# Giftedness and Genius  ## Metadata - Author: [[Arthur Jensen]] - Full Title: Giftedness and Genius - Category: #articles - URL: https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/1996-jensen.pdf ## Highlights - My primary thesis is that the emergence of genius is best described using a multiplicative model. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e3zf5sgg86bddvsb29ppxf)) - I will argue that exceptional achievement is a multiplicative function of a number of different traits, each of which is normally distributed, but which in combination are so synergistic as to skew the resulting distribution of achieve­ment. An extremely extended upper tail is thus produced, and it is within this tail that genius can be found. An interesting two-part question then arises: how many different traits are involved in producing extraordinary achievement, and what are they? The musings that follow provide some conjectures that can be drawn on to answer this critical question. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e400y8yj4gk7bp5sdxpb5n)) - G. H. Hardy was England’s leading mathematician, a professor at Cambridge University, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the recipient of an honorary degree from Harvard. Remark­ably precocious in early childhood, especially in mathematics, he became an exceptionally brilliant student, winning one scholarship after another. He was acknowledged the star graduate in mathematics at Cambridge, where he re­mained to become a professor of mathematics. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e43db763jyee20rt4t1ywy)) - One day Hardy received a strange-looking letter from Madras, India. It was full of mathematical formulations written in a quite unconventional—one might even say bizarre—form. The writer seemed almost mathematically illiter­ate by Cambridge standards. It was signed “Srinivasa Ramanujan.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e43s6jzwevgzjjj9cwjf9y)) - A colleague in Hardy’s department then traveled to India and persuaded Ramanujan to go to Cambridge, with all his expenses and a salary paid by the university. When the youth arrived from India, it was evident that, by ordinary standards, his educational background was meager and his almost entirely self­ taught knowledge o f math was full o f gaps. He had not been at all successful in school, from which he had flunked out twice, and was never graduated. To say, however, that he was obsessed by mathematics is an understatement. As a boy in Madras, he was too poor to buy paper on which to work out his math prob­lems. He did his prodigious mathematical work on a slate, copying his final results with red ink on old, discarded newspapers. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e45jw385m5vch97xe6ert3)) - While in high school, he thought he had made a stunning mathematical discovery, but he later learned, to his great dismay, that his discovery had already been made 150 years earlier by the great mathematician Euler. Ramanu­jan felt extraordinary shame for having “discovered” something that was not original, never considering that only a real genius could have created or even recreated that discovery. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e4613h5zxacqegbkqf4dme)) - Facility in solving textbook problems and in passing difficult tests is utterly trivial when discussing genius. Although working out the proof of a theorem, unlike dis­covering a theorem, may take immense technical skill and assiduous effort, it is not itself a hallmark of genius. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e46y5dmp7rhcp56010w5cr)) - Of course, all geniuses are by definition extreme overachievers, in the statistical sense. Nothing else that we could have known about them besides the monumental contributions we ascribe to their genius would have predicted such extraordinary achievement. In discussing Ramanujan’s work, the Polish mathematician Mark Kac was forced to make a distinction between the “ordi­nary genius” and the “magician.” He wrote: An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthog­onal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e49hd313ahvptgq4qzpzan)) - Nonetheless, we do know of at least two key attributes, beyond ability, that appear to function as catalysts for the creation of that special class of behavioral products specifically indicative of genius. They are productivity and creativity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e4aea5peyp8xdjhhvp9jrq)) - Essentially, it amounts to expecting that a computer that perpetually generates strictly ran­dom sequences of all the letters of the alphabet, punctuation signs, and spaces will eventually produce Ham let or some other work o f creative genius. The theory insists that blind chance acting in the processes o f memory searches for elements with which to form random combinations and permutations, from which finally there emerges some product or solution that the world considers original or creative. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e4e2yesa5t4xwb9dgkkadh)) - Note: This is the "chance configuration theory" of creativity - Thus, randomness (or blind chance, to use the favored term in chance configuration theory) seems an unlikely explanation of creative thinking. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e4hjsdh3w7pzrap70nb3r5)) - Note: Human mind abhors randomness. We can't be truly random. Any task will contain some aspect of non-randomness. - The implausibility o f randomness, however, in no way implies that creative thinking does not involve a great deal of “trial-and-error” mental manipula­ tion, though it is not at all random. The products that emerge are then critically sifted in light o f the creator’s aim. The individuals in whom this mental- manipulation process turns out to be truly creative most often are those who are relatively rich in each of three sources of variance in creativity: (1) ideational fluency, or the capacity to tap a flow of relevant ideas, themes, or images, and to play with them, also known as “brainstorming”; (2) what Eysenck (1995) has termed the individuals’ relevance horizon; that is, the range or variety of ele­ments, ideas, and associations that seem relevant to the problem (creativity involves a wide relevance horizon); and (3) suspension of critical judgment. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e4tsa8rye2hanqcwx0yhdx)) - Creative persons are intellectually high risk takers. They are not afraid of zany ideas and can hold the inhibitions of self-criticism temporarily in abey­ance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e4v14765p3jjxgszzzs8mb)) - Francis Crick once told me that Linus Pauling’s scientific ideas turned out to be wrong about 80 percent of the time, but the other 20 percent finally proved to be so important that it would be a mistake to ignore any of his hunches. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e4vpn2fyvqet7jpvmdhz17)) - Eysenck, however, has identified a trait, or dimension of personality, termed psychoticism, which can be assessed by means of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e6c6n527sk4qv99j6yk370)) - Trait psychoticism is a constellation of characteristics that persons may show to varying degrees; such persons may be aggressive, cold, egocentric, impersonal, impulsive, antisocial, unempathic, tough-minded, and creative. This is not a charming picture of genius, perhaps, but a reading of the biographies of some of the world’s most famous geniuses attests to its veracity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e7gdmeqtk7xhw5emv8aq9g)) - When one reads about famous creative geniuses one finds that, although they may occasionally have to force themselves to work, they cannot will themselves to be obsessed by the subject of their work. Their obsessive-compulsive mental activity in a particular sphere is virtually beyond conscious control. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e832nb5g3n8yd6zac259nz)) - To summarize: Genius = High Ability X High Productivity X High Creativity. The theoretical underpinnings of these three ingredients are: —Ability = g = efficiency of information processing —Productivity = endogenous cortical stimulation —Creativity = trait psychoticism ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e87pkxakg7jw0pfwsp9rzr)) - A high level of expertise involves the automatization of a host of special skills and cognitive routines. Automatization comes about only as a result of an immense amount of prac­tice (Jensen, 1990; Walberg, 1988). Most people can scarcely imagine (and are probably incapable of) the extraordinary amount of practice that is re­quired for genius-quality performance, even for such a prodigious genius as Mozart. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h5e8bs02fbrzmy7a4pqpjptj))