Why Child Prodigies Are Important

Abstract

Prodigies have only been studied scientifically during the past century, but have added to what is known about a number of important questions. Studying prodigies has helped better understand the nature of giftedness, intelligence, creativity, the brain, physical and cultural evolution, and knowledge, skill and expertise. Although the number of studies is still small, there is a growing body of work that helps inform the field and promises to continue to contribute to our understanding of prodigies and their development.

Full text

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Why Child Prodigies Are Important
David Henry Feldman
Tufts University
Abstract. Prodigies have only been studied scientifically during the past
century, but have added to what is known about a number of important
questions. Studying prodigies has helped better understand the nature of
giftedness, intelligence, creativity, the brain, physical and cultural evolution,
and knowledge, skill and expertise. Although the number of studies is still
small, there is a growing body of work that helps inform the field and
promises to continue to contribute to our understanding of prodigies and
their development.
Introduction. Prodigies have been among us for millennia, have astonished
us with their uncanny abilities and other worldly gifts. The great impact of
prodigies has been recorded through history: the boy David slaying the
giant Goliath; the boy Jesus confounding the money lenders in the temple
of Jerusalem; the teenage Joan of Arc leading an army on the battlefields
of France; Mozart’s compositions that seem to come from the hand of God;

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Bobby Fischer conquering the world of chess while still a teen; all of the
leaders of the Tibetan Buddhist religion, and many others.
Clearly, prodigies have been important in Eastern and Western
civilization for as long as there have been Eastern and Western
Civilizations. Their contributions to various challenging and valued fields of
endeavor have been the stuff of legend and their achievements have set
standards nearly impossible to comprehend let alone achieve. If so, then
why do we need to ask why prodigies are important? It will be my purpose
in this paper to show that, while prodigies have undoubtedly been important
in a number of ways, they have been important in a number of new ways in
the century or so that they have become subject to scientific study.
For most of history, prodigies were taken as evidence to support
beliefs about natural, supernatural, religious or secular events, particularly
as signs of impending changes in the natural or supernatural order, or proof
of the claims of one or another religious group, as evidence to support the
“rightness” or inevitability of power structures or attempts to change power
structures. Prodigies have been interpreted as “miracles” from God or the
gods, as portents or signs of changes in weather, natural events such as
earthquakes or tsunami, the divine right of kings, and as “proof” that a
belief in reincarnation, astrology or alchemy was well grounded in real

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events. Prodigies, then, were of relatively little interest in themselves. Their
purpose, rather, was in the service of something else that had little directly
to do with the prodigy. What changed in recent decades is that the prodigy
became of scientific interest on its own terms, and the aim of the present
essay is to assay contributions to our understanding of the prodigy have
yielded to date.
Early Prodigy Research. The earliest studies of child prodigies were done
during the first decades of the twentieth century. The studies were not
frequent; in fact there were only a few published works. The great Alfred
Binet published a study of the child visual artist Tade Styka (Binet, 1909).
Hungarian psychologist Geza Revesz published a book on the music
prodigy Ervin Nyiregyhazi in 1916 (Revesz, 1916), and Swiss psychologist
Franziszka Baumgarten wrote a book about nine prodigies that was
published in 1930 (Baumgarten, 1930). To my knowledge, these are the
only major works to appear in the scientific literature in advance of a more
than fifty year hiatus. Prodigy research began again in 1986 with my book
with Lynn Goldsmith (Feldman, with Goldsmith, 1986) and the field has
produced a small but steady stream of findings over the past thirty or so
years.

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The early studies were initial efforts to understand the child prodigy
on its own terms. What was the nature of the gift that the prodigy
possessed? How did the prodigy come to perform at such high levels at
such young ages? What were the origins of the prodigy’s talents in terms of
family, culture, training and opportunity? How were prodigies similar and/or
different from other children? How did prodigies perform on newly available
tests of intelligence? What could society do to foster prodigies and help
them fulfill their potential?
These early studies of prodigies were remarkably sophisticated and
some of the questions asked are still relevant and the evidence gathered
would still hold up well nearly a century later. These works are legitimately
thought of as classics in the field. For reasons that are not altogether clear,
however, research on prodigies all but ceased until the 1980s. Between
1930 and about 1980 some activity did occur, although it was carried out by
people in the prodigy’s fields themselves, professional writers, science
journalists, or the prodigies themselves.
There were occasional works within fields such as music and chess
by music scholars or teachers and chess scholars or teachers (e.g.,
Collins, 1974), and science journalists wrote interesting articles or books
about famous or infamous prodigies. The famous mathematics prodigy

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Boris Sidis was the subject of such efforts (Montour, 1977; Wallace, 1986).
A few child prodigies wrote autobiographies (e.g. Wiener, 1953). All of
these works are valuable, but of course they are not scientific research.
I have estimated that fewer than 50 child prodigies have been studied
since Binet first published his work (Binet, 1909). Virtually all research to
date has been of cases, one or several individuals, and in fields like chess,
music, art, mathematics and writing most often. Research methods tend to
be interview based with the children, their parents, teachers and others
who support the child’s preparation. Psychologists have sometimes given
samples of standard intelligence and other tests to children as well as
activities designed to assess specific abilities in their focus area (e.g. ask a
child to repeat a melody, compose a short piece on the piano, or improvise
on a theme).
Research on prodigies has tended not to be hypothesis driven, but
rather exploratory. Most investigators seek to understand the prodigy
better, especially the amazing talents that she or he displays and their
relationship to other forms of intelligence (especially IQ). Scholars have
also explored concerns about the experience of the prodigy and possible
ways in which that experience may deviate from other children. Given their
unusual gifts, do they experience a “normal” life? Are they similar to other

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children in most respects, or are they extreme in ways other than in their
special area of talent? And scholars have tended to speculate on the future
of their young subjects. Revesz (1916) predicted of his twelve years piano
and composition prodigy Ervin Nyiregyhazi that he might well be the next
Mozart. In fact, Revesz was dismissive of “infant prodigies” for their
“imitative” abilities and their lack of creativity and saw young Ervin as a true
musical talent of the highest order (although see Bazzana, 2007).
The small amount of research notwithstanding, child prodigies have,
especially in recent decades, shed light on some of the major issues in the
fields of gifted studies, creativity, and intelligence. In the remaining sections
of this paper, I will summarize some of the important contributions that
research on prodigies have made to central issues in fields associated with
the prodigy phenomenon.
The nature of giftedness. Almost since the field began, there have been
questions about the extent to which giftedness is a broad, general ability
versus a more specific talent for particular kinds of activities. For most of its
century or work, the field favored the more general interpretation of
giftedness, especially as IQ became such a prominent and powerful
technology for assessing intelligence. One of the earliest theory-driven
interpretations of the child prodigy was by Leta Hollingworth (1942).

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Hollingworth studied cases of 180 or higher Stanford-Binet IQ and believed
that a score in that range was necessary for a child to be labelled a prodigy.
This was part of a trend to impose qualitative categories along the IQ bell
curve, with designations like “imbecile” and “idiot” at the lower end of the
scale and “gifted” and “genius” at the higher end. Hollingworth believed that
child prodigies were beyond “genius”, i.e., beyond an IQ score of 140-160.
This way of interpreting the prodigy tended to be accepted until recent
decades.
Research in the past thirty years (Feldman, with Goldsmith, 1986;
Feldman & Morelock, 2011; Ruthsatz & Urbach, 2012) has shown that child
prodigies vary greatly in their IQ scores. Recognized cases have scored as
low as about 100 and as high as above 200, depending on the test.
Ruthsatz and colleagues (Ruthsatz & Urbach, 2012) have found systematic
differences among prodigies in different fields, such that child artists and
musicians required about average IQ to support their specific talents, while
child mathematicians and chess players tended to have much higher IQ
scores, leading to the interpretation that the prodigy gift is a combination of
general and specific abilities, with at least average general ability
necessary for all forms of child prodigy, but for some fields a higher
minimum IQ is probably necessary (Feldman & Morelock, 2011).

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For the question of general versus specific abilities as the nature of
giftedness, child prodigies have tended to indicate that it is a combination
of a known degree of general intelligence and an extreme degree of
specific intelligence that defines giftedness. General ability is necessary but
not sufficient for giftedness (and in some instances, only average general
ability), while extreme specific abilities are necessary as well. The
important distinctions are among various combinations of general and
specific abilities that characterize various expressions of potential. By
showing that general and specific talents are essential to the expression of
gifted potential, child prodigies have helped resolve one of the oldest and
most tendentious issues in the field.
The Nature of Intelligence. The same findings that have helped to clarify
the nature of giftedness have at the same time helped redefine the nature
of intelligence. Since the field began, there have been debates between “g”
general and “s” (specific) definitions of intelligence (Gardner, Kornhaber, &
Wake, 1996). For most of its history, psychometrics has used IQ as its
operational definition of intelligence. That “g” oriented view has been
challenged many times, and in the past few decades new challenges from
the “s” side have appeared in the scholarly literature, most notably the

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“triarchic” theory of Robert Sternberg (2011) and the thory of Multiple
Intelligences by Howard Gardner (1983).
As with giftedness, people tended to join one camp or the other, but
general intelligence has held the high ground, with some shifting taking
place as a result of the more contemporary work on specific intelligences
(Gardner, 1983; Sternberg, 2011). Child prodigies have been used in
Gardner’s MI theory as specific data to support the claim that there are
separate intelligences for at least seven or eight kinds of abilities. The claim
is that a child prodigy has an extreme dose of (usually) one specific form of
intelligence (spatial, musical, linguistic, etc.) but not necessarily extreme
doses of any other and not necessarily an extreme dose of IQ. Child
prodigies are offered as a kind of existence proof; if children exist who are
only exceptional in a single area, then the claim that intelligence should
apply to any specific domain is weakened. Child prodigies have helped to
resolve a false either-or belief that intelligence has to be either general or
specific. In fact, it is both.
The Nature of Creativity. It is often assumed that child prodigies are
creative. That is no doubt true, but as the field of creativity studies has
evolved, it has become clear that creativity is not one thing but several
(Feldman, 1997; Kaufmann, 2009; Winner, 1997). Prodigies tend to be

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masters of an existing domain; that is, what is striking about the prodigy’s
achievement is that it happens to early. Children are able to do things that
most others do not approach until well into adulthood, if at all. They rarely
make major transformations to their domain; Mozart was clearly an
exception (Fairclough & Farnham, 2014). In this respect, then, the creativity
of the prodigy is of a more modest sort. They may add a distinctive
interpretation to an existing piece of music, or transpose it for a different
instrument, but most prodigies in music and other fields work within existing
forms.
For creativity studies, prodigies have helped clarify the relationship
between the activity of the individual practitioner or performer and the
domain in which their activity takes place. Prodigies for the most part
contribute to their domains by their rapid achievement of difficult levels of
performance, but these levels of performance are shared with others who
have reached the highest levels of their craft. The innovations that
prodigies contribute tend to be of a modest sort: add technology to their
performance; approach traditionally formal material in a more informal way;
bring unique personal qualities into their performances. These are
important forms of creativity and deserve to be recognized as such. On the
other hand, we need to remember that the meaning of creativity now

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includes several forms, and the creativity of the prodigy tends to be a
modest form.
The Nature of the Brain. Remarkably, there has been no research on the
prodigy brain using recent imaging technologies. Nor, as far as I know,
have there been brain studies using more traditional methods. And yet,
prodigies almost certainly must have distinctive brain structure and/or brain
function. How can we understand the prodigy without learning about the
prodigy brain as compared with the brains of others such as savants, brain
damaged individuals, or less gifted people in their own fields?
In spite of the absence of research on prodigy brains, there have
been some interesting speculations on possible ways that prodigy brains
might differ from others. One line of thought uses evidence from
anthropology, evolution and brain studies to form hypotheses about the
origins of and special anatomical and functional qualities of the prodigy
(Vandenberg, 2009). In this work, the prodigy is the likely product of two
sets of changes in the brains of our species: increases in size of both the
cerebrum (front of the brain) and the cerebellum (lower rear of the brain).
Both area showed dramatic increases in volume that were during the same
period of increasing domesticity and stability in human populations. The

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evidence appears to point to these areas as sites of the increasing
specialization of human cultural and social life.
For purposes of understanding prodigies, the cerebellum may be the
more interesting area. According to Vandenberg (2009), the cerebellum
increased in volume even more than the cerebrum during the period of
increased domestication. This, along with research on savant syndrome
and suppression of brain areas (e.g. Snyder, 2009), suggests that the
cerebellum may be the site of the special talents that make a prodigy
possible. Although traditionally known as an area of the brain responsible
for balance, it now appears that the cerebellum may also contain modules
devoted to specific kinds of abilities, among them may be music, drawing,
writing, time, space and logic. A prodigy may be a child who has a
reasonably well developed cerebrum, associated with an exceptionally
developed cerebellum area. A savant may be someone with the same sort
of cerebellar specific site, but lacking the cerebrum development to make it
viable in the social/cultural world (Feldman & Morelock, 2011).
Again, these are possible ways that the prodigy brain may be able to
help us understand locations and functions of various brain areas. No
actual findings can yet be reported. Even if there were such findings, we
would want to know the ways in which different relevant areas of the brain

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are interconnected, and even how individual neuronal connections may
differ from brain to brain. There is reason to suspect that “wiring” patterns
will help unravel the mysteries of the prodigy brain and how it works, but we
are still only able to speculate about these matters. Hopefully research will
soon begin to add information to allow us to put these speculations to
empirical test.
The Nature of Physical and Cultural Evolution. In our 1986 book on six
case studies of prodigies (Feldman, with Goldsmith, 1986), we offered a
broad framework within which to interpret the prodigy; that framework was
labelled co-incidence. Co-incidence was intended to show the joint
influence of a number of contributing factors to the appearance and
development of prodigies. It included, for example, the claim that physical
evolution produced variations in specific abilities, sometimes extreme
variations, that were the natural sources of the prodigy’s great gifts in
music, chess, mathematics, art and other fields. Also included in the co-
incidence matrix were considerations of the state of the domains in which
prodigies appear. For example, at the time that a child was born and raised,
was there an appropriate domain available through which his or her
extreme gifts could be expressed. Other factors in the co-incidence matrix

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included family qualities, material resources, technologies, pedagogies and
chance events.
Our claim was that when a prodigy appears, it represents an
improbable but lawful functioning of the interactions among the relevant co-
incidence factors, held in productive coordination for a sufficiently long
period of time for the power of the child’s natural potentials to be released
through the relevant domain. What this analysis may have revealed are
some of the common and distinct qualities of physical as compared with
cultural evolution. The prodigy affirmed that the relationship between nature
and culture, while not closely coordinated, is nonetheless critical for the
fulfilment of human potential.
Because prodigies are extreme, they reveal co-incidence factors and
processes more sharply than tends to be true for the rest of humanity. For
the prodigy, his or her gift tends to be pure, deep, narrow and exceptionally
powerful, constrained by a single domain in most cases. Prodigies, as we
claimed, are usually single purpose individuals. Their amazing potential
depends, however, on the existence of an available domain through which
to channel their abilities, and it is cultural evolution, including preservation
of valuable artifacts, technologies, techniques for practice, and established
sequences of levels of mastery, that provides the fertile ground for prodigy

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development. In the absence of such cultural resources, the probabilities of
a prodigy being able to develop to full potential are greatly diminished.
The prodigy offers a way to better comprehend how the natural
variation in abilities has undoubtedly existed for millennia, waiting for
cultures to create, nurture, preserve, and share domains of activity uniquely
calibrated to the prodigy’s special talents and abilities. When the timing is
optimal, prodigies may appear. When the timing is less than optimal, the
probability of a prodigy appearing is much less. In this respect, a prodigy is
an affirmation of the power of physical evolution and the wisdom of cultural
evolution jointly expressed. Cultures eventually have made prodigy
producing domains available to potential prodigy children.
Of course whether or not prodigies actually appear and develop
sufficiently to fully express their extreme potential depends on more than
physical and cultural evolution. Also required are those who try to “harness
the forces of co-incidence” (Feldman, with Goldsmith, 1986), the parents,
teachers, institutions and gatekeepers who are responsible for guiding the
processes and helping them stay in productive coordination. The children
themselves may contribute to this process, but during most of the
development of their gifts (about ten years typically), children must depend
upon others to make wise decisions. In our research, families moved

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around the world to get access to what they believed to be the optimal
environment to support their child’s gift (Feldman, with Goldsmith, 1986;
Rolfe, 1978).
We have begun to understand how nature and culture are in a
continuous dance, with nature’s contributions likely to have remained
relatively unchanged over thousands of years, while cultures are
increasingly able to produce conditions that take fuller advantage of what
nature offers. Over historical time cultures have found ways to utilize
potential in certain domains to exceptional degrees. These tend to be the
domains in which prodigies appear.
As part of this same analysis, it became clear that human evolution
must have produced variations in two broad forms of intelligence: general
and specific (Feldman, with Goldsmith, 1986). For prodigies, their natural
gifts are dramatically marked with amazing abilities in very specific
domains. And yet, it also became clear that these powerful specific gifts
would not be able to develop fully without support from more general
intellectual abilities (usually referenced with IQ). A prodigy is a specific
combination of general and specific abilities, varying from domain to
domain how much general intelligence is required to support the specific
gift. This observation has also led us to offer an interpretation of the savant

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as a child whose specific domain gifts may match the prodigy, but who lack
the more general intelligence needed for development of a culturally valued
and rewarded form of expertise (Feldman & Morelock, 2011).
The prodigy, then, has helped reveal how general and specific
abilities play themselves out within existing culturally preserved domains,
helping us to understand better how nature and culture work, independently
and in concert.
The same processes that are involved in producing prodigies (and savants)
are involved in the development of potential in the rest of humanity, but are
more difficult to see in less clear cut cases. The very extremes in variation
of the prodigy provide a glimpse into nature, culture and development of
potential that have general applicability. The prodigy helps understand
ourselves as biological and cultural organisms.
The Nature of Knowledge. There are only a small number of domains in
which prodigies appear, primarily music, chess, preaching, mathematics
and art. The latter has only been a prodigy producing domain in recent
decades, at least in Western cultures, and is in some respects a special
case. Depending upon the definition one accepts for a prodigy, fields like
sports, acting, poetry and fiction writing, and programming have also had

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prodigies. We may ask what it is about the domains where prodigies
appear that makes them fruitful contexts for prodigy development. Why are
there such a relatively small number of domains where prodigies appear?
Trying to answer this question has helped answer other questions about
the nature of knowledge, skill and expertise. The great Swiss
developmental epistemologist Piaget was a student of knowledge, but the
kind of knowledge Piaget studied was of a universal sort, that is, the kind of
knowledge that all human beings come to be able to acquire and make
their own. Piaget’s contributions to what we know about knowledge,
enormous as they are, tell us very little about more specific kinds of
knowledge. Piaget acknowledged as much in a number of places (e.g.
Bringuier, 1980).
Prodigies are of course amazing not for their universal knowledge
abilities but for their highly specialized, domain specific abilities. They are in
a sense at the opposite extreme from the shared knowledge capabilities
that each of us comes to construct as a human being. By trying to
understand what it is that makes prodigy knowledge and skill possible, we
begin to learn about the likely evolution and significance of these domains.
We know, for example, that prodigy producing domains tend to have highly
structured rules and highly adapted technologies that make it possible for

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children to access them. For example, a quarter sized violin makes it
possible for a child of three to develop mastery of an instrument that would
otherwise be too large and unwieldy.
It also tends to be true that prodigy knowledge domains are
venerable, have been part of human cultures for centuries if not millennia.
This does not necessarily mean that the specific way in which knowledge is
expressed has existed for that long, but that the specific knowledge
structures that are expressed through that activity have been part of human
history for a very long time. For example, chess itself may only be six or
seven hundred years old, but the combination of logic, foresight,
perseverance and exceptional memory that are required for excellent chess
play have produced in extreme forms for much of human history. Cultures
have found ways to utilize these special gifts and talents by creating
artifacts that benefit from them, practices that require them, and
technologies that allow them to be developed even by exceptional young
children.
As special purpose individuals, as contrasted with Piaget’s universal
mind, the prodigy offers insight into variation and extreme single purpose
gifts. For purposes of adaptiveness and expression of potential, these
special, distinct, and highly focused abilities may be as important to human

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survival and well- being as the universal knowledge structures that Piaget
taught us about. Physical evolution, after all, produces common traits that
make up the core of our species as well as variations that make us the
unique individuals that we all become. Prodigies help us appreciate and
understand the nature of the variations, and also the relationship between
common and uncommon forms of knowledge. The prodigy helps create a
more balanced the view of intelligence, knowledge and achievement by
showing how domain specific knowledge contributes to expression of
potential.
Conclusion. Prodigies have been with us for millennia, but for most of that
time they were not studied as important sources of understanding about
development and the fulfillment of potential. In the past century, the
scientific study of prodigies, while still only a small area of research, has
proven fruitful in furthering our understanding of a number of challenging
issues about the nature of giftedness, intelligence, creativity, the brain,
evolution and knowledge. Rather than viewing prodigies as evidence to
support beliefs about supernatural causes, divine control, reincarnation,
astrology or other causes, prodigies are now being studied for what they
can teach us about human potential and its development. We can look

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forward to further insights from our prodigies as we learn better how to
study them.
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