"That millions share the same forms of mental pathology does not make those people sane." ------ Erich Fromm

Click on Book Image to view Details

The Einstein Syndrome ( taken from the book The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late by Thomas Sowell. This article has been contributed by ReadnSurf Editorial Team. ) “This is about very bright children who are unusually late—sometimes years behind schedule—in beginning to talk. Most bright children are not late in talking and most children who are late in talking are not exceptionally bright. But there is a special set of youngsters with a distinctive set of characteristics—and whose families also have a distinctive set of characteristics—whose speech development lags far behind that of other children their age, while their intellectual development surges ahead of that of their peers. The most famous such person was Albert Einstein, ....continued below.....

These words are from the book The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late by Thomas Sowell. The book is a follow-up to Late-Talking Children, which established Thomas Sowell as a leading spokesman on the subject. Sowell has joined with Stephen Camarata of Vanderbilt University, who has conducted a much broader, more rigorous study of this phenomenon. Sowell identifies a cluster of common symptoms and family characteristics, that differentiates these late-talking children from others; relate this syndrome to other syndromes; speculate about its causes; and describe how children with this syndrome are likely to develop. Some interesting words follow….

In a world where there are "norms" set for when infants are supposed to do everything—sit up, crawl, walk, talk—many parents nervously compare when their own child does these things with when they are supposed to do them, according to the charts, books, and magazines. Where these parents are in contact with other parents whose children are the same age, their anxieties may be magnified if little Johnny is not doing things as early as a neighbor's little Susie.

In the end, nearly all people walk, talk, learn to use the bathroom, and read and write. In later life, no one is ever likely to know or care when they first did any of these things. But, of course, parents of small children are rightly focused very anxiously on the present as a young life unfolds before their eyes. No doubt norms can be useful to parents, physicians, and others who deal with small children, and who must be on the lookout for problems and dangers. In some cases, however, these norms may do more harm than good. Norms are based on averages and there is often much variation around those averages.

Norms can hang like a dark cloud over those parents whose children pass their second, third, or even fourth birthday without speaking. Tragic as this may be when the child is retarded or deaf, parents eventually come to terms with this. But those parents who are most likely to be continually torn with contradictory feelings and to hear conflicting conclusions from others, including experts, are those whose children show every sign of being bright—often strikingly brighter in some ways than other children their age—and yet who remain silent, while the children of neighbors and friends develop the ability to speak at the normal time.

Parents of children who are late in talking are ultimately concerned about how their children will turn out as adults. Will these children, for example, continue to show the shyness and social maladroitness that many have as children or is that something that will fade away over the years, as they acquire fluent speech and are therefore able to participate more easily in social activities? For many parents, the question is even more basic: Will their children be able to take care of themselves independently when they are grown?

There are enough late-talking children who grew up to become political figures or media figures to dispel the notion that shyness must be permanent. Benito Mussolini was certainly not shy. Nor are talkshow hosts G. Gordon Liddy and Barry Farber, economist-journalist Walter Williams, or House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Yet all of them were late in beginning to speak.
Even in fields not requiring much social interaction or social skills, such as science and engineering, late-talkers are not necessarily shy or withdrawn as adults. Nuclear physicist Richard Feynman was a late talker—and an extrovert.

Some late-talkers do, of course, tend to remain shy and socially maladroit as adults, but that is also true of many people who begin speaking at the normal time. How any given child's personality will turn out as an adult is as difficult to predict for late-talking children as for anyone else. But the early shyness and social awkwardness that is so often found among young late-talkers is not a sign of predestination. As for being able to take care of themselves as adults, financially and otherwise, that question has been answered in the affirmative by both famous and unknown adults who were late in talking as children.

The most famous late-talker was of course Albert Einstein, which is why the set of characteristics found among the children in our study is called "the Einstein syndrome." However, other famous physicists who also talked late include Edward Teller, later to become known as "the father of the H-Bomb. Feynman was two years old before he began to talk. According to his biographer, Feyman's mother "worried for months" and then suddenly he became "unstoppably voluble. Edward Teller's grandfather told young Teller's parents: "I think you should face the possibility that you have a retarded child." In the case of Einstein, even after he began to speak, his first teachers in elementary school "revived early fears that he was mentally retarded." He "ignored whatever bored him, making no attempt to master it; but if something caught his interest, he Embraced it with the purposeful concentration of a watchmaker." When his worried father asked the headmaster of the school his son attended what kind of occupation he should try to prepare the boy for, the reply was: "It doesn't matter; he'll never make a success of anything."

Young Einstein's highly selective interests and unusual concentration on the things that attracted that interest were also common characteristics of the children studied here. So are early childhood temper tantrums. As a young child, Einstein was "lonely and dreamy" and did not make friends easily. He preferred "solitary and taxing" pastimes, such as assembling complicated constructions with his building blocks and making houses of cards as much as fourteen stories high. Even after Einstein began to speak, he was neither fluent nor sure of himself. He "would softly repeat every sentence he uttered—a habit he continued until he was seven." He was still not yet fluent when he turned nine.

While there may never be another Einstein, in terms of his analytical or creative genius, the thrust of the abilities of the children studied here have been in the same general analytical direction.

However varied the timing and manner of their speaking, bright children who talk late nevertheless tend to share various personal, as well as intellectual, characteristics. Young Edward Teller was typical of many such children in doing what interested him, when it interested him, but not otherwise. His biographer wrote that "he would play the piano for hours, then he might not go near it for a week." He was also typical of such children in highly uneven development. As an eight-year-old, he worked mathematics problems for fun and played chess with his father, but he still expected his governess to put on his socks for him as she helped him dress.

It is also worth noting young Edward Teller's "refusal" to talk, since this makes a distinction between inability and non-compliance that many evaluators of late-talking children fail to make, not only as regards talking but also other tasks used to assess children's mental development.

When the child is given some materials and a simple task to perform, but chooses instead to do something more complicated with those materials, some evaluators record this as an inability to perform the simpler task assigned and reach ominous conclusions about the child's mental ability as a result. One little boy who failed to respond to a question as to whether he was a boy or a girl was recorded as not understanding something this basic.

Another late-talking child was pronounced "mentally retarded" after a seven-minute interview in which, among other things, he failed to respond when asked to point to his mother. Many parents of late-talkers report such children's non-compliance when asked to do things that the child has done many times before at home and, more generally, that such children are "strong-willed"—a phrase occurring repeatedly in letters I have received from parents of late-talking children. These children are not "trained seals," as one mother put it. If they are not interested, they don't do it—like Einstein and Teller before them.

A study of geniuses in general characterized creative women as "rebellious and non-conforming," when compared to women of average ability. Since Professor Robinson found similar characteristics among mathematicians—most of whom are men—this seems to be a tendency among people of high intellectual ability, regardless of sex. However, this trait complicates the evaluation of small children with high intellectual potential, who may not cooperate in the evaluation process.

Separating inability from non-compliance requires judgment, but first the distinction must be recognized as important by the evaluator, who must also be prepared to do more than mechanically go down a checklist.

Although we tend to think of the children in the groups studied here as youngsters who talk late despite their precocious development in analytical thinking, it is also possible that they talk late because of their precocious development in analytical thinking.

Since the entire brain grows in early childhood, producing more total resources that can then be used for various functions, this hypothesis is consistent with the fact that bright, late-talking children do eventually begin to speak and that their speech development usually catches up with that of other children in a few years.

What at remains to be examined scientifically by specialists is how all this fits together. Children talk late for so many different reasons and have so many different collateral characteristics that it will be a challenge for the future—and for others—-to untangle all the complex factors at work. Here we are seeking only to grope toward some understanding of why one particular subset of children with highly developed analytical and other mental abilities are also years late in beginning to speak. Because these children so often come from families where close relatives are concentrated in highly analytical and musical occupations, heredity seems like a promising factor to investigate. Though we are far from a scientific answer, the relevant questions seem more likely to revolve around the hereditary characteristics of the brain and its development than the usual explanations based on blaming parents— especially mothers—for the way they raised the child. In most families with a bright child who talked late, the other children did not talk late, even though raised by the same parents. 

Speech Therapists
With all that science has discovered, there remains so much about the brain which no one yet understands that dogmatic pretensions of "expertise" on the part of semi-professional evaluators of children should be warning signs for parents. In an area where no one has "the answer," you might think that there would be reticence and caution, along with a desire to learn more. In fact, however, there is not only much haste and dogmatism, but also too often a resistance to learning more, especially from anyone outside the occupational coterie.

Whatever speech therapists may or may not be able to do for a particular child, they are unlikely to be the most reliable or unbiased source of information as to whether a given child needs speech therapy in the first place. If the reason a particular child is behind schedule in beginning to talk is a matter of brain maturation, then the therapy sessions could be little more than sources of frustration to all concerned before the child's brain has developed to the point of being ready for speech.

In

While no one knows specifically or with certainty why some very bright children talk late, what is known is that there are other brain-related abnormalities that are more common among very bright people than in the general population. Children with the Einstein syndrome are not unique in that respect, however puzzling they may seem to their parents or to those who come in contact with them in medical or educational institutions. Explanations offered by researchers who have studied other brain-related disorders among, very bright people—-that a disproportionate share of the brain's resources going to intellectual functions can leave inadequate resources for some other brain functions—may apply to bright children who talk late, as well as to bright people with higher incidences of allergies, myopia, and left-handedness.

Both the statistical patterns among bright children who talk late and their personal and family histories are more compatible with this explanation than with such alternative explanations as the parents' child-rearing practices. So is the imperviousness of many of these children to attempts to get them to talk at the ages when other children talk—and their later spontaneous development of speech as their brains grow with the rest of their bodies. So is the fact that the overwhelming majority of children with the Einstein syndrome are boys, given that the organization of the male brain makes it more vulnerable to localized problems. ”

Readnsurfing is Fun. Enjoy !!!