The Myth of Prodigy

They learn to read at age two, play Bach at four, fluently speak foreign languages by six, and breeze through calculus at eight. Their classmates shudder with envy; their parents rejoice at winning the lottery. Prodigious children make headlines in ever increasing number.

In the business of performing old music, the industry is relying on youth as never before. While symphony ticket sales are stagnant and classical album sales are plunging, talented teens are filling concert halls and putting CDs on the charts. The past few decades have seen more and more orchestras and record companies in the U.S. turning to youngsters to lift their sales. This trend is being seen in other industries too, such as in Indian TV shows featuring young musical talents. Indeed, today's swelling crop of prodigies reflects neither a sudden surge in talent among kids nor an improvement in teaching techniques. Instead, it reflects industry-specific economics, pure and simple.

So, who exactly is a child prodigy? In psychology, the term child prodigy is defined as a person under the age of ten who produces meaningful output in some domain to the level of an adult expert performer. Wikipedia maintains a dynamic list of child prodigies covering the past four centuries who rose to prominence in various disciplines spanning mathematics, music, science, sports, etc. It features luminaries such as Mozart, Rabindranath, Ramanujan, von Neumann, as well as Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”.

Ever wondered what happened to those wunderkinds from decades ago? Surely many of the prodigies on the Wikipedia list had reached the pinnacle of success in their respective domain. However, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, the careers of most tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Consider the most prestigious award in the US for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of science by one American president. Since its inception in 1942 and until 1994, the search recognized more than 2,000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 per cent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. Of course, these odds are better than 1 in 1000 (of non-prodigious individuals) making the list of Nobel laureates. Yet for every successful prodigy, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential.

To be a prodigy in music, for example, is to be a mimic, to reproduce what you hear from grown-up musicians. Yet only rarely do child musical prodigies manage to make the necessary transition from mimicry to creating a style of their own. The “prodigy midlife crisis,” as it has been called, proves fatal to all but a handful of would-be Mozarts. Early acquisition of skills — which is often what we mean by precocity — may thus be a misleading indicator of later success.

Precociousness is a slipperier subject than we ordinarily think. The notion of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement is much of the problem. Often the benefits of earlier mastery are overstated such as in the case of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Famously, Wolfgang Mozart started to compose music at age four; by six, he was traveling around Europe to give special performances with his father, Leopold; and went on to produce hundreds of highly regarded works before his death at the ripe early age of thirty-five.

Upon first glance, Wolfgang definitely supports the explanation that “talent” is genetic and not learned. However, if we take a closer look, we will find some very striking details that we may not have thought about before.

Leopold Mozart was a famous composer and performer in his own right.  He was also a very controlling parent who put Wolfgang in an intensive training program of music study starting at age three. Leopold was well qualified for this role as he was considered one of the most highly accomplished and sought-after teachers.  He also had a deep interest in how music is taught to children. In a way, Leopold was an 18th-century equivalent of a little league father.

Wolfgang’s early compositions have raised several questions upon close scrutiny by many scholars. These manuscripts are not written in Wolfgang’s own hand.  It seems Leopold always wanted to “correct” them before anyone else saw the compositions. It’s also interesting to note that Leopold stopped composing himself at about the same time he began teaching Wolfgang.

There are a few cases where some of Wolfgang’s compositions are not original.  In fact, the first four piano concertos written by him at the age of eleven do not contain any original music. They were put together using works by other composers. The next three works composed by the age of sixteen also do not contain any original music.  They are simply arrangements of works by Johann Christian Bach with whom Mozart happened to be studying with at the time in London. What these early works really represent are pieces by someone being trained as a composer by the usual methods of copying, arranging, and imitating the works of others.

The Piano Concerto No. 9, composed at the age of twenty-one, is considered Wolfgang Mozart’s first real masterpiece. This is still considered an early age, but we must remember that by this time, Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of gruelingly difficult, expert training.

Think about this for a minute.  If there was any magical talent that Wolfgang was born with, it still did not help him to produce his first masterpiece very quickly or easily. Contrary to the pervading myth, Mozart did not write music in his head as perfectly and completely as you might have originally thought! Today’s surviving manuscripts show that he was constantly revising, rewriting, crossing out, and reworking many sections of his music over time.

Mozart was the same as any of us but underwent intense training (or focused practice) at a very early age.  This is not something most of us do in our childhood.

The other way to look at precocity is of course to work backward — to look at adult geniuses and see what they were like as kids. A number of studies have taken this approach and uncovered a similar pattern. A study of 200 highly accomplished adults found that just 34 percent had been considered in any way precocious as children. The list of historical geniuses who had been notably undistinguished as children is rather long and includes Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Beethoven, Kant, and Leonardo Da Vinci.

Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. As it turns out, the skill of being a child prodigy is qualitatively different from the “skill” of being a creative genius. What holds the prodigies back is their lack of originality. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall or on Zee TV and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn't make new.

Research reveals that the more we practice, the more we become entrenched – trapped in familiar ways of thinking. On the other hand, the passion that drives one to practice for hours is discovered through natural curiosity or nurtured through early enjoyable experiences with an activity or many activities. If that passion is appropriately channelized, there may be sparks of geniuses. Evidence shows that creative contributions depend on the breadth, not just depth, of our knowledge and experience. 

Relative to typical scientists, Nobel Prize winners are twenty-two times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians; twelve times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels; seven times more likely to dabble in arts and crafts; and twice as likely to play an instrument or compose music. "The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition," Albert Einstein reflected. His mother enrolled him in violin lessons when he was five, but he wasn't intrigued. His love of music only blossomed as a teenager, after he stopped taking lessons and stumbled upon Mozart's sonatas. "Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty," he said.

Our romanticized view of precociousness matters. When certain kids are singled out as gifted or talented, it creates an environment that may be subtly discouraging to those who are just average. And we will never know how many kids, who might have been great achievers had they been encouraged and not discouraged from joining the fray, might have ended up as being very successful several years down the road.

The wisdom of wanting to provide learning environments suited to different paces of achievement is often overwhelmed by our irresistible desire to look at precociousness as a prediction. Predictions from childhood about adult performance can only be made based on relatively fixed traits. Unfortunately, many of the things that really matter in predicting adult success are not fixed at all. And once we begin to concede the importance of these kinds of non-intellectual, highly variable traits, we have to give up our fascination of precociousness.

Consider the story of two buildings. One is built ahead of schedule, and one is being built in New York City and comes in two years late and several million dollars over budget. Does anyone really care, ten years down the road, which building was built early and which building was built late? But, somehow, when it comes to children we feel the other way, that we get obsessed with schedules. If you want to know whether a ten-year-old musician will be a good musician when they’re twenty-one, you should wait until they’re twenty-one. It is impossible to predict which course a life will take.