The Intelligence Trap by David Robson

Author:David Robson [Robson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473669864
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Published: 2019-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Part 3

The art of successful learning: How evidence-based wisdom can improve your memory

7

Tortoises and hares: Why smart people fail to learn

Let’s return to the USA in the late 1920s. In California, Lewis Terman’s geniuses have just started to attend high school, the vision of a glittering future still stretching out before them, but we are more interested in a young boy called Ritty, tinkering away in his home laboratory in Far Rockaway, New York.

The ‘lab’ comprised an old wooden packing box, equipped with shelves, a heater, a storage battery, and an electric circuit of light bulbs, switches and resistors. One of Ritty’s proudest projects was a home-made burglar alarm, so that a bell would sound whenever his parents entered his room. He used a microscope to study the natural world and he would sometimes take his chemistry set into the street to perform shows for the other children.

The experiments did not always end as he had planned. One day, he began to play with the ignition coil from a Ford car. Could the sparks punch holes through a piece of paper, he wondered? They did, but before he knew it the paper was ablaze. When it became too hot to hold, Ritty dropped it into a wastepaper bin – which itself caught light. Conscious of his mother playing bridge downstairs, he carefully closed the door, and smothered the fire with an old magazine, before shaking the embers onto the street below.1

None of this necessarily marks Ritty as anything out of the ordinary: myriad children of his generation will have owned chemistry sets, played with electric circuits and studied the natural world with a microscope. He was, by his own admission, a ‘goody-goody’ at school, but by no means remarkable: he struggled with literature, drawing and foreign languages. Perhaps because of his poorer verbal skills, he apparently scored 125 in a school IQ test, which is above average but nowhere near the level of the ‘geniuses’ in California.2 Lewis Terman would not have given him much thought compared to the likes of Beatrice Carter, with her astronomical score of 192.

But Ritty kept learning anyway. He devoured the family encyclopaedia, and as a young adolescent he soon took to teaching himself from a series of mathematics primers – filling his notebooks with trigonometry, calculus and analytic geometry, often creating his own exercises to stretch his mind.3 When he moved to the Far Rockaway High School, he joined a physics club and entered the Interscholastic Algebra League. He eventually reached the top place in New York University’s annual maths championship – ahead of students from all the city’s schools. The next year, he began his degree at MIT – and the rest is history.

Schoolchildren would later learn Ritty’s full name – Richard Feynman ? as one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. His new approach to the field of quantum electrodynamics revolutionised the study of subatomic particles4 – research that won him a Nobel Prize in 1965 with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger.

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