To think that nearly any child could become a genius with early training?

[crunchymint]

I have been reading about psychologist László Polgár who thought that any child could become a genius in a chosen field with early training. As an experiment, he trained his daughters in chess from age 4. All three went on to become chess prodigies, and the youngest, Judit, is considered the best female player in history.

If you're talking about being a world champion at something rather than simply being a genius then yes, of course. Most world champions have been training in their field since very little because that is how competitive those things are.

Whether you should is a totally different argument (I think no) but it's certainly possible, yes, absolutely. Even with special needs but in that situation with the caveat that the skill is chosen to fit the child's needs.

It will be much more interesting if for his experiment he didn't just use his own daughter's but random children in various home situations with different genes - then the answer to whether early training makes a clear significant difference on "genius" level would be more clear

moon My brother was an amazing drawer and painter born into a non artistic family. Art teachers kept saying how he was extremely talented. He has hardly drawn since leaving school.

Kids brains are constantly changing and being rewired so I think any kid could be very good at something mental (chess, maths, languages etc) with the right training and practice. It's just a matter of getting the brain to rewire itself in response to the right stimulation.

Physical activities are a different matter. We appear to be genetically predisposed to be good at stuff and not as good at other stuff. Some people process oxygen very efficiently so would be great at endurance sports (cycling, running etc). Tall people are better at swimming freestyle than short people, who are better at breaststroke and butterfly. You can always train to improve but if you don't have the right genes you'll never be the best.

If I had 12 hours every day to spend solely concentrating on a single child's education then sure ... But that's unrealistic and I would hate to be that poor kid. It would be boring for me too. Things like that are reason suicide rates in Asian countries are so high

Presumably though Polgar picked chess as something that he had a lot of knowledge and skill. As well as inheriting a high level of intelligence from their parents their aptitude was likely skewed towards the intellectual type needed to succeed at chess. Difficult to separate the nature from the nurture.

Being a success in life is about much more than being intelligent. It can help sure but it can also be a hindrance if the message given to you in childhood is that’s what matters.
My DH came from a family like this, all praised for schoolwork and coming “ top of the class” As the one with dyslexia his self esteem was rock bottom. I don’t think any of them were geniuses but they were clever enough. Hot houses you would call it nowadays but not my husband ( he was pretty much written off)
Three sisters hugely successful academically but rubbish at actual work life. Two alcoholics, one with MH problems who has never held down a job long term in her life.

Being able to read at four is nothing to do with being a genius though. Being able to read is a relatively easy thing to do that nearly everyone can master. And four is not unusually early, for a child who's had a lot of support.

YABU. Talents just aren't evenly distributed, I'm afraid.
I've had a few discussions with people which go like this:
Me: I always hated PE. I was terrible at it.
Second person: Ah, well, you should've worked harder at it.
Me: But I'd still have been terrible.
SP: How do you know?
Me: Well, when I throw anything, it goes in the wrong direction. When I try to catch something, I fall over. And I always come last in races.
SP: But what makes you think you're any worse than anyone else who doesn't work at it?
Me: I've only got one working lung.
SP: Ah, well, that's different.
But, honestly, why IS it different? Why does the fact that I was born with only one working lung absolve me, whereas being born Person Most Likely To Trip Over doesn't?
But here's the thing. Life doesn't have to be a competition.Telling kids they can be the top of every field if they work at it sets them up for massive disappointment, whereas telling them they're just naturally good or bad at things implies you can't change how good you are at something, and you might as well not try.
Better, surely, to say that you can be "your personal best" at anything you like - if you want to be - and if it really doesn't float your boat, that's ok too. In adulthood, being shit at rounders has had very little impact upon my life. Being the best choral singer I can be - which is still pretty mediocre, but, you know, okay - has saved my life.

Crunchymint have you read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell? It addresses some of the questions you've raised, though research has moved on since it was published, and some of his ideas don't quite hold true. When you're born also has a link to how good you get at some things (he discovered that the players in Canada's hockey league all had birthdays early on in the year after the cut-off dates for age groupings- those children were bigger and had more physical prowess earlier, so they got picked for training, so of course at higher ages they were already better because they'd had so many extra hours put into their training.

I think many children could be far more advanced in many areas if they began younger, but not all. And is it entirely desirable? I don't know. Some people are happy just being ok at things.

haba No I haven't read that, thanks I will. Interesting about the hockey league.

carefree Not unusually early I agree. But this was every child in the class and was down to the school. My point is that most children are capable of achieving far more at an earlier age.
The question of whether that is desirable is a totally different one.

Nocake, agree about rewiring but also think there is a difference in brain processing.

3 dc all bright but the youngest has a faster processing speed than the others which makes him appear smarter.

This became apparent for 11+ as him and various others children could all do the papers but the difference was he could fly through the papers.His cousin could do the work but not in the same timeframe so got less marks...is my dc smarter? I don't think so, just that he can process quickly which in exams helps.In the world of work this becomes less important as knowledge is knowledge and other skills such as people management take over.

I also have a brother who has a fantastic memory...this makes him appear smart as he is the guy who can remember stuff.

Being a quick reader is also a huge advantage during most standardised testing as it allows longer thinking/answering time per question.

Is a quicker reader necessarily cleverer? Many clever people will read quickly but it's not the same thing.

Could almost all children learn to read by the age of 4? Probably. Could almost all children become 'geniuses'? I doubt it. As pp have said, it wasn't much of a reliable experiment if a highly intelligent professor used his own children as an example.

As someone who's taught from low ability kids in deprived areas to highly intelligent kids in selective private schools, I've often reflected on how differently a child from one setting might have fared in the other. But I still don't think it's all down to nurture.

There are definitely different levels of innate qualities that enable some people to achieve height that others can't. I think they are mostly personality traits, tenacity and the tendency to obsession being the key ingredients.

Some people feel great repeating the same activity 100 times a day, others are going to lose it very quickly if forced to any such thing.

Some children genuinely want to play piano, or draw, or play chess, or whatever for 8-16 hours a day. They are always going to be fabulously better at the activity in question than children that want to do a variety of activities every day.

BUT. Almost anyone could get good at anything they wanted to improve at. Natural talent isn't a limit that many people encounter for real in their lives (olympic level athletes being an obvious exception). So talent is no where near as important in everyday life/study/work etc. as most people think.

There are population variations, but most people never really encounter the limits caused by them and could therefore always improve at anything they had a real desire to improve at.

The requirement is an IQ over 140.
Which types of tests though? I, like I’m sure many people, score very differently in verbal vs numerical vs visio-spacial IQ tests.

It's hard to know. I got 4 grade 8 musics etc and spent 10,00 hours plus on music as a teenager so not surprisingly I was pretty good but also have a genetic quirk of absolute/perfect pitch (not that that necessarily makes you better at music) and parents prepared to pay for piano and music theory lessons and both parents were quite musical - genes,l environment, parental encouragement and 10,000 hours of work. 3 of my children won music scholarships again is that genes or hard work or home environment?

i have non identical twins (so slightly different genes). One is very good at most sports - whatever it is he will be good at it very quickly from skiing to badminton. If you loko at a video of him and his twin aged about 2 crawling the sporty one was great, the other only ever put 3 limbs on the floor, roll on to them on bikes a few years later and you still see the same pattern. i really don't think we told one you are so good at sport keep at it and the other one you are useless better stick to something else. So I do think genes come into it too.

No. I think a true genius is very rare. The term is over used these days anyway.

I think the ceiling on intelligence/ability is set, but nurture and practice determine how close to that ceiling you get

I suppose we should start with a definition of genius - eg just intelligence or do we include being the best in the world at music, chess, football etc?

I've just rooted out the letter from MENSA that my daughter got when she was 12, she took the cattell B test and scored 144. This makes her in the top 2% but wasn't high enough to get her into it. She's not remotely bothered and decided she didn't want to take the test again when I asked her.

I would not class top 2% as anyway even in the ballpark of genius.By that reckoning there would be at least one genius in the average 2 school classes!
I would say maybe 1 in a million.But then often geniuses are only good in one area rather than generally intelligent.I think their brains are wired differently.

I remember doing a logic puzzle in our student house. Everyone in the room comfortably top 1% if not top 0.1% based on A Level results. The puzzle said that each letter stood for a digit, and we were to solve the puzzle to find all ten digits.

The puzzle was something like (but not exactly):

NORMAN +
ROBERT
EDWARD

Now, five of us picked up paper and pencil and started writing out simultaneous equations with equalities and less than all over the place.

But the sixth, the cleverest person I've ever met, just looked at the paper for about ten seconds and started saying, "D is four ... A is nine" and so on. He had never seen it before, and he was absolutely spot on. It was incredible to just watch him see the answer as though he was merely reading it off the question paper.

When I think about genius brain, I think about him. His processing was just unparalleled.

DS is at prep school, where pretty much all the parents have been pushing their children to become geniuses from birth. Trust me, it hasn't worked.