This is the article I was telling you about gifted children who talk late, but are actually unusually bright.
Ten years later
Thomas Sowell (archive)
May 21, 2003 |
A decade ago -- in May 1993 -- this column first mentioned unusually bright little children who are also unusually late in beginning to speak. Unknown to me at the time, this set in motion some remarkable developments which have not yet run their course.
Letters from parents of such children in various parts of the country led to the creation of a support group of 55 families that kept in touch with one another, largely by mail, but also by phone and even some personal visits between parents in different states. It also led to two books, the most recent of which -- The Einstein Syndrome -- included research by Professor Stephen Camarata, a speech pathologist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center and himself a late-talker.
Professor Camarata has his own support group of more than 600 families of late-talking children, spread across the United States and extending overseas. He is spearheading research on children with extraordinary abilities who nevertheless may not speak a complete sentence until they are three or four years old -- or older.
Albert Einstein was the most famous such person but there have been many others. One of the most remarkable late-talkers was a boy in India, born into a poor family named Ramanujan during the era of British rule there. He somehow came into possession of a book on mathematics, written by a leading British mathematician.
Young Ramanujan went through the book and taught himself mathematics. Then he went on to derive further mathematical implications on his own. Eventually, his work was recognized at Cambridge University and he was brought to England, where he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Music is another area in which some late-talking children have been remarkable. Famed nineteenth-century pianist Clara Schumann and famed twentieth-century pianist Arthur Rubinstein were both late-talking child prodigies.
Not all the children with what we call the Einstein syndrome become famous, of course. But whatever their levels of achievement or prominence, they have tended to have a pattern that includes remarkable abilities in what a professor at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute called "the three M's -- music, math, and memory."
The children in both my group and Professor Camarata's group tend to excel in mastering logic-based systems, whether mathematics, chess, pianos, or computers. More than four-fifths of these children are boys but the few girls among them share the same over-all pattern.
Unfortunately, they have something else in common -- "experts" who are quick to label them, whether that label is mentally retarded or autistic or any of the other labels that proliferate to describe children who differ from preconceptions. Einstein himself was considered to be mentally retarded as a child and so was Edward Teller, another late talker.
Professor Camarata repeatedly encounters late-talking children in his clinic who have been labeled autistic but who are clearly not autistic. Too often they are labeled as having a "pervasive" developmental disorder, even when their only problem is being late in beginning to speak.
The needless anguish inflicted on parents by false diagnoses is too often accompanied by treatments that are so oppressive -- tying the child in a chair, for example -- as to force even a normal child into problems such as withdrawal from people.
Make no mistake, however. For some children, lateness in beginning to speak can be a symptom of deeper, more serious, even dangerous, and long-lasting problems. For others it is not. Multiple professional evaluations are needed to sort this out. But the quality of those evaluations is crucial.
Local school districts are usually the worst when it comes to reckless diagnoses and dogmatic certainty. They offer free evaluations of children, but it can be the most expensive free thing a parent ever gets.
Perhaps the best advice to offer parents is from that column of a decade ago: "In this age of labels, when there is a government program for every label, parents have to be on guard against having their children pigeon-holed. The stakes are just too high."
Thomas Sowell
The Einstein Syndrome
jewishworldreview.com -- WHAT have famed pianist Arthur Rubinstein, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, India's self-taught mathematical genius Ramanujan, Nobel Prizewinning economist Gary Becker, talk show host G. Gordon Liddy and renowned physicists Richard Feynman, Edward Teller and Albert Einstein all had in common?
Aside from being remarkable people, they were all late in beginning to speak when they were children. Edward Teller, for example, did not say anything that anyone understood until he was four years old. Einstein began talking at age three but he was still not fluent when he turned nine.
While most children who are late in beginning to speak are male, there have also been some famous female late-talkers -- celebrated 19th century pianist Clara Schumann and outstanding 20th century mathematician Julia Robinson, the first woman to become president of the American Mathematical Association. In addition, there have been innumerable people of exceptional ability in a number of fields who were years behind the norm for developing the ability to speak when they were children.
Parents and professionals alike have been baffled as to the reason for delayed speech in children whose precocious intellectual development has been obvious, even when they are toddlers. Some of these kids can put together puzzles designed for older children or for adults. Some can use computers by themselves as early as age two, even though they remain silent while their peers are developing the ability to speak.
No one really knows for sure why this is so. These children have only begun to be studied within the past decade. My own recently published book "The Einstein Syndrome" is one such study. More research on these children is being conducted by Professor Stephen Camarata at the Vanderbilt University medical school. He was himself late in talking.
Research on Einstein's brain has suggested to some neuroscientists that he was late in talking because of the unusual development of his brain, as revealed by an autopsy. Those portions of his brain where analytical thinking was concentrated had spread out far beyond their usual area and spilled over into adjoining areas, including the region from which speech is usually controlled. This has led some neuroscientists to suggest that his genius and his late talking could have been related.
At this point, no one knows whether this is the reason why Einstein took so long to develop the ability to speak, much less whether this is true of the other people of outstanding intellect who were also late in beginning to speak. What is known, however, is that there are a number of disabilities that are more common among people of high intellect than in the general population.
Members of the high-IQ Mensa society, for example, have a far higher than normal incidence of allergies. A sample of youngsters enrolled in the Johns Hopkins program for mathematically precocious youths -- kids who can score 700 on the math SAT when they are just 12 years old -- showed that more than four-fifths of them were allergic and/or myopic and/or left-handed.
This is all consistent with one region of the brain having above normal development and taking resources that leave some other region or regions with less than the usual resources for performing other functions. It is also consistent with the fact that some bright children who talk late remain impervious to all attempts of parents or professionals to get them to talk at the normal time. Yet these same kids later begin to speak on their own, sometimes after parents have finally just given up hope and stopped trying.
Noted language authority and neuroscientist Steven Pinker of M.I.T. says, "language seems to develop about as quickly as the growing brain can handle it." While this was a statement about the general development of language, it may be especially relevant to bright children who talk late. As the whole brain grows in early childhood, increasing the total resources available, the regions whose resources have been pre-empted elsewhere can now catch up and develop normally.
My research and that of Professor Camarata have turned up a number of patterns in children with the Einstein Syndrome that were similar to what biographies of Einstein himself reveal. Most children who talk late are not like those in our studies. But a remarkable number are.
Unfortunately, many of these children get misdiagnosed as retarded, autistic or as having an attention deficit disorder.
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