Barry_Green
Moderator
Nonsense. There simply ARE more talented people than others. Any number of chess prodigies or musical prodigies will testify to this. If a three-year-old can pick up and play the violin, and another three-year-old can't, what does that tell you? It tells me that their life experience, and their environment, and their nurture and all that, are fairly meaningless in the context of whether they have "it".
Doesn't mean practice isn't important, as it clearly is. Any three-year-old prodigy, vs. Bobby Fischer in his prime, is gonna get wiped off the floor.
And I can study and study and study chess, study its history, study the great games, but if my brain is physically incapable of making the connections that the prodigy's brain can, then I will lose to them. Period. I can be better than folks with my equivalent innate talent level, yes, practice can take me above them. But I could never compete with those who have the "chess gene".
Some people just have more gifts than others do, and sometimes in a substantial way. I watched an episode of ... what was it called, "Stan Lee's SuperHumans"? I saw guys on there who could calculate any number of complex calculations in their head, instantly. I saw a guy who could -- I kid you not -- he could draw a samurai sword and slice a pellet gun pellet in half, that was fired at him. They took him out to a field, pointed a pellet gun at him, and pulled the trigger -- he drew the sword and sliced that tiny pellet in half before it hit him. And he did it twice, on camera.
"Regular", rank and file humans cannot do these things. It is impossible. They dug into why these folks are different. They did brain scans and all, showing how they actually were using different sections of their brains and whatever.
Some people have a gift. Those people, with practice, can become absolutely great at what they're good at. And they have capabilities that far exceed those of the average person. Of course, they probably have corresponding deficiencies in other ways that far exceed an average human's; Einstein is reputed to not be able to remember his home address or to zip his pants up (true or not, I don't know).
You cannot change your fundamental hardware. You can only refine and improve it as best as possible -- through practice and effort. And you can almost invariably get much better than you were. But, like it or not, there simply are folks who have a genetic advantage. Their brains work differently. They have the ability to process information in ways that average people don't. And when one of those people puts in the effort too, that's when true greatness is possible.
See above. In my view, the "it" depends on the field of success, but in any field I think it would be an ability to process information that's relevant to that task, superior to how others can process that information. And, again, it would refer to "prodigies" -- those who clearly and obviously have a "gift" beyond normal people. That gift may be the ability to see a chess board and envision the next 20 moves, when your opponent simply cannot. Or it may be the ability to process calculations in the visual cortex center of the brain (if I remember right, that's what the Stan Lee SuperHumans show concluded, that the guy was using the spatial visual cortex area of his brain to do math calculations). Or it may be the ability to feel music on an entirely different level, such that they can play by ear. Or it may be a gift for seeing connections and reverberations and patterns that makes someone able to tell a story with layers of context and subcontext that reach people on an entirely different level than the ordinary person is able to accomplish.
Okay, here's where I become confused. You have previously asserted that there is no genetic difference, that anyone with practice can become them (if I understood you correctly). And now you say that we cannot even understand them. Which is it?
For my piece, I put them in the same class as a piano prodigy, a Beethoven, or a chess prodigy, or a math prodigy, or a Michael Phelps. They are storytelling prodigies.
Of course all those things have substantial effect on someone's storytelling skills. But I would question whether they have much to do with whether a person has "it". You know a person is a piano prodigy when they're three and they can play a complete symphony without even being able to read music! And a three-year-old doesn't have any substantial personal experiences, hasn't had much of a childhood, may not have any relationships beyond parents, wouldn't know a religious belief from an episode of My Little Pony, etc., but regardless of all that, they still have "it".
