It’s not a magic number – the highest performers move on to doing a whole lot more, of course, and, like Mirzakhani, often find their own unique perspective along the way.Įricsson’s memory research is particularly interesting because random students, trained in memory techniques for the study, went on to outperform others thought to have innately superior memories – those you might call gifted. Deliberate practice, that stretches you every step of the way, and around 10,000 hours of it, is what produces the expert. After research going back to 1980 into diverse achievements, from music to memory to sport, he doesn’t think unique and innate talents are at the heart of performance. Prof Anders Ericsson, an eminent education psychologist at Florida State University, is the co-author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. So, is there even such a thing as a gifted child? It is a highly contested area. Maryam Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel prize, but showed little maths ability to begin with. Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school. However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers – curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example – an approach Eyre calls “high performance learning”.
#Called and gifted book how to
Just because you can read Harry Potter at five doesn’t mean you will still be ahead of your contemporaries in your teens.Īccording to my colleague, Prof Deborah Eyre, with whom I’ve collaborated on the book Great Minds and How to Grow Them, the latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most people, unless they are cognitively impaired, can reach standards of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented. On top of that, research is clear that brains are malleable, new neural pathways can be forged, and IQ isn’t fixed. There is a canon of research on high performance, built over the last century, that suggests it goes way beyond tested intelligence. But he did miss two future Nobel prize winners – Luis Alvarez and William Shockley, both physicists – whom he dismissed from the study as their test scores were not high enough. None ended up as the great thinkers of their age that Terman expected they would. Lewis Terman, a pioneering American educational psychologist, set up a study in 1921 following 1,470 Californians, who excelled in the newly available IQ tests, throughout their lives. But he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity. He struggled at work initially, failing to get academic post and being passed over for promotion at the Swiss Patent Office because he wasn’t good enough at machine technology. He failed the general part of the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic – though they let him in because of high physics and maths scores. Einstein was slow to talk and was dubbed the dopey one by the family maid. Most Nobel laureates were unexceptional in childhood. Is her background unusual? Apparently not. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her – and she was hooked.
She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on together with her best friend she would prowl the book stores on the way home from school for works to buy and consume.Īs for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he’d learned. Mirzakhani, did go to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t her interest – reading was. Thankfully it ended around the time she went to secondary school. The only part of her childhood that was out of the ordinary was the Iran-Iraq war, which made life hard for the family in her early years. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, one of three siblings in a middle-class family whose father was an engineer. The child that takes maths GCSE while still in single figures, or a rarity such as Ruth Lawrence, who was admitted to Oxford while her contemporaries were still in primary school.īut look closer and a different story emerges. The ones reading Harry Potter at five or admitted to Mensa not much later. It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those gifted children who excel from babyhood.
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