NurtureShock (15 page)

Hearing the poor accuracy of intelligence tests, it’s tempting to find some other method of testing for giftedness—say, looking
at a child’s emotional intelligence or behavior. Dozens of web sites ask, “Is Your Child Gifted?” and then offer a checklist
of behaviors to look for. And this isn’t just for parents—we found schools that had adopted these checklists as part of their
screening process. But are these behavioral guidelines any more valid?

Since the 1995 publication of Dr. Daniel Goleman’s
Emotional Intelligence
, there has been widespread acceptance of the theory that temperament and interpersonal skills might be more important to
success than cognitive intellect. In the ten-year anniversary edition of his book, Goleman praised the school districts that
now mandate emotional intelligence materials be included in their curricula, and he suggested that for some students, emotional
intelligence might be the linchpin to their academic success. Still other schools have incorporated the premise into their
admission processes. It’s increasingly popular for private schools to send preschoolers into staged play groups—administrators
use checklists to quickly assess children’s behavior, motivation, and personality.

So could the emotional side of children explain what IQ tests are missing?

In the last decade, several leading approaches to measuring emotional intelligence have emerged. One test, the MSCEIT, comes
from the team that originally coined the term “emotional intelligence”—including Dr. Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College.
The other test, the EQ-i, comes from Dr. Reuven Bar-On, who coined the term “Emotional Quotient.” Researchers around the world
have been using these scales, and the results have been a shock.

In a meta-analysis of these studies, scholars concluded that the correlation between emotional intelligence and academic achievement
was only 10 percent. Those studies were all done on adolescents and college students—not on kids—but one study of a prison
population showed that inmates have high EQ. So much for the theory that emotionally intelligent people make better life choices.

Salovey has repeatedly slammed Goleman for misrepresenting his team’s research and overstating its impact. He considers Goleman’s
optimistic promises not just “unrealistic” but “misleading and unsupported by the research.”

In one test of emotional knowledge, kids are asked what someone would feel if his best friend moved away. The more verbal
a child is, the more she’s able to score high on these tests—but verbal ability is also what drives early cognitive intelligence.
(In a later chapter, we’ll talk about what drives that early language development.) So rather than triumphantly arguing that
emotional intelligence supplants cognitive ability, one influential scholar is proving it’s the other way around: higher cognitive
ability increases emotional functioning.

There’s also research into how children’s personalities correlate with academic success. But the problem is that, at every
age, different personality traits seem to matter. One study determined that in kindergarten, the extraverts are the good students,
but by second or third grade, extraversion is only half as important, while other scholars found that by sixth grade, extraversion
is no longer an asset. Instead, it has an increasingly negative impact. By eighth grade, the best students are conscientious
and often introverted.

In 2007, Dr. Greg Duncan published a massive analysis of 34,000 children, with no less than eleven other prominent co-authors.
They combed through the data from six long-term population studies—four of which were from the United States, one from Canada,
and one from the United Kingdom. Prior to kindergarten, the children participating all took some variety of intelligence test
or achievement test. As well, mothers and teachers rated their social skills, attention skills, and behaviors—sometimes during
preschool, sometimes in kindergarten. The scholars sought out data on every aspect of temperament and behavior we recognize
can affect performance in school—acting out, anxiety, aggression, lack of interpersonal skills, hyperactivity, lack of focus,
et cetera.

Duncan’s team had expected social skills to be a strong predictor of academic success, but, Duncan recalled, “It took us three
years to do this analysis, as the pattern slowly emerged.” On the whole the IQ tests showed the degree of correlations as
in Suen’s meta-analysis: combining math and reading together, early IQ had at best a 40% correlation with later achievement.
The attention ratings, at best, showed a 20% correlation with later achievement, while the behavior ratings topped out at
an 8% correlation. What this means is that many kids who turned out to be very good students were still fidgety and misbehaving
at age five, while many of the kids who were well-behaved at age five didn’t turn into such good students. That social skills
were such poor predictors was completely unexpected: “That is what surprised me the most,” confirmed Duncan.

It’s tempting to imagine one could start with the 40% correlation of IQ tests, add the 20% correlation of attention skill
ratings, and top it off with a social skills measure to jack the total up to a 70% correlation. But that’s not how it works.
The various measures end up identifying the same well-behaved, precocious children, missing the children who blossom a year
or two later. For instance, motivation correlates with academic success almost as well as intelligence does. But it turns
out that kids with higher IQs are more motivated, academically, so every analysis that controls for IQ shows that motivation
can add only a few percentage points to the overall accuracy.

Almost every scholar has their own pet concoction of tests, like bartenders at a mixology competition. At best, these hybrids
seem to be maxing out at around a 50% correlation when applied to young children.

In a later chapter of this book, we’ll discuss measures that get at the skill of concentrating amid distraction—how this may
be the elusive additive factor scientists are looking for. And it could be that in a few years, a scholar will emerge with
a hybrid test of IQ and impulsivity that will predict a five-year-old’s future performance. Until then, it needs to be recognized
that no current test or teacher ratings system, whether used alone or in combination on such young kids, meets a reasonable
standard of confidence to justify a long-term decision. Huge numbers of great kids simply can’t be “discovered” so young.

With IQ test authors warning that kids’ intelligence scores aren’t really reliable until a child is around 11 or 12, that
raises a fascinating question. What’s going on in the brain that makes one person more intelligent than another? And are those
mechanisms substantially in place at a young age—or do they come later?

Back in the 1990s, scientists were seeing a correlation between intelligence and the thickness of the cerebral cortex—the
craterlike structure enveloping the interior of the brain. In every cubic millimeter of an adult brain, there’s an estimated
35 to 70 million neurons, and as many as 500 billion synapses. If the nerve fibers in a single cubic millimeter were stretched
end to end, they would run for 20 miles. So even a slightly thicker cortex meant trillions more synapses and many additional
miles of nerve fibers. Thicker was better.

In addition, the average child’s cortex peaked in thickness before the age of seven; the raw material of intelligence appeared
to be already in place. (The entire brain at that age is over 95% of its final size.) On that basis, it could seem reasonable
to make key decisions about a child’s future at that stage of development.

But this basic formula, thicker is better, was exploded by Drs. Jay Giedd and Philip Shaw of the National Institutes of Health
in 2006. The average smart kid does have a bit thicker cortex at that age than the ordinary child; however, the very smartest
kids, who proved to have superior intelligence, actually had much thinner cortices early on. From the age of 5 to 11 they
added another half-millimeter of gray matter, and their cortices did not peak in thickness until the age of 11 or 12, about
four years later than normal kids.

“If you get whisked off to a gifted class at an early age, that might not be the right thing,” Giedd commented. “It’s missing
the late developers.”

Within the brain, neurons compete. Unused neurons are eliminated; the winners survive, and if used often, eventually get insulated
with a layer of white fatty tissue, which exponentially increases the speed of transmission. In this way, gray matter gets
upgraded to white matter. This doesn’t happen throughout the brain all at once; rather, some parts of the brain can still
be adding gray matter while other regions are already converting it to white matter. However, when it occurs, this upgrade
can be rapid—in some areas, 50% of nerve tissue gets converted in a single year.

The result can be leaps in intellectual progress, much like a dramatic growth spurt in height. During middle childhood, faster
upgrading of left hemisphere regions leads to larger gains in verbal knowledge. The area of the prefrontal cortex considered
necessary for high-level reasoning doesn’t even begin upgrading until preadolescence—it’s one of the last to mature.

In those same years, the brain is also increasing the organization of the large nerve capsules that connect one lobe to another.
Within those cerebral superhighways, nerves that run parallel are selected over ones that connect at an angle. Slight alterations
here have whopping effects—a 10% improvement in organization is the difference between an IQ below 80 and an IQ above 130.
Such 10% gains in organization aren’t rare; on the contrary, that’s normal development from age 5 to 18.

With all this construction going on, it’s not surprising that IQ scores show some variability in the early years. From age
3 to age 10, two-thirds of children’s IQ scores will improve, or drop, more than 15 points. This is especially true among
bright kids—their intelligence is more variable than among slower children.

Dr. Richard Haier is an eminent neurologist at University of California, Irvine. When I told him that New York City was selecting
gifted students on the basis of a one-hour exam at age five, he was shocked.

“I thought school districts ended that practice decades ago,” Haier said. “When five-year-olds are tested, it’s not clear
to me that having a single snapshot in the developmental sequence is going to be that good, because not every individual progresses
through development at the same rate. What about the kid who doesn’t progress until after age five?”

Haier’s specialty is identifying the location of intelligence in the brain. Neuroscience has always been obsessed with isolating
the functions of different brain regions. Early findings came from patients with damage to discrete regions; from what they
could not do, we learned where visual processing occurs, and where motor skills are stored, and where language is comprehended.

In the last decade, brain-scanning technology enabled us to decipher far more—we know what lights up when danger is imminent,
and where religious sense is experienced, and where in the brain lie the powerful cravings of romantic love.

But the search for intelligence in the brain lagged. At last, neuroscientists like Haier are on the verge of identifying the
precise clusters of gray matter that are used for intelligence in most adults. But during their hunt, they collectively discovered
something that has made them rethink the long-held assumption that ties brain location to brain function.

As a child ages, the location of intellectual processing shifts. The neural network a young child relies on is not the same
network he will rely on as an adolescent or adult. There is significant overlap, but the differences are striking. A child’s
ultimate intellectual success will be greatly affected by the degree to which his brain learns to shift processing to these
more efficient networks.

Dr. Bradley Schlaggar, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, has found that both adults and children called
upon 40 distinct clusters of their gray matter when subjects performed a simple verbal test inside an fMRI scanner. However,
comparing the scans of the children (age 9) to adults (age 25), Schlaggar saw that only half of those clusters were the same.
The adults were utilizing their brains quite differently.