The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens Read Free Book Online Page A

highest Piaget level in their area of expertise but thinking like their age-mates in all other ways. At the time, Feldman felt that he had proven his point (though he would later change his mind regarding whether the prodigies were actually demonstrating formal operational thought).
    Feldman’s prodigy definition served his purposes well. As the guiding threshold for an entire field of study, though, there were some bugs to work out. Child prodigies presumably have unique internal wiring that leads to their astounding abilities. Any study of child prodigies would ideally screen for children with such wiring and exclude others. But according to Feldman’s definition, the ultimate yardstick forprodigiousness is a child’s level of achievement—an imprecise indicator of the child’s intrinsic abilities.
    Still, Feldman’s definition provided an anchor for a field that had long drifted through the scientific backwaters. With a definition in place, other researchers had somewhere to start. They could use Feldman’s definition, critique it, or argue for alternative criteria;a more rigorous scientific debate could begin.
    Feldman had meant to move on from child wonders once he finished his initial experiment. “I said it many times, that I don’t care about child prodigies. I’m not particularly interested in them,” Feldman recalled. “But that was just denying what was really true at another level.”
    He couldn’t resist the inherent mystery of children with remarkably advanced abilities. He expanded his initial prodigy study to includethree additional children: a writer, a mathematician, and a jack-of-all-trades prodigy who inhaled languages, math, science, and music. This last prodigy, Adam Konantovich (a pseudonym), didn’t technically satisfy Feldman’s prodigy criteria. Adam seemed preternaturally talented in many areas (one psychology professor said Adam was the most gifted child ever to take the Stanford-Binet) but didn’t yet have a single area of specialty. Feldman reckoned with his definition of prodigiousness and decided that it was the sort of rule that could bend a little bit. As he put it in
Nature’s Gambit,
the book he and his collaborator, Lynn T. Goldsmith, wrote about their prodigy research, “any theory worth its salt should be able to say something about talents like Adam’s.” So he included him in his study.
    The difficulty of using such criteria to identify prodigies is further illustrated in a dissertation written by one of Feldman’s students. The author, Martha Morelock, studied two children who she believed had IQs higher than 200—one of whom was a prodigy, and one of whom was (technically speaking) not.
    Bethany Marshall (a pseudonym) qualified as a child prodigy. Bethany was born limp and not breathing. The doctors revived her, but she stopped breathing again later that night. The doctors discovered bloodin her spinal fluid—the product, they said, of a blood vessel bursting under her skull during her rapid delivery. The doctors warned her parents that she might have suffered other damage.
    Bethany began speaking at eight months, and when she was nine months old, she grew captivated by letters. She began memorizing verse at eighteen months and whole books from the library around the time she turned two. She wrote stories at three and poetry at six. The words seemed to come to her mind spontaneously; initially, they were accompanied by music. An adult writer judged the poetry Bethany had produced from the time she was eight equal to that of an adult professional—hence a prodigy, according to Feldman’s definition.
    Michael Kearney, on the other hand, technically missed the prodigy cutoff. Like Bethany, Michael had a traumatic birth. His birth weight was a mere four pounds, and he had an APGAR (the score used to assess a baby’s condition after birth) of two out of a possible ten. His parents