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Slow Starters Have Higher IQ?
lockefire writes "Science Daily is reporting that children with 'superior' IQ's tend to have a slow start in the development of their cortex. These children have a 'delayed but prolonged' spurt that causes their cortex thickness to peak later than their peers and thin much quicker. This effect is most evident in the pre-frontal cortex. 'People with very agile minds tend to have a very agile cortex,' says Dr. Philip Shaw of the NIMH."
I wonder if the reason for this is that the slow starters grow up thinking they are not that smart. So they don't close their minds, as fast as their average IQ counterparts. to new ideas because they have been humbled enough to realize what they know may not be always correct. Vs. Children who grow up and start off smart early so they know they are ahead of everyone else so they assume that they are smarter then everyone else so they close their minds more to different ideas. And the change in thickness of their cortex is because the slower starters need to exercise their minds more.
Growing up I myself heard a lot of arguments against correct Ideas from the "Smart" students, arguments like I am the next Level class above you so your information is wrong and I am right. So they go on for the rest of their life with the wrong ideas about things while the "Slower" student goes along absorbing information and different ideas thus making their minds more agile.
I know many slashdotters don't like the nurture side of the debate because results are not as predictable, and some think it is an attack on evolution which it isn't. But especially the brain is very adaptable to environmental changes and can even "rewire" itself if serious damage occurs. I wonder if they could do statical information where they put the slower starter child in an environment where they taught information much more slowly and see how the brain develops in that situation.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Do they know The Secret of NIMH?
*hides*
About "first posters", versus "slow starters"?
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Yeah, baby, it'll be higher than all the other guys', you just have to give me some time...
Also, there are so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless. I've worked with plenty of people who had a very high IQ but were completely ineffective either because of psychological weirdnesses or because they couldn't focus enough to get anything done.
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And here I was worried that by 30 I hadn't became a genius yet. Nice to know that with this delay I'm sure to be the worlds biggest supper genius when my time comes! Bwahahaha.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
All my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb and my mom always tolld me to try and lern just like Miss Kinnian tells me but its very hard to be smart and even when I lern something in Miss Kinnians class at the school I ferget alot.
I am a leaf on the wind
This is a very probable conclusion. After all, it has been illustrated countless of times before in history. For example, take Isaac Newton, someone who could be consider the founder of classical physics. Newton did not excel in his studies in comparison to others; only when he reached the age of 21 did he develop his brilliant ideas and observations in utter seclusions. Now take Albert Einstein. Einstein was born in 1879. The school system did not treat him as anything special. He went with the other neigborhood children to a regular, average school. Furthermore, at the age of 16, he applied to the Swiss Institute of Physics but got rejected, and he failed to graduate from his subsequent enrollment at Zurich University.
In all honesty, take a look at "child geniuses" that prospered early on. We hear every once in a while about a kid that starts college at the age of 8, or 10; and that's the last time we hear about them. It is the people that consistently produce significant progress that "show".
One subject that seems to be an exception to this rule is the arts. For example, Mozart--and many other great musicians--were fluent in their art form very early on. But, I think that it very well might be that those "early bloomers" might not be all they're made out to be.
Where the heck in this article would you get that it's "slow starters" ?
Now, there may be something about the somewhat different early development of the brain for these smarter kids with the thicker, later-maturing cortexes, and how that changes their early behavior compared to others, but TFA ( and the study ) didn't cover that, now, did they ?
Damn crappy wrong article summaries like this make me mad... somewhat at the submitters, but mostly at the admins. Thanks for actually reading and interpreting ( incorrectly ) the article, ScuttleMonkey !
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I am one of those slow starter people. For example, I am going to think of something very contributive and helpful to add to this Slashdot discussion. It is going to happen, it's just going to take me a while. So mod me up ahead of time for my potential wisdom.
I think it's politically incorrect to say this because no one should ever hear that they are "doomed to be dumb". I actually agree that no one should hear this, but denying that nature has a large effect on intellegence isn't the way.
People need to realise that there are many types of intelligence, and that not having a high IQ really only related to a small number of them. There is acedemic intelligence (heck you can often find a person who is great in one subject area and not another), there is emotional intelligence, there is interpersonal/social intelligence, there is technical (hands on) aptitudes that are also intelligences.
Nature affecting IQ doesn't mean that someone who has "bad" genes is dumb. It just means that they will probably use some other intelligence or talent to make their contribution to the world.
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I would give anything to have a "delayed but prolonged spurt."
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One of the greatest challenges is getting past the pervasive attitude that certain subjects are "hard" People get to believing it. Hell, it's in television, movies, comics, etc. that you have to be a "brainy nerd" like, say Jason Fox or Francis Ottoman to be able to hack certain subjects. The reality is people buy into the "for super brains only" and "[subject] is hard" and tune out. Attitude and confidence are everything when studying.
I was about to drop a chemistry class in college because I just felt I couldn't do it. It was just too much. But I was also working a student job in the computer center and had interacted a bit with faculty and administration on a concept of "writing across the curriculum", in a nutshell, repeat in writing not what was just shoved into your brain, but what you thought of it, what it meant to you, plus any connections to any other areas it seemed to connect. It's a cognitive kickstart, which rather than focus on rote learning emphasized understanding of the concepts. Once you've got the concepts down and feel confident, you've got it made.
I decided to be fair to myself before dropping the class and admitting failure and sat down in the commons to write out what about inorganic chemistry I did know. Turned out I did know a lot, it was just a few things I didn't know that were defeating me. Why focus energy on learning what you already know? So I focused on what I didn't know and pulled an A in the class. It was a watershed moment and after applying it to a few other classes I realized I could do it all and do it all well.
All except that three pronger in music... ah well...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think I might be an example of both arguements here. I was a slow learner when young but then suddenly surpassed my classmates about 5th grade or so. Before then I thought I was dumber than the rest of them. Slow development because of the cortex, or did I just try harder because I thought I was dumb? At age 35, it's hard for me to remember.
In high school my IQ test claimed I was near genius. So why can't I learn to read music? Several people have tried to teach me and I've tried to learn but I just never get it. Yet I'm quite intuitive about computers and GUIs. Neither of my parents were above average, but my mother could finish a difficult crossword puzzle in 10 minutes flat, whereas I can't finish one of average difficulty. Her mind grasped the pattern in them but apparently mine does not. I'm not good at other word games either like she was, but I'm very good at puzzles that involve shapes, colors and pieces (tetris, etc.). So there definitely are people who are better at some things than others, regardless of IQ or how developed their brains are supposed to be, which is much the same as saying there are different sorts of intelligence.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
All three were highly talented in their fields at a very early age.
I'm sure I could find plenty more examples given time.
Could you please name the countries that 1) always show the highest test scores and 2) let kids out of school as early as age 10?
Finland is, as I remember, one of those high-scoring countries, but the Basic Education page at the Finnish National Board of Education site says "Basic Education means the general education provided for each age group in its entirety. It is intended for children from seven to sixteen years of age, and its completion in comprehensive school takes nine years."
Japan is another of the high-scoring countries; the US Library of Congress Country Studies information on Japan says under "Primary and Secondary Education" that, at least as of 1994, "Education is compulsory and free for all schoolchildren from the first through the ninth grades" and a diagram in the report (PDF) indicates that this runs up to age 14. (The page on "Upper-Secondary Education" indicates that, even after age 14, "94 percent of all lower-secondary school graduates entered uppersecondary schools in 1989".)
Similarly, in Mario Kart, Bowser and Donkey Kong, (and lately Wario), have the slowest accelerations, but achieve the highest top speeds!
"Science Daily is reporting that children with 'superior' IQ's tend to have a slow start in the development of their cortex."
"Slow Starters Have Higher IQ?"
Now I would expect that a person submitting a story to a relatively technical place like slashdot would have just a hint of logical thinking ability.
Don't tell me that slow starters have higher IQ's - that doesn't follow. It's just flat out wrong here.
Tell me that a small number of people who are slow starters go on to have higher IQ's. The vast majority of slow starters simply remain slow, and their IQ never rises to brainy heights.
The summary was defective in the first place, as lots people have noted above, but it was defective within its own assumptions after that.
That's only one of the two problems with that idea. The other, and bigger is that "No child left behind." ends up as "No child gets ahead." Teachers spend so much time dragging along the slowest learners, the ones who really need to be left behind because the need that extra time, that they can't give the best and the brightest the attention they need and deserve. Thus, trying to bring the slowest up to standard means the best have to be held back.
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Agreed that IQ is a decent indicator of future success, but I don't know that it's the best one and it's definitely not the only one.
What about socioeconomic status? That's a pretty good one. And what about effort? Harder to quantify but somebody's dedication and work ethic seem to be more highly correlated to success than IQ to my subjective measurement. I'm guessing a combination of these factors would be a much better predictor (higher R^2) than any one of them alone.
Anybody have any good studies on this?
I'd have to say my life follows this hypothesis fairly well. When I was three years old, I was barely speaking more than one word utterances. The doctors told my mom I would probably turn out OK, and she shouldn't worry too much. By the time I was in kindergarten, I had my first IQ test (Pennsylvania does this to place "superior" students in gifted programs, and "deficient" students in a remedial education program). I scored around a 105, just above average and I took all the regular classes like all of the other "regular" students. In state testing in second grade, I scored in the 99th percentile overall; higher than any other kid in my grade, including the "gifted" ones. Because of this, it was suggested that I be tested yet again. This time, I made a dramatic improvement, to two and a half standard deviations above average (I don't like to say scores, because, in essence they mean nothing more than how well I was able to do on a certain test on a certain day). This was more than enough to put me in the gifted program, so I'd get the perk of getting out of 'regular' class one day a week and doing what they considered "smart kid stuff" and I got to go on a bunch of field trips. Why being intelligent should earn some kids these special priveledges over other kids is beyond me.
I eventually started college and realized I had no idea how to learn stuff. High school was easy for me; all I'd have to do is show up and I'd get an "A." Soon I was depressed (more so than normal- I've suffered depression my whole life) and stopped going to classes altogether. When I finally got my act together, I went to a neurologist to figure out why I'm having such a difficulty in learning. I had yet another IQ test, in addition to all these other tests. Amazingly, my IQ went up another whole standard deviation- even though my reading comprehension and auditory memory subtests were actually considered low enough as for me to have a disability under the ADA (how it works is if you are more than 1.5 standard deviation below your test average, you are considered to have a disability in that area- the part I have a hard time accepting is that I still scored above the 90th percentile in both of these tests). My neurologist was very intrigued about how my scores have been improving considering how I got off to such a slow start.
I'm very blessed to have a one-in-10,000 IQ, but it comes with it's caveats. I still struggle to learn information I'm not interested in, I've suffered from pretty severe depression most of my life, and I almost never see a project of mine to completion- my mind just wanders too much. I've gotten a little off-topic here, but I'd be interested to see if my cortex withers more rapidly as I age as illustrated in the article.
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Interestingly, it seems at least one study suggests people with ADD get "stuck" in a phase of cortical development, possibly delaying later development.
As ADD seems correlated with the dopamine transporter density and genes that increase the number of DATs, perhaps lower extracellular dopamine levels result in slower cortical development and ADD represents an extreme manifestation of an "agile" cortex-- sometimes perhaps a bit too agile for its own good.
IIRC, task persistance and switching tasks is controlled by the temporal lobes, not the PFC, and while that ties in with the PFC's executive control, I think the definition of "agile" they use in this study might apply to a different region of the brain entirely.
Regarding not being able to learn music, there are several possibilities (I don't know enough about your personal background (actually, I know nothing about your musical background) so these may not apply to you.) Sorry if any of these sounds like insults, it's just conversation and mental excercise
1) You were not taught how to play a musical instrunment at an early enough age. Music is an expressive form, which can essentially communicate ideas or at least emotions, likely very similar to language. It is vastly easier for people to learn new languages at a certain age (I think younger than about 6 years old? Someone more versed in developmental psychology may feel free to correct me here.) After that age, it becomes more and more difficult to learn a foreign language. Although learning any foreign language in this critical time appears to make it much easier to learn a different foreign language later in life than if the person only learned their native tongue. My guess is that translating between languages is a skill that must be learned early to be fully effective.
2) It is possible that you are simply tone deaf. Not meant to be an insult. Some people have innate "perfect pitch" and can replicate any tone given to them. Some people are on the other end of the spectrum and have a very difficult time differentiating between any pitches. This seems to be mostly a physiological limitation of some sort, although practice can move one significantly closer to the "perfect pitch" end of the spectrum. (Personally, I don't have "traditional" perfect pitch in which I can hear a tone and tell if it middle C or not, but am fairly decent at discerning relative pitches... E.G. if one note is four steps above another, if one pitch is an octave double of another, etc etc.)
3) The people who tried to teach you how to read music may have simply not been good teachers in this particular field.
4) Whether or not the reading music was in an attempt to learn an instrunment that you are interested in playing can make a big difference. And some instrunments are more suited for learning to read music: the piano being pretty much ideal as it is laid out in pretty much the exact form that sheet music is written in. But I think whether or not you are actually interested in learning that particular instrunment is more important (assuming a melodic instrunment... learning to play drums or other rhythmic instrunments would not help.)
5) Many of the other details in your post imply that you are an extremely visual thinker as opposed to verbal. Your relative ability to play tetris over doing a crossword puzzle is very telling of this. Even your doing poorly early on in school and then finally racing ahead is very telling. Much of early education seems to be rote memorization, which is done better in a verbal mindframe. Since speech is a linear process it would seem logical that memorizing lists of facts etc would come easier to a verbal thinker. Defining a visual thinker is a bit difficult to do with words, but it is my opinion that the thought processes are not nearly as linear and there are multiple parallel concepts being processed at the same time. This allows for a greater ease in learning certain abstract topics which would only come into play later in an academic career. I believe that visual thinkers have a little bit more difficult time learning a completely foreign topic. This is because (in my opinion) that visual thinkers need to compare the thing being learned to other related ideas. But once a few key concepts in the area are known, it becomes quite trivial for the visual learner to visualize the patterns of how other concepts link into the framework of the entire topic or discipline. This could possibly be compared to object oriented programming, where once a class is set up all the information and functions contained within can then be reused by something which needs it. A visual mode of thinking means that you have to have a baseline knowledge built up to be a
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
IQ as a measure of ability is reductive and almost useless. People are good at different things, and many many skills are not measured by "IQ" that are highly correlated with success in the world. Leadership, confidence, self-image, creativity, organizing the external world, etc. etc. etc. Jung and other have made extremely good models that provide better measures for people's abilities and skills.