| Subject: Ignorance is bliss |
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BB
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Date Posted: 10:15:02 03/23/05 Wed
In reply to:
Betty
's message, "Re: Child prodigy's suicide came without harbingers" on 08:18:36 03/23/05 Wed
At nearly 6 feet tall and with the vocabulary of a college professor, Robert Mercer could easily pass for much older than 14, were it not for the self-conscious giggle and the telltale teenage skin. He's equally at home discussing Greek history and shoot-'em-up video games. He likes to golf and ski and sail and swim, and he'd take up fencing if the lessons weren't so expensive. Through his young eyes, life is rich and good and full of possibility.
But this animated young man from Arlington endured a dark period throughout 2001. He didn't feel "normal" when he played with children his age in his community, and he noticed that some of his friendships were slipping away, a phenomenon he likens to rocks shearing during an earthquake. His mother, Kiki Mercer, knew something was truly wrong when he deliberately flubbed an intelligence test that year. Robert is what is known in educational parlance as profoundly gifted, a category defined, by one measure, as having an IQ greater than 180. He has taken many tests over the years, and he decided to throw this particular exam because he didn't want to be gifted anymore.
Then came September 11. He was only 10 at the time, but he felt compelled to study the geopolitical reasons for the terrorist attack. Intellectually, Robert understood the conflict as an adult would, but emotionally, he hadn't developed the defense mechanisms to distance himself from the horror. That dissonance nearly pushed him over the edge. "Ignorance is bliss," he says, pausing to wipe his glasses, which have misted over during an interview in his home. "At that time, ignorance really was bliss. I really understood it, and it really disturbed me. It was the feeling of hopelessness, because there's no way to fix this." He wipes his eyes, then puts his glasses back on. "Sometimes you curse genetics," he says quietly. "It's a blessing and a curse at the same time."
That mixed blessing will both help and haunt Robert for the rest of his life. People with his level of intelligence often struggle to balance the life of the mind and their place in the regular, workaday world, a struggle that intensifies as they reach adulthood. Starting with their first social or academic encounters, they face conflicting reactions to their talents. On one hand, they are viewed as anomalies, strange beings who don't fit in with other children and who are sent out to the school hallway (or, in one humiliating case, to the classroom closet) to work independently. They are often resented by teachers and peers. Such treatment can do irrevocable damage, especially for those who are awkward or shy.
At the same time, learning comes so easily that they are used to excelling, and they are frequently singled out for their extraordinary abilities. One prodigy I interviewed was identified by complete strangers as a modern messiah; another was hailed as a future Mozart. Such labels inevitably lead to great expectations. But child prodigies who are extremely talented at mimicking others may not grow up to be innovators themselves. "When you are a child prodigy, you are mastering a domain that has already been discovered - you are not inventing it," says Boston College psychology professor Ellen Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. "To be a `big C' creator, you have to do things in a different way, and most don't make that transition, and it is very, very painful for them. Most prodigies are never heard from again. They drop out, or they become experts."
These talented people get to a stage at which age doesn't matter anymore, and they're just like every other bright guy or gal trying to get ahead. Their test scores are irrelevant in a world where things like charisma and character are often the tickets to success. And that realization can be shattering. Many onetime child prodigies I spoke with, regardless of their financial and professional status, admit to a sense of inadequacy as adults. Some suffer from what psychologists call the "imposter phenomenon," the fear that they are not as smart as everyone said they were.
The Mercers are well aware of the potential wages of genius, and they are doing their best to prepare Robert. It's clear that mother and son have spent many hours working through the burden of this mixed blessing. "It is really possible that a very bright or moderately gifted person is going to become more successful than your profoundly gifted person," Kiki says. Robert nods, as if he's heard this before. The Mercers have become experts on child development, but they didn't immediately acknowledge that there was anything extraordinary about their only child. Robert's first word after "mama" and "dada" was "ventilator," soon followed by an incessant refrain of "Whazzat? Whazzat?" When he was still in diapers, he engaged in serious debates with his mother at the grocery store - Downy or Snuggle? Ajax or Comet? - and his enthusiasm for the mundane task of product selection attracted the attention and amusement of other shoppers. "I'm telling you, it was bizarre," Kiki recalls, "but we didn't get it."
Robert says his first memory is of lying in his crib thinking about reincarnation. On his first day of preschool at age 2, he lined up all the other children, counted them off, and told them where to go. He once cited Newton's laws of physics as an excuse for not cleaning up the back seat of the car. By that point, the Mercers got it. They had him tested, and Kiki cried when she got the results. Her son is what's known as globally gifted, excelling in the humanities as well as math and science. His scores were so high, they went beyond the point that can be accurately measured. "I thought, `My God, there is no way I can do this. I don't know what to do,'" she recalls.
School certainly wasn't working out. He had a teacher whom the Mercers liken to Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. His parents decided to home-school him after a rocky year, and Kiki left her career in marketing behind. Looking back, Robert realizes that there was no other choice. "I would have retreated into an emotional shell, or I just would have lost it and had an emotional nervous breakdown at some point," he says. "It's not a light issue. For a lot of kids, it becomes a matter of life and death."
The Mercers have been careful not to overemphasize academics. He participates in Voyagers, a home-schooling cooperative based in Acton. He also takes classes there, works with private tutors, and attends Harvard Extension School at night. Robert and his peers are lucky to live in the Boston area, with its rich intellectual resources and prestigious academic institutions, but even so, because of their age, they often face hurdles trying to enroll in community colleges. Robert has applied to Harvard College but would likely defer enrollment until next year. He wants to major in classics and political science, and he wouldn't mind occupying the Oval Office someday.
"We don't want this gigantic brain with sneakers on it," Kiki Mercer says. "We want a kid who can interact in society and feel confident about himself, be comfortable with a myriad of people, because if he's this big brain who can only figure out how to design letter bombs . . ." She interrupts the thought, and we know she's referring to Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, the child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16 and went on to lead a life of isolation and terrorism. His name is a dirty word in the small world of the profoundly gifted, a stereotype of the brilliant mind gone astray. But the Mercers don't sugarcoat the fact that great genius comes with the potential for great tragedy. Together, Robert and his family are carving out a life in which he is stimulated intellectually but allowed to be a kid, too. He has typical teenage interests like video games, movies, and music, and there's a certain girl he fancies, too. But there are still those days when he curses genetics, because he knows there is no greater burden than great potential.
The word "prodigy" comes from the Latin prodigium, meaning omen or portent, a harbinger of change. It also means something that violates the natural order. History has been kind to some prodigies - think Mozart or Einstein. At the same time, society has been suspicious of eccentrics. Consider the contrasting fates of two prodigies from the early 20th century. Norbert Wiener entered Tufts University in 1906 at age 11 and went on to graduate studies at Harvard in 1909. That same year, a brilliant 11-year-old named William James Sidis also enrolled at Harvard. Wiener became the father of cybernetics. Sidis became a recluse who collected streetcar transfers. He died alone and disillusioned at the age of 46.
What contributes to such dramatically different outcomes? Certainly, American society doesn't lionize its young scholars the way it does its young athletes and, to some degree, its young artists. In the days of Wiener and Sidis, there were few resources for profoundly gifted children, who were often isolated in a world that didn't understand them. Some were declared geniuses and pushed into the limelight, where, depending on their temperament, they either floundered or thrived.
But in the late 1960s, Julian Stanley, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, began studying mathematically precocious youth. He identified a need for programs for gifted children, and in 1979, he established the Center for Talented Youth at the Baltimore university, a sort of summer camp for brainy kids. There are similar centers at other universities, and gifted education has become an industry of sorts. The Internet has also been a godsend, creating a niche for parents who previously were afraid to speak up for fear of being branded the Mama Rose of junior high.
One girl I met, Kira Jones, a 15-year-old from Medway, had an even tougher time than Robert Mercer, whom she knows through the Voyagers program. Kira was always precocious, but when she was 7, she began shutting down in school and acting out at home. Her mother, Teresa Schultz-Jones, remembers handing her little girl a resource book on attention deficit disorder. "It didn't occur to me that if I was handing her a book like that to read, maybe it was a different issue," she says now, laughing. Kira's teachers didn't understand her, and the other kids taunted her for being different. "We're freaks of nature," Kira says. It's obviously a joke, but it wasn't funny for Kira at the time.
Doctors talked about institutionalizing her and prescribed Prozac, and Schultz-Jones carried the prescription around for a year. Finally, her parents pulled Kira out of school, and she bounced back. She ultimately enrolled in classes at a community college at age 11. Today, Kira maintains a sort of childlike quality. She carries a stuffed cat and holds it close at all times. She is interested in writing children's books, because she doesn't like stories with unhappy endings. The prescription for Prozac has long been tossed away.
A number of groups like Voyagers exist to help parents who don't know what it means when their toddler conducts adult conversations at the supermarket. But these things cost money, lots of money, and that's the open secret of this particular subculture. If you can't afford to pay for services, or if you come from a background that hasn't prepared you to work the system, your child could go without support, or his or her talents might not be acknowledged. "If the physical potential is there but the environment isn't, it won't see the light of day or it will come out in a very distorted or strange fashion," says David Henry Feldman, a professor of child development at Tufts University and an authority on giftedness.
Several foundations, including the Davidson Foundation in Reno, have arisen to try to fill that gap. But private and public resources are limited. There is no federal mandate for gifted education, and the Massachusetts Department of Education spends next to nothing on programs for gifted children.
Even with substantial support, there is no easy solution to the problem of raising a well-rounded prodigy. Such children are driven by what Winner calls "a rage to master." They are passionate about learning, which hinders their ability to interact with their peers. So what do you do with such a child? In one infamous case, a California boy named Adragon De Mello was promoted as a genius by his father and graduated from college in 1988 at age 11. Soon after, the boy chose to return to Little League and junior high. At the other extreme, Gregory Smith got his college degree at 13 and now, at 15, is pursuing a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Virginia. He has been lauded for his work with International Youth Advocates, a humanitarian group he founded, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. Smith is a polished young man accustomed to talking in sound bites, but he also cheerfully admits to boyish pleasures. "I definitely feel like just a kid," he says during a telephone interview. "I play sports. I go to the movies. I watch TV."
But he feels a sense of duty to make a lasting impression on the world. "I know I have been given a special gift, this gift to learn rapidly, and it has given me a tremendous opportunity to help on a global scale," he says, adding that he, like Robert Mercer, wants to be president someday. Every kid has dreams, and every adult suffers disappointment. But the pressure to achieve is more profound for uncommonly gifted people, and failure to meet one's own expectations can often lead to self-destruction.
That's why Stanley, the Johns Hopkins psychologist, hates the word "genius." "Little kids aren't geniuses," he says. "They're just little kids who are good at taking tests. There is only one Einstein in the history of the world. There is only one Mozart in the history of the world." And only one president at a time.
Marnen Laibow-Koser could have been the next Mozart, at least that's what his mother said. He remembers being told that he was extraordinary. "My parents made a very big deal of it," Laibow-Koser, who's now 30, recalls. "Particularly my mother made sure that I knew. It's like that immortal line from The Fantasticks: `I am special. I am special. Please, God, please, don't let me be normal!"
He certainly didn't have a "normal" childhood. His mother, Rima Laibow, a trained psychiatrist, contends that he was talking at 3 months and conducting adult conversations by 6 months. He was doing math, reading music, and was fluent in several languages by the time he was 3. Child-development experts were astounded by his brilliance, and he was one of six children studied in Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies and the Development of Human Potential, the seminal book by Tufts's Feldman and educator Lynn T. Goldsmith. He was "Adam Konantovich" in the book, but Laibow-Koser has no problem using his real name now. In fact, he's never even read the book, and until I reached him for this article, he hadn't told his girlfriend about its existence.
Laibow-Koser describes himself as a starving artist - a composer and musician - who lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, and works a day job doing technical support for IBM. He has several part-time musical gigs, including performing with a Javanese gamelan orchestra. He's active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval role-playing group, and says he speaks many languages, including Klingon, from Star Trek, and Esperanto. Last year, he toured with Blackmore's Night, a rock band with a medieval twist headlined by Ritchie Blackmore from Deep Purple. When I first interviewed Laibow-Koser, he said he was between major gigs but made it clear that he has "an audition in the pipeline."
An only child, he grew up outside New York in a household that revolved around his needs. When he was 5, the family conducted "the Boston experiment." Two days a week, they traveled to Boston, where the boy attended a progressive school in the Back Bay and worked with professors at MIT. His early life was a patchwork of music lessons, sessions with tutors, and trips to museums to study hieroglyphics.
His parents went through a bitter divorce when he was 16. He had been commuting to the State University of New York at Purchase at the time, but when the split got nasty, he decided to live on campus. He says he has a difficult relationship with his mother today.
But Laibow-Koser is positively cheery about most aspects of his life - with one exception. "I am missing a certain amount of discipline and organization that I like to think I would have gotten in a school environment," he says. "I had gotten the impression growing up that I was the absolute best, and everyone need only see that to believe it. I didn't realize how good everyone else out there was."
His problem, in his estimation, is a matter of marketing. Everything came so easy to him as a child, and he never learned how to package himself, an essential skill for a freelance musician. He also never got his degree in music composition, partly because he had too much fun in college. "I actually made friends," he says today, almost in disbelief.
His mother sees things differently. "I consider him a failed prodigy, and with no joy do I say that. I am devastated," she says. "I am disappointed. My heart is broken." His failure to do more with his gifts, she says, is "the world's loss." In her view, he is deluding himself with a life of trivial pursuits: "He is jovial. He is amiable. He is full of self-deception."
But Laibow-Koser doesn't rue the choices he's made. He would like his musical career to take off, and he wouldn't mind being financially stable. But his personal life is thriving. "You must understand the fact that I even have a girlfriend, let alone one that I'm probably going to spend my life with, is a new thing for me," he explains. Happy? "Oh, yeah. Then again, I have a friend who rather frustratedly said to me, `Damn it. You could be happy in a damp cave."
Jonathan Edwards doesn't have a display of diplomas decorating his workstation at MIT. Truth be told, he doesn't have much of a workstation at all. It's just a desk on the airy seventh floor of the Ray and Maria Stata Center, where the school's Software Design Group does its research. But Edwards, 48, is happy to have his little spot and the privilege of working there. Graced with the title of visiting engineer, he's the only researcher laboring on programming language who never graduated from junior high school, and he's probably the only one who built his own company and sold it for millions of dollars. "I'm a nobody now," he says. "It's liberating."
Several decades ago, Edwards was a kid like Robert Mercer: the brightest light in the classroom with an insatiable lust for learning. Unlike Robert, though, he didn't grow up in a warm, nurturing nest where he was encouraged to develop his social skills. All he wanted to do was work; math and science were his childhood friends. Educators weren't tuned in to the concept of "giftedness" back then, but he knew he had been blessed with the kind of mind capable of making discoveries that can change the world.
The burden of this great gift has haunted him his whole life. "I always felt that I'm walking this tightrope, that if I made one mistake, I was ruining or dashing this incredible potential," he says. And now, as he approaches 50, the burning desire to leave a lasting legacy is even more intense. It's what drives him. It's what led him to that desk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
By most definitions, Edwards is a great success. He built one of the first electronic money-transfer systems for Citibank before he was 20. He then started his own company, IntraNet, which dominated the field of money transfer. He and his partner sold it in 1998 for a reported $49.1 million in stock. But he downplays his financial success. "What seems to confuse a lot of people is that that's never satisfied me," he says. "You know, being that smart, you end up feeling that you have some sort of duty, or at least I ended up feeling that it would be an incredible waste not to make use of my talents and leave behind an equation that would be remembered. Or something. An idea."
Growing up as a misfit in Baltimore, he was part of a family that valued ideas over emotions. His mother was a teacher who idolized Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell and impressed her love of pure science on her son, the first of two children. She took Edwards to meet Julian Stanley at Johns Hopkins. Edwards says that the professor must have thought, "Yeah, right, lady," but agreed to test the boy to get rid of her. But Edwards's scores were astonishing, and Stanley invited him to attend Hopkins in 1970, at the age of 13. "My mother always said that if I had been forced to stay in junior high, I would have blown the place up," Edwards recalls, adding that this was well before Columbine. "I had something of a rebellious attitude about things."
College was liberating, an escape from the "prison of junior high." He immersed himself in a double major of math and philosophy. But then puberty hit - late, at 16 - and it hit him hard. Dating? He barely knew how to carry on a conversation that wasn't about facts and figures. He became confused and got involved with a group of students who were into music and marijuana. At 17, he took a semester off and then moved to Cambridge to finish his undergraduate degree at MIT.
He never graduated, though. He dropped out of school and moved into the Cambridge Zen Center in Central Square. "Zen has a mathematical, Spartan feel to it," he says, "and it really helped me a lot." Edwards took a job as a programmer in Kendall Square, and soon after he started IntraNet. The company's system now handles between $1 trillion and $2 trillion a day. Edwards is almost dismissive when he talks about the system he developed. "It was very unsexy software," he says, adding that he lucked out by selling the company during the Internet boom.
But he also had to discover something else along the way. How does a brainy loner learn to communicate? "I thought the only purpose of communication was to exchange ideas," he says. "If someone was telling me something that didn't have an interesting idea, it was noise, and I would ignore it. That was the point of communication, right? To exchange ideas. Wrong! Completely wrong. The point of communication is to exchange emotions. I was on a different wavelength from everybody else."
He met Cheryl Panzarella, then a nurse at Children's Hospital, at a Halloween party in 1986. She was dressed as a cat; he was a commando. They got married five years later and now live in Wellesley with their three children and a hamster. "To sum it up," he says, "I'm all brains, and she's all heart."
By American standards, he seems to have it all: a loving family, financial independence, a comfortable home. But it's still not enough. He isn't interested in politics or professional acclaim. He wants something more elusive. The "big C" creator thing, as Ellen Winner calls it. When he looks back on his childhood, he realizes that his mother valued big ideas. When she died a few years ago, he did some soul searching. "It was probably my mother dying that really made me sit up and say I need to start to get real about what I'm doing," he recalls. "Time is running out."
He started taking graduate classes and met Daniel Jackson, an associate professor of computer science at MIT and leader of the Software Design Group. Jackson invited him to join his group. Edwards is working unpaid, developing new programming language. "I think it is wholly admirable," notes Jackson. "It reminds me of the 19th-century gentleman scholars."
But Edwards is hardly a dilettante: He's driven to make the most of his talents. It hasn't always been easy, but he thinks he's ended up where he was meant to be. "It was very stressful, and that's probably why I dropped out of the whole thing," he says of his early years. "I felt too much pressure. It was self-inflicted, but it was there, and I needed to just blow it off and decide what I wanted to do. But in the end, I've come full circle."
Ruth Duskin Feldman understands that pressure. Growing up in Chicago in the 1940s, she was one of the Quiz Kids on the popular radio and then television programs from that era. She joked with Jack Benny and sang with Bing Crosby. Newspapers lauded her. She signed thousands of autographs.
Feldman, now 70 and living outside Chicago, went on to have a fairly routine life for a woman of her generation: college, marriage, a few kids. But when she hit midlife, she was nagged by self-doubt. She got a job writing for a suburban newspaper, but that wasn't enough. "I felt I should be making more of a name for myself on a national stage," she recalls, "and I think that expectation went back to all the acclaim I got as a child."
She eventually tracked down many of her former colleagues and wrote Whatever Happened to the Quiz Kids? The Perils and Profits of Growing Up Gifted. Some had careers as Hollywood producers, diplomats, and space engineers. Others were not so successful. One particularly brilliant boy died a sad and disillusioned man at age 47, an alcoholic living with an aged aunt. Most of the former Quiz Kids admitted to bouts of insecurity. "We had this sense that someone is going to find me out," Feldman says, "that I am not as brilliant as everyone says I am."
Feldman says that writing the book helped her get over those feelings of inadequacy, and, today, she is a respected author of textbooks on child development. She has embraced the perils and profits of her childhood and moved on.
And maybe that's the lesson for today's young prodigies. A few weeks after my initial meeting with Robert Mercer, we get together with a group of his friends. Kira Jones is there, and so is Courtney Andersen, a 12-year-old firebrand from Boxborough who could easily be in college full time. After an animated discussion of the highs and lows of growing up gifted, she's weary of the subject. "We're normal," Courtney says with exasperation. If she were giving a speech, she'd be pounding the lectern. "Certainly, we're different with our abilities," she says, "but that doesn't make us different with our personalities. We're all normal people!" At 12, she already knows what it takes some child prodigies years, and a lifetime of pain, to discover.
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