Another Saturday afternoon, and time again for Mandatory Fun. The High Math boys were sprawled on a patch of grass in front of their dormitory, waiting glumly for the games to begin. It was summer in Baltimore, and the wettest spring in memory had left the lawns at Johns Hopkins University deep green and as soft as velvet. Halfway across the quad, some High Verbals were waving banners in the sun, babbling excitedly and chasing one another around with high-pitched squeals. Michael Scarito watched them for a moment and yawned. Then he turned to his friend Andrew Hunter. “There must be a wireless network around here somewhere, but I can’t seem to hook into it,” he said. “Maybe it’s encrypted.” Hunter looked up from his fantasy novel and smirked. “If that were true, you’d still be able to pick it up with your Wi-Fi card.”
On sunny days like this, the Center for Talented Youth—or nerd camp, as most of the attendees called it—could almost pass for some Indian-themed summer camp in the Catskills. But Scarito and Hunter weren’t your typical campers. Scarito, at fifteen, was already a licensed computer technician. Two years ago, he had installed a server for his mother’s medical office, in York, Pennsylvania. (“They got quotes from Dell and Gateway, but he way underbid them,” his father told me.) Hunter, who was also fifteen, was an avid programmer who helped administer his high school’s computers. Sitting on the grass side by side, they looked like a young Laurel and Hardy: Scarito short and stout, with thick black locks hanging in front of his eyes; Hunter tall and knobby, with buzz-cut hair and eyebrows screwed into a look of perpetual disbelief.
Like the other High Math boys, Scarito and Hunter were here to study engineering, and they had run a gantlet of tests for the privilege. The center accepts only the top one per cent of all students—those who score as well on the S.A.T. in junior high as the average student does as a high-school senior—and not every camper is accepted with equal enthusiasm. Some qualify only for humanities courses, some only for math or science courses, and some score so high (above 700 on the math or verbal portion before the age of thirteen) that they take part in a long-term project, the Study of Exceptional Talent.
The boys on the lawn were among the top math scorers at the center. They had spent the past two weeks building cardboard mousetraps and spaghetti bridges, measuring the strength of uncooked pasta in compression and testing girder designs with a truss calculator. They had relished sitting through six-hour daily classes, doing a college semester’s work in three weeks. They just couldn’t get their minds around Mandatory Fun.
Today’s event was the Woohoo! Olympics. Any minute now, the head resident would come charging out of camp headquarters, bearing a mock torch of black and orange chiffon. Then the students would spend three hours competing in sack races, water-balloon tosses, hula-hoop contests, and tugs-of-war.
Only later, in one of the dorms, while the rest of his team was busy playing Ping-Pong and pool, would Scarito find what he was seeking. “Check this out,” he murmured, shuffling past Hunter with a twisted smile.
They made their way to the back of the room, shoulders slumped with suspicious nonchalance. When they reached what looked like a closet, Scarito glanced around at the other campers, then opened the door a crack. Inside, a tall bank of sleek machinery stood behind tinted glass, flickering with green L.E.D.s in the darkness: the fabled computer router. They gazed at it in silence, their minds racing. “If we can find a D.H.C.P. server, we can finally get on the Internet,” Scarito said. “But I might have to manually reconfigure my card.” Hunter grinned; if anyone knew how to do that, it would be someone at nerd camp.
Bright kids are used to fending for themselves in America. Dweeb, dork, brainiac, nerd: to be young and brilliant here is almost always to be a figure of some derision, to accept isolation as a condition of existence. Americans are phenomenally good at finding and nurturing certain kinds of talent. By the time they’re ten, the best athletes have been handpicked from peewee leagues and sent to sport clinics and travelling teams. By the time they’re twelve, the members of the future varsity know exactly who they are. True athleticism is a rare and natural-born gift, we believe, so we lavish resources on our physical prodigies—and content ourselves with intramural leagues and summer softball.
Mental prodigies are another matter. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I live, parents are obsessed with their children’s education, yet programs for the gifted are so meagre as to be nearly nonexistent. To qualify, children take an intelligence test at the age of four, then agree to be bused to whichever program will have them. But parents receive little official notice, so even those who are interested often don’t apply. When my wife took my four-year-old son Hans to be tested a few years ago, at a run-down Board of Education building in nearby Sunset Park, they were ushered into a room full of nervous mothers drilling their children in their ABCs. After an hour or so, Hans was called in for a fifteen-minute interview. He was asked a few basic math questions, shown a picture and told to describe it from memory, and then sent home. Six months later, we were informed that he had passed the test, but that there were twice as many qualifiers as there were slots in the program. There had been a lottery, and his name hadn’t been drawn.
The news came almost as a relief. Programs for the gifted tend to arouse suspicion in most parents I know. They’ve heard all about the cultural biases in intelligence testing. They aren’t surprised to hear that affluent students outnumber poor students by a large margin in classes for the gifted. The whole notion of giftedness is outdated, many say: as I.Q. has splintered into multiple intelligences—logical, linguistic, interpersonal, and so on—it has become fashionable to claim that every student is gifted in some way. Under the circumstances, sending a child to a gifted program is evidence of either prejudice or preciousness: just another yuppie who thinks his child is a genius.
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The same egalitarian ardor has swept over schools across the country in recent years, slashing gifted classes and dismantling tracking systems. Programs for the gifted now receive less than two cents of every hundred dollars spent on education by the federal government, and gifted students typically begin the school year already knowing thirty-five to fifty per cent of the basic curriculum. Yet despite this trend—or, rather, because of it—a kind of parallel universe has emerged, a sprawling network of enrichment classes, camps for the gifted, and tutors determined to help children find their inner genius. Just down the street from my son’s elementary school, a business called Score! promises to help students leap grade levels in reading and math. In advertisements, programs proffer their wares in the hyperbolic language of exercise gurus: “Welcome to the World of the Visuospatial Learner!”; “Unleash Your Child’s ‘Gifted’ Potential!” Seventy-five to eighty per cent of all newborn babies are potentially gifted, the latter ad notes. “You, as a parent, have only six years to take advantage of this ‘Window of Opportunity.’ ”
The Center for Talented Youth is the unofficial headquarters for this movement. When the psychologist Julian Stanley founded it at Johns Hopkins in 1972, it was known as the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth and occupied a single classroom. Today, the center oversees a Mensa-ready cohort of more than twenty-five thousand students, from the ages of five through fifteen, drawn from nearly a quarter of a million candidates nationwide. Students who qualify are roughly divided into geographic groups and invited to apply to camps and courses that are run independently by four universities: Johns Hopkins in the Northeast, Duke in the Southeast, Northwestern in the Midwest, and the University of Denver in the West. To the schools that host them, the gifted camps are partly recruiting tools and partly a way to fill idle summer campuses. To Stanley, they are a subversive meritocracy. “We take a benignly insidious approach,” he told me. “We set precedents. Johnny needs Algebra I, but his school won’t let him take it, because he’s too young. So we sit down with his guidance counsellors and say, ‘Look, he’s already done pre-algebra this summer.’ Then, once Johnny is allowed to take the class, other mothers can say, ‘Well, if Johnny can take it, why not Jimmy?’ ”
On summer mornings, when the center’s prodigies cross paths with phalanxes of sturdy lacrosse campers, they remind you of nothing so much as H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”—only with the roles reversed. Here, students in the physical classes cavort in the sunshine, while their more ethereal counterparts pass most of their days underground, in basement rooms lit with flickering fluorescent lights. In the math classes that I visited, the students worked at their own pace, spending six hours a day with just a textbook, a calculator, and a pencil, and raising their hands only when they hit a snag. The theory of the class, I was told, was that if teachers don’t try to set the pace their students will eventually outrun them, like greyhounds lapping the rabbit at a racetrack. It seemed to be working: according to his math teacher, one boy had completed a year’s worth of algebra in the first week.
“Are you familiar with Freud’s theory of personality?” a twelve-year-old named Jesse Mirotznik asked me one day. He was studying psychology at the camp and had come up with a few improvements on the Viennese model. “I don’t believe in the preconscious,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything about it that you can’t fit into the conscious and the subconscious. Also, in my theory there’s no ego, but the id is divided into two parts: the hedona, which is for immediate gratification, and the optima, which is for long-term goals.” A few months before, he said, he’d been in Federico García Lorca’s play “The Butterfly’s Evil Spell” and he had forgotten the last lines of his closing monologue. “Now my hedona doesn’t want me to go onstage anymore, because it’s not pleasurable, and my optima is worried that the audience might hurt me. So I guess they’re in agreement.”
We were sitting in the camp cafeteria, having dinner with a couple of High Verbals from the logic and history classes. Mirotznik, who is from Brooklyn, was wearing a T-shirt that read “Do Not Disturb. I’m Disturbed Enough Already.” He had wide, keen eyes and milk-jug ears, braces on his upper teeth, and a sweetly solicitous manner. Wherever I saw him on campus, he was surrounded by giggling girls, whispering confidences in his ears. And though he could sound pretentious sometimes, he had a winning sincerity about him. Mirotznik liked words; he liked people; and he was well aware that the two don’t always mix.
“I’ve tried to gear down my vocabulary,” he said. “But I still get a hard time. Anti-intellectualism is really popular in America.” Before coming to the center, he’d spent two disastrous summers at a sports-oriented camp in Pennsylvania called Island Lake. “I hated it,” he said. “It was not a stimulating environment. I took boxing, and I was very afraid.” Back home, Mirotznik attends a private school that offers a strong academic program. I asked him what he would do if he had to go to school with the kids from Island Lake. “I don’t know,” he said. “I would probably get more into sports and less into thinking.” He paused. “Or maybe I would just be very, very unpopular.”
Across the table, Lily Berger and her brother Ben laughed. They were fourteen-year-old twins, born six minutes apart, and had the same pale skin, flaxen hair, and liquid eyes. But while Ben was quiet and watchful, Lily could barely contain herself. She was learning French, Arabic, and Mandarin in her spare time, as well as Hebrew and Spanish at school. Earlier that day, I’d watched Lily and her classmates grapple with symbolic logic in their philosophy course. The teacher, a baby-faced Georgetown graduate student named Bill McGeehan, ambled around the room in sandals and a Leonardo da Vinci T-shirt, a look of carefully calibrated enthusiasm on his face. “O.K., O.K., one idea at a time.”
At one point, McGeehan went to the blackboard and sketched out a complicated logic tree—a diagram of the branching paths of a logical argument. “Oh, my God!” Lily blurted out, collapsing back in her chair as she grasped its significance. Within a few minutes, though, she was ready to move on. “You don’t want to do any more logic trees?” McGeehan asked.
“Well . . . I get it.”
McGeehan told me later that he had never taught such students before. “In terms of seriousness, in terms of rate of comprehension, it is beyond belief how much better they are than the average class at Georgetown. Teaching them is kind of like driving a Mercedes.” McGeehan was once something of a prodigy himself. Ordinary classes moved at such a “glacial pace” for him, he said, that he spent much of his time forging notes to get out of school. “I graduated with something like a 2.3 average. If I hadn’t rocked the S.A.T.s, I’d still be working in a butcher shop.” Still, the camp’s social life would have meant even more to him than its classes. “I spent a lot of years not being the alpha male, I can tell you that. It would have been nice to come to a place like this and not be at the very bottom of the social ladder. It may be nerd camp, but nerd camp is a wonderful thing,” he said.
After dinner that night, as Lily was walking back to the dorm, she told me that she and her father had memorized the first hundred and eight digits of pi, and that they used to recite them together for fun. She paused under a street lamp and took a deep breath: “3.141592-6535897932384626433832795028841-9716939937510 . . .” The digits clipped by at such a pace that they initially sounded like gibberish. Then Lily slowly found her rhythm. As the beat fell first on one digit and then on another, she found patterns in the sequence and accented them like arpeggios, until the performance took on a headlong, incantatory quality—half Dizzy Gillespie and half “Rite of Spring.” When she was done, she looked exalted and a little embarrassed. “Last year, the kids here used to call me Pi Girl,” she said. “Then I taught another boy the numbers and they started calling him Pi Boy.” She laughed. “I’m kind of the dork wherever I go.”
Lily lives just north of Baltimore, in a split-level suburban house. Her father is a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, her mother a former college administrator. In the evenings, when debates over ethics and feminism flare around the dinner table, the household can seem like something out of “Franny and Zooey”: Ben calls Lily an iconoclast, then their father calls Ben a philistine, to which Ben replies with a ten-minute disquisition on the excellence of Philistine culture in the second millennium B.C. When friends come over for the first time, Lily says, they sometimes leave a little stunned.
Lily showed the usual signs of precocity: learning the alphabet by the age of two, reading novels in kindergarten. But it’s hard, with High Verbals, to gauge the scale of their intellect. Language is a universal human gift, and the attribute that is most commonly shaped by its environment. (Had Henry Higgins turned Eliza Doolittle into a world-class mathematician, no one would have believed it.) The High Verbals I spoke with often credited their test scores to their upbringing. “Intelligence is less about knowing than about methods of thought,” a thirteen-year-old Egyptian named Amine told me, his fingertips tracing the beginnings of a beard. “Descartes said that others had greater minds than his, but that they accomplished less because their method was not as good.” Genes have something to do with intelligence, he admitted, but it’s mostly a matter of supportive parents and good study habits.
Listening to Lily describe her home life, you could imagine that any child brought up in such a family might have a love of language and some skill at using it. And the same argument could be used to justify dismantling the gifted programs she loved. The educators who rail against tracking and the parents who shuttle their children to Score! seem to share an underlying belief: that a child’s intelligence is largely a social construct, and that the right teacher, wielding the right tools, can galvanize even the most leaden lump of a mind. If gifted students have been favored by circumstance, then they ought to spread that good fortune around; the average class is sorely in need of students like Lily to set an example and keep teachers on their toes.
When Julian Stanley founded the Center for Talented Youth, thirty-two years ago, he wanted to have it both ways. Education for the gifted, he thought, was both too exclusive and not nearly discriminating enough. Stanley, who is eighty-six, has lived through most of the history of intelligence testing in America, and helped shape a good deal of it. In 1933, when he graduated from high school at fifteen, the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test had been around for a decade and a half and was popular in elementary schools. But the top universities relied on lengthy written exams, administered by the College Board, that were geared specifically to the curriculum at élite prep schools. It wasn’t until the nineteen-forties, when the S.A.T. was popularized at the urging of the president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, that universities began to draw on a larger pool.
The S.A.T. was developed in 1926 by Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham, based on a test developed for Army recruits. It measured mental acuity and basic understanding rather than specific knowledge of a topic, and because it was scored by machine it could be given on a vast scale. Almost from the beginning, the test served contradictory purposes. To Brigham, testing was a means of segregating the population. In his book, “A Study of American Intelligence,” he analyzed the test results of Army recruits race by race. American education was sure to decline at “an accelerating rate,” he concluded, “as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive.” Yet to Conant it was an instrument of egalitarianism: any student, no matter how poor or indifferently educated, could use it to gain admission to Harvard or Yale.
Stanley was an early champion of the test. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard in the late nineteen-forties, when the first scholarship students, chosen according to their S.A.T. scores, were attending the school. He went on to study statistics at the University of Chicago and eventually earned tenure at Johns Hopkins. In thirty years of psychometric research, he came to believe that intelligence is every bit as inborn as eye color, but that those who possess it need all the help they can get. He wasn’t worried so much about the next Einstein—“minds like that come around only once every century or two”—as about all the garden-variety geniuses who go to seed. Tens of thousands of gifted students are never identified as such by their schools, he believed, and those who are identified get lumped together in the same gifted classes, instead of being taught to their specific strengths. “I used to think that I.Q. almost guaranteed success,” Stanley told me. “But I found with bitter experience that it’s not true. It can almost be a burden to you.”
In 1969, a local boy named Joseph Bates was brought to Stanley’s attention. Bates, at thirteen, was already teaching computer programming to graduate students. When Stanley gave him the S.A.T., he scored much higher in math than the typical high-school senior, yet no local school would allow him to take calculus or physics. “They said it was ridiculous—he was thirteen years old,” Stanley recalls. Finally, Stanley persuaded Johns Hopkins to admit the boy as a freshman. “It was a desperation move,” he says. “I thought he would do poorly in college.” Instead, within four years Bates had earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computer science, and had gone on to Cornell for his doctorate.
Almost inadvertently, Stanley had set a precedent. A year after Bates entered Johns Hopkins, a woman appeared at Stanley’s office. She’d heard about this young prodigy from some friends in her bridge club, and she was certain that her son was every bit as bright. “She was kind of indignant,” Stanley recalls. “So I gave her son the test, and he went to Hopkins at thirteen, too.” By 1972, four hundred and fifty students were being tested, and Stanley had to set up a special course at the university for the twenty or so who passed. By 1980, he had begun to track the fortunes of the most gifted among the gifted—known as “the 1-in-10,000,” because their test scores were in the top one-hundredth of one per cent nationwide. The talent search had begun.
Stanley has officially been retired for five years, but he still keeps an office at the Center for Talented Youth and comes in twice a week. When I visited him there, he was getting ready for a luncheon with five seventh graders who had scored perfect 800s on the S.A.T. He had on a dove-gray suit that hung loosely on his tall, craggy frame, and his deep-set eyes peered out from behind thick-framed black glasses and beneath bushy brows. Stanley’s colleagues often call him a Southern gentleman (he was born near Atlanta), but his roots are less apparent in his voice, which has grown papery and faint with age, than in his elegant, homespun diction. One minute, he’ll talk about “studying the gifted animal in its native habitat”; the next, he’ll say that education is a matter of improvisation, that “there are more ways to kill a cat than to choke it on butter.”
After three decades of scouting for prodigies, Stanley has a keen sense of how many brilliant students still slip through his grasp. Three-quarters of those who might qualify for the camps are never tested, he estimates, and some that should qualify don’t. The S.A.T. can’t discern the visual and spatial gifts that make for great architects and engineers, for instance. Many of the rest simply can’t afford the tuition. The Johns Hopkins program costs twenty-six hundred dollars for a three-week session, including room and board. Four years ago, Goldman Sachs donated three and a half million dollars to sponsor financially needy students, but blacks and Hispanics still represent only ten per cent of the campers. “Cost is our Achilles’ heel,” Stanley says.
Others, like Joseph Renzulli, say that the problem goes deeper. Renzulli is the director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, a federally funded think tank in Storrs, Connecticut. “Bright kids taking courses on college campuses has become a cottage industry,” he says. “But to me it’s just lesson-learning. It’s teachers presenting information for students to get the right answers. The thing is, we don’t build monuments to people who were good at lesson learning.” Genius is a matter of passion as well as intelligence, I was told by Howard Gardner, the Harvard psychologist who originated the theory of multiple intelligences. If society really wants to find the next Einstein, teachers should stop asking which students are the brightest and start asking which are the most eccentric and single-minded. “Who is the oddest ball here? Who’s collecting rocks or reading the encyclopedia backward from Z to A? They’re the ones who are most likely to end up in the history books.”
The gifted camps, for better or worse, take a more statistical approach. Stanley knows that the S.A.T., like a Gallup poll, is a fairly crude predictor when taken alone. Its strength lies in numbers. Last year alone, more than a hundred thousand seventh and eighth graders were given the test. The top scorers tended to be both sharp-witted and intellectually motivated; they had mastered the material without ever learning it in school. Had the same hundred thousand taken the test as high-school seniors, a fair number would have had perfect scores and it would have been impossible to differentiate among them. By catching them early, the gifted camps were able to rank them across a broad continuum and take the best of the best. “Of course, there’s some regression toward the mean,” Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at Caltech, told me. “If you take all the No. 1 draft picks in basketball, not every one of them will make it to the Hall of Fame—too many things can go wrong. But a greater percentage will than if you took all the forty-second draft picks.”
Camerer, who is forty-four, is one of the oldest alumni of the Johns Hopkins program, and the first member of the Study of Exceptional Talent. He met Stanley in 1970, when he was in the fifth grade in Baltimore, and at Stanley’s urging skipped four grades in the next three years. “It’s the LeBron James approach,” he says, referring to the N.B.A. phenom. “They just throw you into the big leagues.” Being a fourteen-year-old junior in high school wasn’t easy, though he looked older than his age, because of early hair loss. But college came as a relief. “Part of the point of acceleration is to get you into a warmer environment, where people can appreciate you,” he says. “Geeks are more comfortable being geeks in college.” By the time he was in his early twenties, Camerer had earned an M.B.A. and then a Ph.D. in economics. By his thirties, he had tenure at Caltech, a university full of former prodigies.
Camerer’s career is not unusual for a High Math. We know this because he and some six thousand other alumni have now been followed for nearly thirty years, first by Stanley and then by one of his protégées, Camilla Benbow, the dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University. Benbow and her husband, David Lubinski, a psychologist at Vanderbilt, send out periodic questionnaires and track their subjects’ achievements year by year. Recently, they compared Camerer’s cohort—the 1-in-10,000—to a group that merely scored in the top one per cent. “There were huge differences,” Benbow says. “Huge.” By the age of thirty, the 1-in-10,000 were twice as likely to earn Ph.D.s as the other cohort, and fifty times more likely to earn Ph.D.s than the average American. “And they go to much more prestigious schools,” she added. “The top one per cent achieve enormous amounts, but the 1-in-10,000 do even better.”
It’s too early to tell how many of the 1-in-10,000 will become Nobel Prize winners. But a few, like Camerer, are already leaders in their field, and the rest have proved surprisingly predictable. Lubinski showed me a series of graphs based on gifted students’ S.A.T. scores. In college, those with high verbal and low math scores mostly majored in the social sciences and humanities; those with high math and low verbal scores gravitated toward math and engineering. Students with high scores in both areas often studied physics; those with equally low scores drifted into business. By the age of thirty-three, when the students had become professionals, physicians occupied the center of the graph—good but not great in both math and language. And lawyers had joined businesspeople in the bottom quarter.
Even the 1-in-10,000 have their share of disappointments, of course: some reply to the questionnaires with requests for money. Others simply find better things to do than change the world. For most of them, being one of the 1-in-10,000 eventually becomes more of an embarrassment than a point of pride, Camerer says. But, then, great minds have always had to be as resilient as they are resourceful. “You just have to have enough psychological strength to deal with it,” Lubinski says. “When you make these huge jumps in ability, you just have to try to live with the fact that you’re twelve years old.”
The High Math boys were trying their hardest, but their usual methods of analysis weren’t helping.
“I know a 4.9 back home.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Trust me. I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
Scarito, Hunter, and the rest were sitting in the cafeteria after lunch, killing time before the next class, talking about girls. The engineering course was nearly all male, as were most of the math and computer classes at the camp, and its members—unlike Jesse Mirotznik—seemed at a loss when dealing with the opposite sex. I’d never seen any of them talk to a girl on campus, and they tended to herd together in public, horns out, like musk oxen on the tundra. Misha, a scrappy little engineer with a modest pompadour, had devised a rating system from zero to five for any females they spotted in the distance.
“I’m telling you, it’s physically impossible that you know a 4.9,” Scarito told Hunter. “Girls that are rated that high, they basically have this reverse magnetic field around them. When you approach them, they fly backward.”
There was a longish pause as the others considered this. Then Scarito sighed. “I’ve been away from the cube too long.”
The Rubik’s Cube was a kind of rosary to Scarito—a perfect outlet for his nervous mental energy. His record for solving the puzzle was a minute and fifteen seconds, and by now he could almost do it blindfolded. He would glance at the opening configuration once or twice, then flip through a standard sequence of moves without looking down again. Like more than a few of the campers, Scarito had attention deficit disorder, but he said it never bothered him when he did things he enjoyed. “Just sitting in class the other day, I wrote a program in my head for displaying fractals.” Hunter said that he probably had A.D.D., too, though it had never been diagnosed. “It’s not so bad being jumpy,” he said. “People like us can pretty much do four things at once. The problem is finding the balance between them.” Sometimes at school, he said, he paid very close attention to three different things but forgot to listen to the teacher.
The High Math boys were more willing than the High Verbals to say that their intelligence was innate—perhaps because it marked them so deeply. “When you meet some of these incredibly gifted students, you could really believe that they are of a different species,” Robert Plomin, a psychologist at King’s College, London, who is studying the genetics of intelligence, told me. And it was true that Hunter and Scarito stood out whether they wanted to or not. When Scarito spoke, ideas seemed to course through him like electricity. He arched his back and twisted his shoulders, waving his hands in front of him as if willing the current to subside. Hunter was so quick and bracingly blunt that he was often taken for rude.
“It’s not like I’m beaten up or ostracized or anything,” Hunter said, when I asked him about the public school he attended, in Northampton, Massachusetts. “But I often feel like I don’t belong.” At the camp, he said, he could walk into the lunchroom anytime and start a debate about Kantian ethics versus utilitarianism. “At my school, about the only thing we debate is which video game is better, ‘Counter-Strike’ or ‘Unreal Tournament.’ ” As for Scarito, he had spent part of grade school in math classes of one, learning algebra and geometry by the fifth grade, while the rest did long division.
What they all wanted, it seemed, was what Tim Hsieh had. Hsieh was the smallest boy in the group and the least talkative. He wore glasses and had delicate Chinese features and a way of answering every question with a startled grin, as if he hadn’t expected you to notice him. He attended a public school in Hollywood with a small program for the highly gifted, all of whom had to have a minimum I.Q. of 145. It sounded like exactly the kind of place that exceptionally gifted students need. But when I asked Hsieh what he thought of his school he gave an embarrassed shrug, then said, “I don’t like the community that much. It’s full of dull people concentrating on academics.”
The students at Hsieh’s school were mostly Asian, and their parents had a strong hand in their education. “Everybody fits in the same mold,” he said. “Even their appearance. They’re all workaholics. They always play the violin or the piano—or both. And they don’t have any other hobbies.” Perhaps it was a matter of how the students were chosen (“The I.Q. test was designed to find mid-level bureaucrats to administer an empire,” Howard Gardner told me), but he felt caught between the nerd stereotype and the Asian stereotype. Though he had tried to deviate from both, he didn’t have much room to improvise: his parents insisted that he do at least two hours of homework every night. When I asked him what he was going to be when he grew up, he threw his hands in the air with a helpless smile. “An engineer, I guess.”
That Friday, at a glass pavilion near the center of campus, the students gathered for their weekly party. A few dozen formed a circle on the dance floor, flailing light sticks around to rave music, while the shyest campers huddled together next door and watched a video of “Big.” The movie was nearly over when I walked in, and the hero, played by Tom Hanks, was visiting his old neighborhood. As a boy trapped in a grownup’s body, he had proved to be a genius at designing toys and had earned all the perquisites of adult life: a hefty raise, a loft apartment, a beautiful girlfriend. Yet all he could think of was home. He wandered around in his overcoat at sunset, as melancholy strings swelled on the soundtrack, and watched other children play in back yards and baseball fields.
I thought about the math students I’d seen earlier that week, hunched over their textbooks. I knew that some of them were there to pad their college applications and some to please their parents. A few were relishing their first chance to be cool; others were destined to be the nerds of nerd camp. (“They tend to re-create the caste systems of their schools,” Camerer says.) Still, their diligence looked anything but feigned or enforced. When I was twelve, and my mother made me practice the violin for half an hour every day, I spent most of the time staring at the clock. These students spent six hours in class and never seemed to glance at their watches. Beneath the blazing concentration in their faces lay a kind of serenity.
This “rage to learn,” as one psychologist puts it, is what really distinguishes the gifted from other students. Their minds may be no sharper at birth than anyone else’s, but they spend their lives continually, compulsively honing them. “We start with little differences, but they snowball over time,” Robert Plomin told me. “Kids who like math get better and better at it, and those who don’t, don’t. It’s more of an appetite than an aptitude.” Plomin believes that this appetite (or lack of it) is largely a genetic trait. That’s why identical twins, who have the same genes, grow more alike in their intelligence the older they get. In infancy, their I.Q. scores correlate only around twenty per cent. During childhood, the correlation rises to forty per cent, and by adolescence it rises to sixty per cent. By middle age, the scores correlate an astonishing eighty per cent.
Critics say that the twin studies are flawed: the siblings were reared together, so their affinities could be a function of their environments. Yet fraternal twins—who share the same family life—correlate only half as much, and adopted siblings don’t correlate at all. “If fifty per cent of our differences in I.Q. are due to genetic factors, that’s just off the scale. Nothing else in psychology even begins to explain as much,” Plomin says. “But I don’t think intelligence itself is hard-wired—it’s a matter of propensities. It’s like B. F. Skinner said: The older I become, the more I become who I am.”
When the lights came up in the movie theatre, I realized that the seats were half empty; most of the campers were much too busy to mourn their lost childhoods. Out in the lobby, Lily Berger was sitting on the carpet, learning some new Mandarin words from a Chinese exchange student. Next door, Tim Hsieh was playing a medieval board game and a piano prodigy was playing Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu” in the corner. At one point, a girl pushed him aside to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with one finger. He waited patiently until she was done, then picked up exactly where he had left off.
The summer sun had been late in setting, but the glass pavilion glowed like a night-light now. When the traditional final number came on—“American Pie”—all the campers gathered on the dance floor. At first, they draped their arms over one another’s shoulders and sang along, but at the final word of the opening chorus (“This’ll be the day that I die”) they suddenly broke rank. Jumping up and down, they shouted in unison, “Die! Die! Die! Die! Live! Live! Live! Live! Sex! Sex! Sex! Sex! More! More! More! More!” I could see Jesse Mirotznik in the middle of the throng, grinning hugely and pogoing around. He had told me that this would happen, and that no one knew exactly how the tradition had started, but it seemed to fit the campers somehow. Mirotznik jumped and flailed and punched his fist in the air: “More! More! More! More!” And then it was time for bed. ♦
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