Awkward

by Ty Tashiro

  In hunter-gatherer groups, there were people who discovered how to make better animal traps, the benefits of rotating crops, and figured out the physics of irrigation systems. These types of breakthroughs were unlikely to have occurred by accident, rather they were the product of systematic thought and persistent experimentation. Awkward people might not have been masterful hunters or could have been clumsy while carrying back containers of gathered food, but if they figured out how to preserve the meat from the hunt by salting it or designed a better system for transporting gathered food, then these innovations would be valuable to the whole group.

  Unlike temporary survival provided from a successful hunt, harvest, or battle, people who made their intellectual breakthroughs available to everyone would have provided ongoing survival value to the whole group. There was also value from awkward individuals who were simply willing to continue hunting or gathering food long after everyone else went home or who never grew bored by some of the tedious tasks.

  In modern contexts, food is far more abundant and life expectancies have doubled, but awkward characteristics still persist and add unique value. Society needs people to systematically generate better algorithms to solve food distribution inequalities, discover energy sources that are more sustainable, and inspire new pedagogical strategies to teach kids adaptive knowledge and skills. Modern societies also need computer scientists who will tirelessly persist to find and close tiny vulnerabilities that expose us to cyber-attacks and security experts who can identify small abnormalities in intelligence data to deter terrorism threats.

  Awkwardness is adaptive because awkward individuals have the potential to add unique value through their systematic discoveries or their willingness to persist long after others have stopped working on a task. But this added value relies upon awkward people figuring out how to maximize their potential and match their strengths to the right environments. To do so, they have to figure out how to mobilize the social support necessary for turning early flashes of brilliance into prodigious achievements.

  Giftedness Is Singular, Not Plural

  EVEN FREUD, WHO found psychological trouble brewing where no one expected, thought that children entered a “latency stage” during middle childhood. The latency stage was a lull between the unruly years of infancy and the stormy years of adolescence. Kids in this developmental pocket find joys in things like swing sets, ice cream cones, and visits from the Tooth Fairy. Parents look forward to the relatively smooth sailing during the latency stage, but some parents begin to sense their children’s unusual talents around this age. The early signs of talent are like a stray raindrop on a clear summer day and they give parents a premonition that something more potent is on its way.

  Maybe it’s during a family sing-along to the Frozen soundtrack in the car when parents hear their four-year-old daughter sing a line with perfect pitch, or while calculating the restaurant tip are told by their five-year-old son that a 20 percent tip would be $9.50. Parents look with momentary disbelief toward the backseat or to the end of the table.

  When gifted children’s abilities first begin to emerge, they have little sense where their abilities stand in relation to others’. The early years take place in a vacuum that is free of external expectations and pressures. When you get the chance to see a gifted child savor her newfound ability in music, mathematics, or art, the pure joy with which she engages her talent is awe-inspiring.

  One of the great things about being a kid is that you are free to sing, draw, and play make-believe without external judgments about the quality of your work. Gifted kids are the same, acting on what is intuitively pleasing, but their extraordinary talent does not manifest as childlike. They sing with near perfect pitch, draw with a perspective that creates a stunning realism, and play make-believe with plot lines that build complex tensions or contain unexpected twists. Gifted children are unusual, or in psychological terms “abnormal,” which has made them the subject of extensive study over the years.

  In the early 1900s, Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman was one of the first to research how to quantify mental ability with standardized intelligence quotient (IQ) tests. He found that IQ was distributed normally along a bell curve, which means that most people fall somewhere around the average score of 100. People who have IQ scores below seventy are in the bottom fourth percentile of test takers and are considered to have significant intellectual impairment, while people with IQ scores of 130 or higher are in the top fourth percentile, and this is commonly used as one threshold to categorize people who are intellectually gifted.

  The most frequently used IQ tests measure different subtypes of mental ability such as verbal, quantitative (math/science), or memory. One straightforward example is a memory test called digit span. Psychologists ask test takers to remember two or three numbers and ask them to remember more with each correct answer. For example, read this list of numbers:

  3—1—8—1—2—2—5

  Now cover the seven numbers and try to recall as many of those numbers in the order you read them. Most adults can remember five to nine digits, which is why phone numbers were created to be seven digits without the area code. The average nine-year-old, one who scores at the fiftieth percentile, correctly recalls six digits. But some gifted children in the first percentile can recall nine digits. During graduate school, I tested a twelve-year-old girl who was gifted with an incredible memory. She became so bored while she crushed the digit span test that she spontaneously recited the nine digits I read to her in reverse order.

  Kids who are gifted with unusual memory capabilities intuitively approach problems like digit span differently from other kids. Gifted children intuitively chunk the numbers into clusters without anyone having to tell them how to do it. The gifted child hears the task to remember the numbers and intuitively knows that remembering three instead of seven units is easier: 3, 181, 225.

  The mechanisms that allow kids with exceptional cognitive ability to holistically and efficiently process nonsocial information has parallels to what we saw in earlier chapters when we looked at the mechanisms that help socially fluent kids process complex social situations. Recall that socially fluent individuals can process social cues without having to consciously consider individual cues such as intonation, nonverbal cues, and facial expressions. Socially fluent people have the ability to intuitively cluster together individual pieces of information during social interactions. When these individuals spontaneously bump into a friend at a holiday party, they instantly recognize that they should shake hands up and down three times, stand eighteen inches apart, and use a merry greeting, given the date (12.25).

  Howard Gardner is a professor at Harvard University who proposed that intelligence is broader than the abilities tapped by most standardized tests such as verbal IQ and quantitative IQ. Gardner put forth a theory of multiple intelligences, which included additional types of ability such as musical, body/kinesthetic, and interpersonal abilities. Researchers have devoted relatively less attention to a wider variety of multiple intelligences, but popular wisdom would suggest that individuals who are gifted with musical, athletic, or social acumen possess valuable abilities that cannot be fully captured by their verbal or quantitative IQ.

  There is some empirical support that popular wisdom includes a broader view of intelligence. Robert Sternberg is a professor at Cornell University who found in a study of laypeople’s views of intelligence that the average person naturally differentiates between more than verbal intelligence and math intelligence. Sternberg’s participants also saw creative ability to go beyond traditional ways of thinking, wisdom from life experience, and an openness to learning from others as valid and distinctive categories of ability.

  It’s important to distinguish between different types of abilities to investigate whether abilities tend to be even or uneven. For example, someone with an even-ability profile might have a 110 verbal IQ score and a quantitative IQ score right around 110, whereas someone with an uneven profile might have a 135
verbal IQ and a 100 quantitative IQ. It’s the difference between saying that someone is “smart” versus “really good at some things, not so good at other things.” There are practical consequences to this distinction because if abilities tend to be uneven, then schools or workplaces would want to account for that when they think about how to maximize each person’s potential. Conversely, if abilities are uniform, which means that individuals’ subtypes of ability tend to be even across the board, then schools or workplaces could assume that someone who is above average would perform above average on most tasks.

  Researchers generally find that most people have even levels of ability across the board. But when researchers look at people with IQ scores above 130, they usually see that their abilities are uneven and that this unevenness becomes more pronounced as IQ scores get higher. For example, John Achter at Iowa State University and his colleagues looked at data from more than one thousand extremely gifted seventh graders and found that more than 80 percent of them were characterized by uneven abilities and interests.

  The uneven nature of gifted individuals’ IQ profiles can be confusing because we usually think about intelligence as even, which is why some schools put students into typical, accelerated, or remedial tracks. But the reality is that extremely gifted people tend to be gifted in some areas and average or even below average in others. If we think broadly about multiple intelligences, then it’s interesting to think about whether people who are gifted with musical ability or quantitative ability might have significantly lower capability when it comes to interpersonal ability or intrapersonal ability (knowing yourself).

  A Restless Mind

  NICK SABAN IS the football coach at the University of Alabama and arguably the best coach of his era. Coach Saban is known for being an intense guy, but in an interview with ESPN’s Mike Smith in 2016, he told Smith a few lighthearted stories from his earlier days as an assistant coach at Michigan State University. Saban was with a fellow assistant coach on a recruiting trip in Youngstown, Ohio. After a long day of recruiting, Saban and his colleague went to a local bar to continue working into the night on some strategies for an upcoming game. In the middle of their intense session of X’s and O’s, a man with a shotgun entered the bar and demanded that the bartender turn over the money from the register.

  Fortunately, no one was harmed during the incident, but it was a terrifying moment for everyone who witnessed it. When the police arrived on the scene, the bartender explained what had happened. After questioning the bartender, the police prepared to talk to the other people who were present during the robbery, but the bartender told the officers not to bother questioning Saban and his coworker. He said they probably had “no idea” that a holdup had transpired. The bartender was right. Saban and his coworker had become so absorbed in their game plans, so focused on doing their work, that they never even noticed that a robbery had occurred.

  Technically, giftedness is defined by someone’s level of ability, their raw intelligence, athleticism, or artistic ability. But Professor Winner and others have found that gifted individuals are also more likely to have a certain type of personality. Gifted people tend to be stubborn, rebellious, and perfectionistic. They show an unusual drive to master their area of interest and they are constantly trying to push the status quo, which motivates them to pursue their interest with an unusual intensity and persistence. Winner calls this constellation of personality characteristics and attitudes the “rage to master.”

  There is an unsettling ring to the phrase and when I spoke to Winner she said that’s part of the point. It’s an apt phrase because it captures gifted individuals’ intensity and near-desperation while engaging their interests, but I think it also suggests that others may feel uneasy around their intense energy. Gifted people have a deeply inquisitive nature, but their relentless curiosity can come across as agitated or somewhere near the border of anger. We can see this agitation manifested in the gifted athlete trying to scratch his way back into the lead or an investigative reporter trying to get her team to meet a critical deadline.

  Gifted students can feel perturbed when a parent or teacher runs out of answers, which can lead them on a hunt through the library or the far reaches of the Internet. Gifted adults are more likely to grow impatient with incompetent coworkers and managers or when the work does not move at a brisk pace. When gifted individuals’ rage to master is frustrated, their agitation is palpable to others, like being around someone with an itch he cannot scratch.

  When gifted individuals’ rage to master is blocked, they do not perceive it as a minor inconvenience. Lauren Cuthbertson is a dancer who is the London Royal Ballet’s principal and she articulated this feeling beautifully in an interview. In 2014, Cuthbertson suffered a potentially career-ending foot injury and was unable to dance for months. She remarked that the hardest moments in her life have been those when she could not train. It’s notable that Cuthbertson missed the deliberate practice, the time spent honing her craft, rather than the exhilaration of performing for sold-out theaters. Once she was able to return to deliberate practice, Cuthbertson said it felt like she could “suddenly breathe.”

  Pedro Vital, at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, wanted to investigate abilities beyond those measured by traditional IQ tests. He looked at data available from six thousand pairs of twins who had been through assessments that included IQ tests, personality measures, and parents’ observations of their twins’ traits. One of the questions asked of parents was whether their children displayed a striking skill compared to children who were much older. The term “striking skill” is intentionally vague, but permitted researchers to assess a broader range of giftedness beyond verbal or quantitative IQ scores.

  Vital found that 17 percent of children were identified with a striking skill compared to older children, but the most interesting findings concerned which factors were most strongly associated with having a striking skill. Although 33 percent of the children identified as having a striking skill also had high IQ scores, the factor most strongly related to their skill was the children’s level of obsessive interests. Children who had high levels of narrow and obsessive interests were 61 percent more likely to be identified as having a striking skill.

  The rage to master manifests in childhood, but usually persists throughout adulthood. There are two motivations that drive the rage to master: an allergic reaction to averageness and a pull toward perfection. Gifted individuals hate being bad at something, which can be a blessing and a curse depending on the situation. When their aversion to averageness works well for them, gifted individuals are not satisfied with the status quo and show an urgency to better themselves. But the reality is that gifted people will not be good at everything, which creates an angst that we will discuss in more detail later.

  Gifted kids are also drawn to challenge, which might initially mean latching on to their teachers’ or instructors’ standards for performance, but eventually kids with a strong rage to master reject the traditional standards for excellence. One of the interesting qualities of many gifted individuals is that they have an unusual appreciation for the history of their area of interest and a respect for their predecessors, but seek to achieve a different standard or way of doing things. In the absence of sufficient challenge or an opportunity to move at a rapid pace toward mastery, gifted individuals can appear as if they might implode.

  Their rage to master is also driven by an intrinsic pleasure that comes with doing what they love. I often hear them say, “I just love to focus on the work.” Gifted individuals love to work with a single-minded focus while they code, play a game, write music, or paint and they are easily irritated by anything that distracts from their obsessive work. It’s understandable how someone would enjoy getting lost in her imagination when symphonies are unfolding there or enjoy singing an aria with perfect pitch. Although gifted individuals might receive praise from others for their ability or persistent efforts, they relentlessly hone their abilities even when they thi
nk no one is watching them because they find deliberate practice intrinsically enjoyable.

  This unusual combination of ability, rage to master, and natural desire to engage in deliberate practice is ideal for tackling difficult challenges, but these same qualities can also make it difficult for gifted children to gracefully navigate social life. When gifted kids’ rage to master makes it hard for them to forge meaningful social ties, they are at risk for having their extraordinary potential stunted as well as a wide range of social and emotional problems.

  The Relationship Between Giftedness and Awkwardness

  TWO LINES OF research, one about giftedness and the other about social awkwardness, grew relatively independent of each other over the past few decades, but they have converged upon many of the same conclusions. Giftedness researchers originally set out to understand how extraordinary ability might be identified and nurtured, but along the way they discovered important social and emotional factors that could facilitate or impede gifted individuals’ potential. Researchers who focused on studying social-communication problems and obsessive interests eventually discovered that people with social deficits and obsessive interests sometimes had unusual abilities.

  The conceptual overlap between giftedness and awkwardness is easy to see. Awkward individuals have spotlighted attentions that shine on specific interests and gifted individuals are likely to narrowly focus on their specific talents. Awkward people become obsessive about their interests and gifted individuals are driven by a rage to master. Both gifted people and awkward people enjoy more time alone to engage in deliberate practice. These points of overlap and others suggest that awkwardness and giftedness may share something in common.