Why are some people more intelligent than others? What makes men like Nobel Prize Winner Albert Einstein or child prodigies like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart so outstanding? The answers to these age-old questions are helping scientists to learn more about intelligence and to understand why some people have more than others..........
These boys and girls not only fascinate their families and friends but are a vital link in understanding the elusive phenomenon of intelligence. From an early age, gifted children are capable of exceptional achievements. They learn quickly and efficiently, think as adults do, juggle formulae from mathematics or physics and often learn to read by themselves or learn their way round a computer keyboard by the time they are old enough to go to school!! Such children stand out from others in the areas of science, literature, music, painting and sports. (In music, for example, many a famous virtuoso was a brilliant performer as a child).
Many of Einstein's contemporaries were also remarkably knowledgeable, and perhaps just as creative, inventive and intelligent, but Einstein stood out from the crowd because of his genius. His work, his results and his ideas decisively changed our picture of the world and our philosophy. The best evidence that there are varying levels of intelligence may be seen in the question of genius.
In fact, gifted children may try not to attract attention to themselves. They may feel uneasy about their unusual abilities, and so they tend to be shy and only rarely stand out as the best in the class. Sometimes, they become bored by the class routine that they can no longer concentrate on what the teacher is saying. When this happens, their marks fall rapidly :-( !!
Louis Pasteur, the French chemist who invented pasteurisation and discovered vaccines against rabies and anthrax, was undistinguished as a student! But after he set up a laboratory, the quality of his research proved that he possessed an unusually high level of intelligence.
