to prevent the procreation of persons socially inadequate from defective inheritance,
by authorizing and providing for eugenical sterilization of certain potential parents
carrying degenerate hereditary qualities.

This model bill became the prototype for most laws passed in
America, although few states cast their net as widely as Laughlin
advised. (Laughlin’s categories encompassed “blind, including
those with seriously impaired vision; deaf, including those with seri-
ously impaired hearing; and dependent, including orphans, ne’er-
do-wells, the homeless, tramps, and paupers.”) Laughlin’s sugges-
tions were better heeded in Nazi Germany, where his model act
served as a basis for the infamous and stringently enforced
Erbgesundheitsrecht, leading by the eve of World War II to the ster-
ilization of some 375,000 people, most for “congenital feeblemind-
edness,” but including nearly 4000 for blindness and deafness.

The campaign for forced eugenic sterilization in America
reached its climax and height of respectability in 1927, when the
Supreme Court, by an eight-to-one vote, upheld the Virginia sterili-
zation bill in the case of Buck v. Bell. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then
in his mid-eighties and the most celebrated jurist in America, wrote
the majority opinion with his customary verve and power of style.
It included the notorious paragraph, with its chilling tag line, cited
ever since as the quintessential statement of eugenic principles. Re-
membering with pride his own distant experiences as an infantry-
man in the Civil War, Holmes wrote:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens
for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap
the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices. . . . It is better for all the world,
if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve
for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from contin-
uing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad
enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are
enough.

Who, then were the famous “three generations of imbeciles,”
and why should they still compel our interest?

When the state of Virginia passed its compulsory sterilization
law in 1924, Carrie Buck, an eighteen-year-old white woman, was
an involuntary resident at the State Colony for Epileptics and Fee-
ble-Minded. As the first person selected for sterilization under the
new act, Carrie Buck became the focus for a constitutional chal-
lenge launched, in part, by conservative Virginia Christians who
held, according to eugenical “modernists,” antiquated views about

334 CONSTITUTIONAL COMMENTARY [Vol. 2:331

individual preferences and “benevolent” state power. (Simplistic
political labels do not apply in this case, and rarely do in general.
We usually regard eugenics as a conservative movement and its
most vocal critics as members of the left. This alignment has gener-
ally held in our own decade. But eugenics, touted in its day as the
latest in scientific modernism, attracted many liberals and num-
bered among its most vociferous critics groups often labeled as reac-
tionary and antiscientific. If any political lesson emerges from these
shifting allegiances, we might consider the true inalienability of cer-
tain human rights.)

But why was Carrie Buck in the State Colony and why was she
selected? Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld her choice as judicious in
the opening lines of his 1927 opinion:

Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Col-
ony …. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution,
and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.

In short, inheritance stood as the crucial issue (indeed as the
driving force behind all eugenics). For if measured mental defi-
ciency arose from malnourishment, either of body or mind, and not
from tainted genes, then how could sterilziation be justified? If de-
cent food, upbringing, medical care, and education might make a
worthy citizen of Carrie Buck’s daughter, how could the State of
Virginia justify the severing of Carrie’s Fallopian tubes against her
will? (Some forms of mental deficiency are passed by inheritance in
family lines, but most are not-a scarcely surprising conclusion
when we consider the thousand shocks that beset fragile humans
during their lives, from difficulties in embryonic growth to traumas
of birth, malnourishment, rejection, and poverty. In any case, no
fair-minded person today would credit Laughlin’s social criteria for
the identification of heredity deficiency-ne’er-do-wells, the home-
less, tramps, and paupers-although we shall soon see that Carrie
Buck was committed on these grounds.)

When Carrie Buck’s case emerged as the crucial test of Vir-
ginia’s law, the chief honchos of eugenics knew that the time had
come to put up or shut up on the crucial issue of inheritance. Thus,
the Eugenics Record Office sent Arthur H. Estabrook, their crack
fieldworker, to Virginia for a “scientific” study of the case. Harry
Laughlin himself provided a deposition, and his brief for inheri-
tance was presented at the local trial that affirmed Virginia’s law
and later worked its way to the Supreme Court as Buck v. Bell.

Laughlin made two major points to the court. First, that Car-
rie Buck and her mother, Emma Buck, were feebleminded by the
Stanford-Binet test of IQ, then in its own infancy. Carrie scored a

1985] CARRIE BUCK’S DAUGHTER 335

mental age of nine years. Emma of seven years and eleven months.
(These figures ranked them technically as “imbeciles” by definitions
of the day, hence Holmes’s later choice of words. Imbeciles dis-
played a mental age of six to nine years; idiots performed worse,
morons better, to round out the old nomenclature of mental defi-
ciency.) Second, that most feeblemindedness is inherited, and Car-
rie Buck surely belonged with this majority. Laughlin reported:

Generally feeble-mindedness is caused by the inheritance of degenerate qualities;
but sometimes it might be caused by environmental factors which are not heredi-
tary. In the case given, the evidence points strongly toward the feeble-mindedness
and moral delinquency of Carrie Buck being due, primarily, to inheritance and not
to environment.

Carrie Buck’s daughter was then, and has always been, the piv-
otal figure of this painful case. As I stated before, we tend (often at
our peril) to regard two as potential accident and three as an estab-
lished pattern. The supposed imbecility of Emma and Carrie might
have been coincidental, but the diagnosis of similar deficiency for
Vivian Buck (made by a social worker, as we shall see, when Vivian
was but six months old) tipped the balance in Laughlin’s favor and
led Holmes to declare the Buck lineage inherently corrupt by defi-
cient heredity. Vivian sealed the pattern-three generations of
imbeciles are enough. Besides, had Carrie not given illegitimate
birth to Vivian, the issue (in both senses) would never have
emerged.

Oliver Wendell Holmes viewed his work with pride. The man
so renowned for his principle of judicial restraint, who had pro-
claimed that freedom must not be curtailed without “clear and pres-
ent danger”-without the equivalent of falsely yelling “fire” in a
crowded theater-wrote of his judgment in Buck v. Bell: “I felt
that I was getting near the first principle of real reform.”

And so the case of Buck v. Bell remained for fifty years, a foot-
note to a moment of American history perhaps best forgotten. And
then, in 1980, it reemerged to prick our collective conscience, when
Dr. K. Ray Nelson, then director of the Lynchburg Hospital where
Carrie Buck was sterilized, researched the records of his institution
and discovered that more than 4000 sterilizations had been per-
formed, the last as late as 1972. He also found Carrie Buck, then
alive and well near Charlottesville, and her sister Doris, covertly
sterilized under the same law (she was told that her operation was
for appendicitis), and now, with fierce dignity, dejected and bitter
because she had wanted a child more than anything else in her life
and had finally, in her old age, learned why she had never
conceived.

336 CONSTITUTIONAL COMMENTARY [Vol. 2:331

As scholars and reporters visited Carrie Buck and her sister,
what a few experts had known all along became abundantly clear to
everyone. Carrie Buck was a woman of obviously normal intelli-
gence. For example, Paul A. Lombardo of the School of Law at the
University of Virginia, and a leading scholar of the Buck v. Bell
case, wrote in a letter to me:

As for Carrie, when I met her she was reading newspapers daily and joining a more
literate friend to assist at regular bouts with the crossword puzzles. She was not a
sophisticated woman, and lacked social graces, but mental health professionals who
examined her in later life confirmed my impressions that she was neither mentally
ill nor retarded.

On what evidence, then, was Carrie Buck consigned to the
State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded on January 23,
1924? I have seen the text of her commitment hearing; it is, to say
the least, cursory and contradictory. Beyond the simple and un-
documented say-so of her foster parents, and her own brief appear-
ance before a commission of two doctors and a justice of the peace,
no evidence was presented. Even the crude and early Standford-
Binet test, so fatally flawed as a measure of innate worth (see my
book The Mismeasure of Man, although the evidence of Carrie’s
own case suffices) but at least clothed with the aura of quantitative
respectability, had not yet been applied.

When we understand why Carrie Buck was committed in Jan-
uary 1924, we can finally comprehend the hidden meaning of her
case and its message for us today. The silent key, again and as al-
way~. is her daughter Vivian, born on March 28, 1924, and then but
an evident bump on her belly. Carrie Buck was one of several illegit-
imate children borne by her mother, Emma. She grew up with fos-
ter parents, J.T. and Alice Dobbs, and continued to live with them,
helping out with chores around the house. She was apparently
raped by a relative of her foster parents, then blamed for her resul-
tant pregnancy. Almost surely, she was (as they used to say) com-
mitted to hide her shame (and her rapist’s identity), not because
enlightened science had just discovered her true mental status. In
short, she was sent away to have her baby. Her case never was
about mental deficiency; it was always a matter of sexual morality
and social deviance. The annals of her trial and hearing reek with
the contempt of the well-off and well-bred for poor people of “loose
morals.” Who really cared whether Vivian was a baby of normal
intelligence; she was the illegitimate child of an illegitimate woman.
Two generations of bastards are enough. Harry Laughlin began his
“family history” of the Bucks by writing: “These people belong to

1985] CARRIE BUCK’S DAUGHTER 337

the shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the
South.”

We know little of Emma Buck and her life, but we have no
more reason to suspect her than her daughter Carrie of true mental
deficiency. Their deviance was social and sexual; the charge of im-
becility was a cover-up, Mr. Justice Holmes notwithstanding.

We come then to the crux of the case, Carrie’s daughter, Viv-
ian. What evidence was ever adduced for her mental deficiency?
This and only this: At the original trial in late 1924, when Vivian
Buck was seven months old, a Miss Wilhelm, social worker for the
Red Cross, appeared before the court. She began by stating hon-
estly the true reason for Carrie Buck’s commitment:

Mr. Dobbs, who had charge of the girl, had taken her when a small child, had
reported to Miss Duke [the temporary secretary of Public Welfare for Albemarle
County] that the girl was pregnant and that he wanted to have her committed some-
where-to have her sent to some institution.

Miss Wilhelm then rendered her judgment of Vivian Buck by
comparing her with the normal granddaughter of Mrs. Dobbs, born
just three days earlier:

It is difficult to judge probabilities of a child as young as that, but it seems to me not
quite a normal baby. In its appearance-! should say that perhaps my knowledge
of the mother may prejudice me in that regard, but I saw the child at the same time
as Mrs. Dobbs’ daughter’s baby, which is only three days older than this one, and
there is a very decided difference in the development of the babies. That was about
two weeks ago. There is a look about it that is not quite normal, but just what it is,
I can’t tell.

This short testimony, and nothing else, formed all the evidence
for the crucial third generation of imbeciles. Cross-examination re-
vealed that neither Vivian nor the Dobbs grandchild could walk or
talk, and that “Mrs. Dobbs’ daughter’s baby is a very responsive
baby. When you play with it or try to attract its attention-it is a
baby that you can play with. The other baby is not. It seems very
apathetic and not responsive.” Miss Wilhelm then urged Carrie
Buck’s sterilization: “I think,” she said, “it would at least prevent
the propagation of her kind.” Several years later, Miss Wilhelm
denied that she had ever examined Vivian or deemed the child
feebleminded.

Unfortunately, Vivian died at age eight of “enteric colitis” (as
recorded on her death certificate), an ambiguous diagnosis that
could mean many things but may well indicate that she fell victim
to one of the preventable childhood diseases of poverty (a grim re-
minder of the real subject in Buck v. Bell). She is therefore mute as
a witness in our reassessment of her famous case.

338 CONSTITUTIONAL COMMENTARY [Vol. 2:331

When Buck v. Bell resurfaced in 1980, it immediately struck
me that Vivian’s case was crucial and that evidence for the mental
status of a child who died at age eight might best be found in report
cards. I have therefore been trying to track down Vivian Buck’s
school records for the past four years and have finally succeeded.
(They were supplied to me by Dr. Paul A. Lombardo, who also sent
other documents, including Miss Wilhelm’s testimony, and spent
several hours answering my questions by mail and Lord knows how
much time playing successful detective in re Vivian’s school
records. I have never met Dr. Lombardo; he did all this work for
kindness, collegiality, and love of the game of knowledge, not for
expected reward or even requested acknowledgement. In a profes-
sion-academics-so often marked by pettiness and silly squabbling
over meaningless priorities, this generosity must be recorded and
celebrated as a sign of how things can and should be.)

Vivian Buck was adopted by the Dobbs family, who had raised
(but later sent away) her mother, Carrie. As Vivian Alice Elaine
Dobbs, she attended the Venable Public Elementary School of
Charlottesville for four terms, from September 1930 until May
1932, a month before her death. She was a perfectly normal, quite
average student, neither particularly outstanding nor much trou-
bled. In those days before grade inflation, when C meant “good, 81-
87” (as defined on her report card) rather than barely scraping by,
Vivian Dobbs received A’s and B’s for deportment and C’s for all
academic subjects but mathematics (which was always difficult for
her, and where she scored D) during her first term in Grade 1A,
from September 1930 to January 1931. She improved during her
second term in 1B, meriting an A in deportment, C in mathematics,
and B in all other academic subjects; she was on the honor roll in
April 1931. Promoted to 2A, she had trouble during the fall term
of 1931, failing mathematics and spelling but receiving A in deport-
ment, B in reading, and C in writing and English. She was “re-
tained in 2A” for the next term-<>r “left back” as we used to say,
and scarcely a sign of imbecility as I remember all my buddies who
suffered a similar fate. In any case, she again did well in her final
term, with B in deportment, reading, and spelling, and C in writing,
English, and mathematics during her last month in school. This
offspring of “lewd and immoral” women excelled in deportment
and performed adequately, although not brilliantly, in her academic
subjects.

In short, we can only agree with the conclusion that Dr.
Lombardo has reached in his research on Buck v. Bell-there were
no imbeciles, not a one, among the three generations of Bucks. I

1985] CARRIE BUCK’S DAUGHTER 339

don’t know that such correction of cruel but forgotten errors of his-
tory counts for much, but it is at least satisfying to learn that forced
eugenic sterilization, a procedure of such dubious morality, earned
its official justification (and won its most quoted line of rhetoric) on
a patent falsehood.

Carrie Buck died last year. By a quirk of fate, and not by
memory or design, she was buried just a few steps from her only
daughter’s grave. In the umpteenth and ultimate verse of a favorite
old ballad, a rose and a brier-the sweet and the bitter-emerge
from the tombs of Barbara Allen and her lover, twining about each
other in the union of death. May Carrie and Vivian, victims in dif-
ferent ways and in the flower of youth, rest together in peace.

Response Papers

Responses should be no more than 2 pages, double spaced, 12 point Times New Roman font, standard margins. They must include a brief introduction and a conclusion and need to incorporate each of the assigned texts for that week.

Use the following questions as a guide:

What overarching themes/issues/ideas do the readings address?

How do they connect, or speak to each other?

Do the authors make any compelling or convincing arguments?

Please do not summarize the material. These short papers give you an opportunity to synthesize and analyze the information. You may quote from them, but not extensively. No citations or outside sources necessary.