Brains vs brawn

History's most eminent geniuses share a common trait: most would have been picked last for school sports teams

By Misty Harris, Canwest News Service


Researchers from the University of California discovered a negative association between IQ and physical health in youth.

Researchers from the University of California discovered a negative association between IQ and physical health in youth.
Photograph by: Photos.com,

Some of history's most eminent geniuses share a common trait, aside from their ability to make mere mortals look bad: most would have been picked last for school sports teams.

Analyzing archival data buried for more than 70 years, researchers from the University of California discovered a negative association between IQ and physical health in youth. Their study, which appears in the journal Psychological Science, draws on data concerning 282 geniuses, including Voltaire, Abraham Lincoln, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton and Michelangelo.

"We cannot always assume that good goes with good," says study co-author Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology. "We don't necessarily have the smart, stable, and fit on one side and the dumb, unstable, and sick on the other."

The study examined historical geniuses in 10 achievement categories: politicians, revolutionaries, military commanders, religious leaders, scientists, philosophers, informative writers, imaginative writers, composers and artists.

Across all groups — although less so for military men — Simonton and co-author Anna V. Song found superior intelligence was linked to inferior physical health during youth. While this could be a result of the sample's extreme selectivity, the researchers say it may also be that being "sickly" in youth helps accelerate intellectual development.

The philosopher Descartes, for example, was in such poor health as a boy that his teachers allowed him to sleep until noon. He later said it was during those morning hours that he came up with all his best ideas.

Horatio Nelson, the Royal Navy's most revered sailor, might never have been accepted into the British navy and become the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar were it not for a family connection, as he was a feeble, sickly child. Likewise, the writer Charles Dickens was prone to sickness and violent spasms as a child, both of which kept him away from physical games and glued to books.

"Instead of spending all that time on the basketball court or baseball field, the kid becomes the nerdy bookworm, joining science clubs and serving on the knowledge bowl team," explains Simonton. But while these characteristics might hold true in childhood, he adds, they don't necessarily continue into the genius' maturity.

"The genius CEO who was always picked last in gym class as a child might later become quite the terror on the tennis court."

The study uses data gathered for Catharine Cox's widely recognized genius studies in the early 1900s. Simonton notes that Cox would have been displeased with his findings since she strongly believed good goes with good — a concept that generally holds true for the average person but not for those Simonton calls "the cream of the cream of the cream."

Engineer John Saringer, whose medical devices have helped millions of people mitigate the effects of immobility, spent his childhood in and out of hospitals due to chronic health problems. Although Stouffville, Ont.-based Saringer says this made him "an outcast" among his peers, he believes the time alone put him on the path to success.

"By 15, I was playing blindfold chess against four players at once — and winning — taking charge of my own life very rapidly to become an empowered, financially independent adult," says Saringer, who was on his way to his first million by the age of 20.

Dan Hoch, principal of an elementary school in Airdrie, Alta., says the study echoes author and pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell's recent conclusion that 10,000 hours of practice is the critical threshold for providing people the experience needed to excel at something.

"If I'd had poor health as a kid, perhaps I would've been more housebound, done more reading and taken my studies more seriously," says Hoch, a lifelong athlete who recently learned his IQ is in the 99.9th percentile. "As it happened, I did well enough in school but I wasn't a high achiever."

Bob Yewchuk, an officer with Mensa Canada, based in Mississauga, Ont., whose IQ falls within the top two per cent of society, sees a bit of himself in the study but suspects physical prowess is just one small part of an achievement puzzle shaped by everything from parental influence to access, to resources.

"I was not an athletic person, partially due to my physical stature — or lack of it," says Yewchuk, "but I hesitate to draw any conclusions from that."

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned?

Friday, Feb. 13, 2009

By John Cloud

Is it possible to cultivate genius? Could we somehow structure our educational and social life to produce more Einsteins and Mozarts — or, more urgently these days, another Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes?

How to produce genius is a very old question, one that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. In the modern era, Immanuel Kant and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton wrote extensively about how genius occurs. Last year, pop-sociologist Malcolm Gladwell addressed the subject in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.

The latest, and possibly most comprehensive, entry into this genre is Dean Keith Simonton's new book Genius 101: Creators, Leaders, and Prodigies (Springer Publishing Co., 227 pages). Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, is one of the world's leading authorities on the intellectually eminent, whom he has studied since his Harvard grad-school days in the 1970s.

For most of its history, the debate over what leads to genius has been dominated by a bitter, binary argument: is it nature or is it nurture — is genius genetically inherited, or are geniuses the products of stimulating and supportive homes? Simonton takes the reasonable position that geniuses are the result of both good genes and good surroundings. His middle-of-the-road stance sets him apart from more ideological proponents like Galton (the founder of eugenics) as well as revisionists like Gladwell who argue that dedication and practice, as opposed to raw intelligence, are the most crucial determinants of success.

Too often, writers don't nail down exactly what they mean by genius. Simonton tries, with this thorough, slightly ponderous, definition: Geniuses are those who "have the intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance to acquire the needed expertise in a broadly valued domain of achievement" and who then make contributions to that field that are considered by peers to be both "original and highly exemplary." (Read TIME's 2007 cover story, "Are We Failing Our Geniuses?")

Fine, now how do you determine whether artistic or scientific creations are original and exemplary? One method Simonton and others use is to add up the number of times an individual's publications are cited in professional literature — or, say, the number of times a composer's work is performed and recorded. Other investigators count encyclopedia references instead. Such methods may not be terribly sophisticated, but the answer they yield is at least a hard quantity.

Still, there's an echo-chamber quality to this technique: genius is what we all say it is. Is there a more objective method? There are IQ tests, of course, but not all IQ tests are the same, which leads to picking a minimum IQ and calling it genius-level. Also, estimates of the IQs of dead geniuses tend to be fun, but they are based on biographical information that can be highly uneven. (Read TIME's 1999 cover story about the "I.Q. Gene.")

So Simonton falls back on his "intelligence, enthusiasm, and endurance" formulation. But what about accidental discoveries? Simonton mentions the case of biologist Alexander Fleming, who, in 1928, "noticed quite by chance that a culture of Staphylococcus had been contaminated by a blue-green mold. Around the mold was a halo." Bingo: penicillin. But what if you had been in Fleming's lab that day and noticed the halo first? Would you be the genius?

Recently, the endurance and hard work part of the achievement equation has gotten a lot of attention, and the role of raw talent and intelligence has faded a bit. The main reason for this shift in emphasis is the work of Anders Ericsson, a friendly rival of Simonton's who teaches psychology at Florida State University. Gladwell featured Ericsson's work prominently in Outliers. (See the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008.)

Ericsson has become famous for the 10-year rule: the notion that it takes at least 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of dedicated practice for people to master most complex endeavors. Ericsson didn't invent the 10-year rule (it was suggested as early as 1899), but he has conducted many studies confirming it. Gladwell is a believer. "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good," he writes. "It's the thing you do that makes you good."

Simonton rather dismissively calls this the "drudge theory." He thinks the real story is more complicated: deliberate practice, he says, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something. In a 2002 study, Simonton showed that the average IQ of 64 eminent scientists was around 150, fully 50 points higher than the average IQ for the general population. And most of the variation in IQs (about 80%, according to Simonton) is explained by genetics.

Personality traits also matter. Simonton writes that geniuses tend to be "open to experience, introverted, hostile, driven, and ambitious." These traits too are inherited — but only partly. They're also shaped by environment.

So what does this mean for people who want to encourage genius? Gladwell concludes his book by saying the 10,000-hour rule shows that kids just need a chance to show how hard they can work; we need "a society that provides opportunities for all," he says. Well, sure. But he dismisses the idea that kids need higher IQs to achieve success, and that's just wishful thinking. As I argued here, we need to do more to recognize and not alienate high-IQ kids. Too often, principals hold them back with age-mates rather than letting them skip grades.

Still, genius can be very hard to discern, and not just among the young. Simonton tells the story of a woman who was able to get fewer than a dozen of her poems published during her brief life. Her hard work availed her little — but the raw power of her imagery and metaphor lives on. Her name? Emily Dickinson.

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• http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1879593,00.html