What makes some people geniuses

The collaboration with Renmin was quietly put on hold. The fortunes of the research effort changed in October , when Zhao met Steve Hsu, a professor who was spending a year in Taiwan while on sabbatical from the University of Oregon. He is now vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State University.

A theoretical physicist who likes to apply his mathematical muscles to a wide range of complex problems, Hsu was intrigued by a news article about BGI that briefly mentioned Zhao's project.

A few emails later, he flew over to give a talk at BGI and soon became a permanent collaborator and adviser to the team.

Since most of the variation in IQ is heritable, scientists have long searched for genetic differences that might account for it. The reason we haven't found them, Hsu theorizes, is because there aren't any single genes or even a handful of genes with a big effect on IQ. Instead, the thinking goes, there are as many as 10, different locations in the genome where a mutation can affect IQ. According to Hsu's rough model, all humans carry a few hundred of those 10, possible mutations, and each mutation has a tiny negative cost to IQ, on the order of half an IQ point.

If this is right, then the difference between a brilliant IQ person and an average IQ person comes down to DNA typos at perhaps of those 10, places.

Other traits—like height, for example—seem to work the same way, and an ongoing study into the genetics of height has begun to find relevant mutations. Most geneticists who have studied intelligence agree with this theory in broad strokes.

At the very least, says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland who studies brain development, Hsu's basic theory of many deleterious mutations "is far more plausible than the alternative"—that is, more plausible than the idea that the mutations are building up IQ, not knocking it down.

The only way to unravel the genetics of a trait scattered among 10, possible DNA variants is to use something called GWAS genome-wide association study. Rather than identifying the variants that cause a trait, as can be done with so-called Mendelian traits like finger length or earwax type, you find the variants associated with the trait.

But—and this is crucial—the implications of this math are that it will take far more than a few thousand genomes to solve the puzzle of intelligence. Given the small sample size they have so far, Hsu hopes they'll start by finding one or two genes associated with intelligence. A recent Dutch study required more than , genomes to isolate three variants associated with educational attainment; to create a genomic predictor of IQ, Hsu says, it could take 1 million or more.

The good news for Zhao is that cheap DNA sequencing, together with more creative ways of obtaining DNA, means that a million genomes could be in reach within five years. The genomes don't all need to be geniuses, because the IQ-affecting genetic markers they're looking for—DNA typos that drag down intelligence—are more often carried by the IQ people. That is, it's a relative dearth of these mutations that gives people higher IQ, according to the theory.

Assuming Zhao and his team succeed, there are implications that will trouble many people. Hsu is confident that through embryo screening during IVF, any genetic markers for intelligence that their team discovered would inevitably be used to select for more intelligent babies. Children tend to fall within a spread of 13 IQ points above and below the average IQ of their parents.

But sometimes the apple can fall twice as far from the tree—that is, two parents with IQs producing a child with an IQ of Hsu puts the chance of such a positive outlier at around 2 or 3 percent, and it depends mostly on which sperm meets which egg.

If parents use IVF to conceive, then a genetic test—an extension of the screening tests for genetic diseases that are already routinely done on embryos—could let them pick the smartest genome from a batch of, say, 20 embryos. But effectively, you could be giving an unborn child a boost in IQ above their parents. As Hsu sees it, this is no Faustian bargain. For example, there's the question of epistasis, or the interaction of genes with one another.

Hsu is convinced based on his reading of the existing data that IQ mutations are essentially additive, such that the negative pull of each person's DNA typos can simply be tallied up.

But it's likely that the effect of some genes will depend on the presence or absence of others, making it much trickier to predict IQ from birth. Even if Mitchell's skepticism is borne out, and the answer is somewhere in between, it still means that an embryonic test could allow parents a significant degree of influence over their offspring's intelligence. In Shenzhen, when I meet two members of Zhao's team—Chris Chang, a year-old Chinese American statistician, and Laurent Tellier, a year-old Danish bioinformaticist—I ask them the unavoidable question: Would they, as parents, take advantage of this service?

Their responses are radically different. It probably wasn't the takeaway that the filmmakers of that dystopian tale had intended. Chang, meanwhile, gives a definite no. He declines to give a reason; he just shakes his head. The last time I see Zhao, I put the same question to him. It's a freezing day in November when he swings through Boston, near where I live, and I meet him at a bar. He's not old enough to legally drink in the United States, but no one cards him.

He had spent the afternoon with a Harvard scientist who studies prosopagnosia, a condition that makes it difficult for a person to recognize faces. There's evidence that the disease is strongly heritable, so Zhao and the scientist discussed sequencing the genomes of afflicted families to find the genes. Over our drink, I pose my earlier question to Zhao: Would he use his research to have more intelligent offspring of his own? When the brain is injured, dead and dying cells leak serotonin into the surrounding tissue.

Physically, this seems to encourage new connections between brain regions, just as with LSD. Mentally, it allows the person to link the seemingly unconnected. Actor Geoffrey Rush has synesthesia, where stimulation of one sense affects others, such as smelling or tasting colours Credit: Alamy. But there is an alternative.

The first clue emerged in , when a group of neurologists noticed that five of their patients with dementia were also artists — remarkably good ones. Specifically, they had frontotemporal dementia , which is unusual in that it only affects some parts of the brain. For example, visual creativity may be spared, while language and social skills are progressively destroyed.

At the age of 53 he had enrolled in a short course in drawing at a local park, though he previously had no interest in such things.

It just so happened to coincide with the onset of his dementia; a few months later, he was having trouble speaking. Soon he became irritable and eccentric, developing a compulsion to search for money on the street. As his illness progressed, so did his drawing, advancing from simple still-life paintings to haunting, impressionist depictions of buildings from his childhood.

In four out of five cases, they found lesions on the left hemisphere. Nobel Prize-winning research from the s shows that the two halves of the brain specialise in different tasks; in general, the right side is home to creativity and the left is the centre of logic and language. But the left side is also something of a bully. This is backed up by several other studies, including one in which creative insight was roused in healthy volunteers by temporarily dialling down activity in the left hemisphere and increasing it in the right.

Consider autism. One theory suggests that autism arises from abnormally low levels of serotonin in the left hemisphere in childhood, which prevents the region from developing normally. Just like with sudden savant syndrome, this allows the right hemisphere to become more active. Interestingly, many people with sudden savant syndrome also develop symptoms of autism, including social problems, obsessive compulsive disorder OCD and all-consuming interests.

This is something universal across all sudden savants. Jon Sarkin compares his art to an instinct. It is believed that many creative geniuses - such as Albert Einstein - may have been on the spectrum Credit: Alamy. In addition, some researchers and theorists argue that the concept of g is too limiting and doesn't really give a full view of a person's intelligence. These researchers feel that intelligence is a combination of many factors.

One theory that tries to provide a more complete view of intelligence is Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences MI. According to Gardner, there are seven types of intelligence:. Many parents and educators feel that these categories more accurately express the strengths of different children. But critics allege that Gardner's definitions are so broad and inclusive that they make intelligence meaningless. For several years, scientists have noticed a general upward trend in the general population's IQ scores.

It has seemed that each generation is a little smarter than the one before it. Researchers aren't sure whether improvements in education, nutrition, medical care or society in general are responsible for this trend, which is known as the Flynn effect. One of the stereotypes surrounding gifted children is that they have trouble fitting in at school. Several scientific studies suggest that the stereotype has a foundation in reality. A Purdue University study of gifted students suggested that they were susceptible to bullying.

A year study of gifted children ending in suggested that the trend of not fitting in continues into adulthood. The study used a test that measured both verbal intelligence and personal adjustment. People who scored above in verbal intelligence generally had lower personal adjustment scores.

Another less restrictive theory is Robert J. Sternberg's triarchic theory of human intelligence. According to Sternberg, human intelligence includes:. In Sternberg's view, a person's total intelligence is a combination of these three abilities. Critics claim that he has little empirical evidence for his theories.

They also argue that practical intelligence is not intelligence at all, or that it can be explained through other theories of intelligence. The triarchic and MI theories are both relatively new, and critics have pointed out flaws in both of them.

However, they may be better able to explain the concept of genius than traditional IQ tests can. Geniuses aren't just people with a lot of g. Mozart, for example, combined musical genius with an innate understanding of mathematics and patterns. Einstein's genius spanned the realms of logic, math and spatial relationships. And all geniuses have a very important aptitude in common -- they have an abundance of creative intelligence. Without it, they wouldn't be geniuses. They'd simply be exceptionally smart.

How much creativity does it take to be a genius? We'll look at how imagination and productivity contribute to genius next. There's a big difference between being really smart and being a genius. While geniuses tend to be exceptionally intelligent, they also use imagination and creativity to invent, discover or create something new within their field of interest.

They break new ground rather than simply remembering or reciting existing information. Geniuses do not usually operate in isolation, either -- nearly all of them analyze the work of other great minds and use that information to make new discoveries. Self-taught geniuses, on the other hand, often explore information in unexpected or inventive ways, due in part to their lack of formal training.

In either case, the ability to imagine new possibilities is as important as general intelligence. Like intelligence, creativity and imagination can be difficult to isolate, quantify or explain. Some researchers believe that creative people have less latent inhibition than other people.

Latent inhibition is the unconscious ability to ignore unimportant stimuli. Researchers theorize that creative people either receive more stimuli from the world around them or ignore less of it. This may also explain why creative people seem to be more prone to mental illness.

People who are both unable to filter stimuli and emotionally unstable are more prone to psychosis. Creativity also seems to have some traits in common with bipolar disorder. During an episode of mania , a person with bipolar disorder experiences increases in energy, the ability to focus and motivation. Bipolar disorder is more common among writers and artists than in the general population, but scientists have not found a cause-and-effect relationship between the two.

The creativity of geniuses also relates to productivity and hard work. Sometimes, the most dramatic examples of genius involve people who produce their best work at a very young age. However, not every genius produces exceptional work early in life the way Einstein and Mozart did.

Some, like Ludwig von Beethoven, do their best work later in life. People with savant syndrome are often described as geniuses.

A hungry mind can also find the intellectual stimulation it needs at home—as in suburban Adelaide, Australia, in the case of Terence Tao, widely considered one of the greatest minds currently working in mathematics.

Tao showed a remarkable grasp of language and numbers early in life, but his parents created the environment in which he could flourish. Billy and his wife, Grace, also sought out advanced learning opportunities for their son as he began his formal education, and he was fortunate to meet educators who helped foster and stretch his mind.

Tao enrolled in high school classes when he was seven years old, scored on the math section of the SAT at age eight, went to university full-time when he was 13, and became a professor at UCLA at Natural gifts and a nurturing environment can still fall short of producing a genius, without motivation and tenacity propelling one forward.

These personality traits, which pushed Darwin to spend two decades perfecting Origin of Species and Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan to produce thousands of formulas, inspire the work of psychologist Angela Duckworth. She believes there are differences when it comes to individual talent, but no matter how brilliant a person, fortitude and discipline are critical to success.

Nor does it happen on the first try. Big hits emerge after many attempts. Lack of support can stunt prospects for potential geniuses; they never get the chance to be productive. Throughout history women have been denied formal education, deterred from advancing professionally, and under-recognized for their achievements. Half the women in the Terman study ended up as homemakers. Using fMRI brain scans below , hearing specialist Charles Limb has found that jazz musicians and freestyle rappers suppress the self-monitoring part of their brains as they improvise.

Limb plans to use electroencephalography, or EEG, to measure electrical activity in the brains of other creative individuals, including comedians; he tries it out on himself in his lab at UC San Francisco above. Sometimes, by sheer good fortune, promise and opportunity collide. If there were ever an individual who personified the concept of genius in every aspect, from its ingredients to its far-reaching impact, it would be Leonardo da Vinci.

The breadth of his abilities—his artistic insights, his expertise in human anatomy, his prescient engineering—is unparalleled. He persisted no matter the challenge. Two years ago he published preliminary genetic analyses of a Neanderthal skeleton. It is an ambitious plan, but team members are optimistically laying the groundwork. Art historians and geneticists, including specialists at the institute of genomics pioneer J.

Craig Venter, are experimenting with techniques to obtain DNA from fragile Renaissance-era paintings and paper. The quest to unravel the origins of genius may never reach an end point. Like the universe, its mysteries will continue to challenge us, even as we reach for the stars. For some, that is as it should be. All rights reserved. This story appears in the May issue of National Geographic magazine.

The Power of Letting Go Using fMRI brain scans below , hearing specialist Charles Limb has found that jazz musicians and freestyle rappers suppress the self-monitoring part of their brains as they improvise. Photographer Paolo Woods lives in Florence, Italy.

This is his first story for the magazine.