Elaine Meinel Supkis
Scientists have documented how children's brains grow at different rates and the ones of very bright children mature slower and peak several years later than children of less intelligence. This is yet another facet of neoteny, homo sapiens evolved into animals with long childhoods and many of our features are baby-like including a long period of childish curiosity.
Very smart children may seem advanced in many ways, but a new study shows they actually lag behind other kids in development of the "thinking" part of the brain.The brain's outer mantle, or cortex, gets thicker and then thins during childhood and the teen years. The study found that in kids with superior intelligence, the cortex reaches its thickest stage a few years later than in other children.
This finding does not surprize me. In the great ape world, maturity is at about 6 to 7 years old. So the fact that many human brains stop growing the frontal cortex at that age would seem to be about normal. But due to neotony, the longer it takes to mature, the less like the near relatives, the Great Apes, we are.
In other words, to get that extra boost in intelligence, there has to be some most likely recessive genes that trigger growth processes at work here. It is a classic bell curve, the children in the middle range of intelligence mature at 9 years of age while the very intelligent children's brains continue to add more matter to the brain until age 11 years old. This information should be explored further because it has many important ramafications.
I was an accelerated child, intellectually far ahead of my classmates, skipping grades, even. I was also a naive, messed up kid, too. Any child could best me at cleverness, I was able to think of very difficult things but unable to cope with emotional or tricky games and things normal children delighted in, bothered me.
In other words, I was a female nerd.
My own children were the same way. It always interested me to see, up close with them, how easily they mastered various intellectual skills yet how immature they were. Far from being puzzled, it astonished me to see they thought through things the same, strange way I did when the same age.
More than one person has noticed that mathematical geniuses reach their top performace levels very suddenly after 12 years of age. By the time they are 16, they will have mastered much of the field and sometimes produce great work. The same is true of musicians, a closely related field if the musician is using or creating written scores which require the same intellectual skills mathematicians tap.
Many great composers died before they reached their 40th birthdays yet they produced an amazing amount of music in a short time span.
Einstein and Newton climbed great peaks in the field of physics and astronomy when still quite young. The part of the brain that continues to grow in higher intelligence children thins out like the brains of normal children but the integration of the thinking processes built up by very intelligent children remains, perhaps like a scaffolding being removed once a building is done.
To deal with the destruction of the Great Ice Ages, the global instabiliy of the climate and the competition to survive, the smarter the humanoid, the more likely that one would survive. When coping with the intricate difficulties of language or handling fire or making tools and of course, the ultimate intelligence test, giving birth to large brained babies which are hard to push out of the mother and which required very careful nurturing and care since the neotenic adult has no fur for the even more neotenic baby to cling to, the mother has to nurse and carry and protect a truly helpless baby and the smarter the baby, the longer the helpless period which meant, smart mothers could raise smart babies and not the other way around which is why, in less than 2 million years, the craniums of successful humanoids grew very big indeed.
Evolution never stops. Today, we see a great variety in human intellectual abilities but when it comes to producing more humans, high intelligence isn't very good for that. Namely, the people having the most babies tend to not be of that population. Thanks to both birth control and before that, people of high intelligence tend to not want lots of children or when they did have them, the children can be very difficult to cope with and even self destructive.
I come from a large family with more than one person at genius level and living in the family home was challenging, to say the least. Which is why my parents allowed me to exit a 16 years of age. I still had children of my own but this heavily interfered with going to school and other things, not that I would change anything!
But many very bright girls in the past and today end up choosing to not have children because they do make intellectual pursuits much more difficult. Another fact is, the various genes that contribute to creating our complex minds are so many and so variable, too many recessives can cause serious problems leading to mental retardation, for example. I know of more than one pair of scientists who have married and had a child who is very disturbed or mentally retarded. Asperger's syndrome is a disorder which seems to happen to the children of very bright parents.
Individuals with AS can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Persons with AS show marked deficiencies in social skills, have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. They often have obsessive routines and may be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest. They have a great deal of difficulty reading nonverbal cues (body language) and very often the individual with AS has difficulty determining proper body space. Often overly sensitive to sounds, tastes, smells, and sights, the person with AS may prefer soft clothing, certain foods, and be bothered by sounds or lights no one else seems to hear or see. It's important to remember that the person with AS perceives the world very differently. Therefore, many behaviors that seem odd or unusual are due to those neurological differences and not the result of intentional rudeness or bad behavior, and most certainly not the result of "improper parenting".By definition, those with AS have a normal IQ and many individuals (although not all), exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a specific area. Because of their high degree of functionality and their naiveté, those with AS are often viewed as eccentric or odd and can easily become victims of teasing and bullying. While language development seems, on the surface, normal, individuals with AS often have deficits in pragmatics and prosody. Vocabularies may be extraordinarily rich and some children sound like "little professors." However, persons with AS can be extremely literal and have difficulty using language in a social context.
This describes more than one genius. The sensitivity to light and sound, um, that is not only my parent's family but also my own. "I hear someone breathing!" is a typical complaint within my own siblings (usually hissed at me). I am the same way. In New York City, I would rise at night and track down car alarms and terminate them using my handy wire cutters. Once, when there was a very obnoxious alarm, I walked 10 blocks to locate it and disable it. There was a crowd of people standing around, holding their ears, wondering what to do when I held up my wire clippers---I had on ear protectors, we have them all over the house---and to cheers of the angry crowd, I and a young man jacked the car up and I reached in and snipped the wires.
My houses were soundproofed just so I and my kids could sleep at night. We also needed absolute darkness. I thought it was normal and would be amazed to meet people who had to have nightlights. Ugh.
It is amazing that smart alecks like us managed to survive because every time there is fear or disorder, our fellow humans tend to kill thinkers. Many teachers and professors in Iraq are being assassinated this year, for example. In Cambodia, years ago, all intellectuals were murdered, also. The Nazis hated intellectuals and so did Stalin. Indeed, all despots hate brilliant people and can't wait to be rid of them. This is also another reason why the human brain isn't getting smarter each generation.
And then there is Bush and his ilk. Whatever braincells this gang had, they blasted them away long ago. And look where they are leading humanity!
Fascinating topic. Like you I was an accelerated child, though not genius level (tested @ 135, give or take) I felt I did not always fit in even if was quite personable. Perhaps it was a slowed growth of maturity. I grew up and developed a belief that my wonderfully intelligent and loving parents (my father has a degree in psych. with emphasis in adolescent deviant behavior) who worked so hard to create the “perfect environment” (dr. spock etc.) perhaps in some ways did me a disservice. I do not look back at this with discontent, but wonder what the optimal upbringing is? Or does it matter when considering this new information?
I think that there is no doubt that your comment about the increase in size of families from different backgrounds, dare I say uneducated and religious, is factual. This Darwinian regression away from the “intelligent” gene certainly gives me pause. Beyond that, the concept of the “dumbing of America” must also be considered from both a political and a sociological view (read cutting education etc. funding). Going one step further I think one must only look to the Nixon tapes where his views are shown with such pearls as “those damn intellectuals” and what he tried/did to them to realize that the only difference between extreme right wing views in Cambodia, Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia was the lack of a totalitarian system. Wait a minute, “Dumbya” is worse than “ Tricky Dick” and he has NO checks and balances thanks to the “a republican can do no wrong” legacy left to us by “Ray Gun”!
Posted by: jb | March 31, 2006 at 09:23 PM
Nice, and thanks for sharing this info with us.Good Luck!
Posted by: mulberry handbags factory | November 13, 2011 at 10:29 PM