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

were told that he would be developmentally retarded.
    Michael began talking at four months. At eight months, he told his parents when pears were on sale at the grocery store and requested that they buy Campbell’s soup. His parents asked him not to speak while they were shopping because people looked at them strangely. Michael gave his mother driving directions before he turned two. He reported that he composed songs in his head, sometimes improvisations on entire symphonies, but he didn’t know how to write the music down. Michael graduated from high school at six and college at ten.He went on to earn master’s degrees in chemistry and computer science before enrolling in a chemistry Ph.D. program.
    Bethany and Michael were both extraordinarily talented. Both endured traumatic birth experiences, evidenced a voracious hunger for knowledge, developed at breakneck speed, and spontaneously heard—and maybe even composed—music. But because Bethany had a specialty in which she reached professional status before the age of ten, she qualified as a prodigy, while Michael, who graduated from college at ten (not technically a professional), did not.
    It’s an imperfect definition. It’s based on accomplishments (an external rather than an internal guidepost), and the age cutoff—which was eventually softened—is somewhat arbitrary. Feldman didn’t even really mean for it to set the bar for prodigiousness—at least not initially. “I think it had some value,” he said. “I didn’t do it for the purpose of having it be a definition that would work for the field for all time. I did it because of what I was up to.”

    After Joanne met Garrett James and his autistic cousin Patrick, she graduated from Case Western and then hopscotched through a series of academic positions.Along the way, she wrote up her work with Garrett, but she kept quiet about any potential link between prodigy and autism. After all, her idea that the two were somehow connected was little more than a hunch.
    That hunch was a highly unorthodox one. In 2005, when Joanne was on the cusp of initiating a small prodigy study, no one searching for the underpinnings of child prodigies’ talents had suggested that they might have something to do with autism.
    But Joanne was determined to test the waters. Over the years, she had contacted the families of talented children she read about online or in the newspapers. She spoke with the mother of a child who was memorizing books at fourteen months and began adding at eighteen months. She reached out to the parents of a little girl whose paintings were selling for tens of thousands of dollars before she hit double digits. They were fascinating cases, but were they prodigies?
    Feldman’s prodigy definition was a good starting point. But Joanne thought that any connection between prodigy and autism was likely genetic, so she wanted to use a standard that was more closely focused on factors intrinsic to the child and less oriented around a particular level of achievement.
    The thing that seemed most critical, she thought—the dagger thatcut to the heart of what it meant to be a prodigy—was the accelerated development of talent during childhood. That insatiable drive, which the psychologist Ellen Winner has described as a “rage to master,” seemed less dependent on attributes of the child’s field or parents; it seemed more likely to have a distinct biological engine behind it.
    Such swift achievement often attracted a fair bit of limelight. A hodgepodge of people from journalists to scientists clamored to applaud children who skyrocketed to the top of a typically adult field. National or international acclaim by adolescence, Joanne reasoned, might serve as a proxy for the runaway-train development pattern she thought characterized prodigy. It was still a behavior-based definition, but by focusing less on whether the child had achieved