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Who is creative? Who might we call a genius? What is meant when we say someone is gifted? These three concepts—creativity, genius, and giftedness—are distinct, and yet closely related as well. Any two can be found in the absence of the other, albeit sometimes a person might exhibit all three at once. As a manifestation of these contrasts, the three concepts have distinctive histories in the empirical literature. This chapter examines the three concepts more closely. It discusses the role of education in the nurturance of creators, geniuses, and the gifted, whether separately or together. The chapter begins by treating each construct as distinct, and then turns to ways that they might be combined into a more comprehensive concept. As will become apparent, only two combinations, each involving two concepts, have real applicability. Education and training is most often dedicated to teaching someone to filter out the irrelevant, and yet creativity requires consideration of the superficially irrelevant—the proverbial 'thinking outside the box.' Hence, by definition, creativity cannot be inculcated, only encouraged. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

In this chapter, I discuss eight topics about giftedness. It is my hope that an understanding of the first six topics will help the reader understand the eighth topic, where I consider the puzzle of childhood giftedness - why it is that the link between childhood giftedness and adult genius is so weak. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

Although Catharine Cox's (1926) study of 301 geniuses was published as the second volume of Lewis Terman's (1925-1959) five-volume Genetic Studies of Genius, it adopts a completely different approach to addressing the relation between early intellectual giftedness and later adulthood achievement. Rather than a psychometric prospective study of high-IQ children. Cox conducted a historiometric retrospective study of eminent creators and leaders, estimating early IQs from biographical data. For a subset of 100 geniuses, she also augmented the IQ scores with measures on 67 character traits, and thereby established the key role played by personality factors, most notably drive and persistence. The net result is a monograph that represents the greatest single historiometric investigation ever conducted, providing a model for subsequent research on the relation between IQ and achieved eminence in both creativity and leadership. Later inquiries also reinforced the supreme importance of motivational factors in attaining success. Future research should update the list of eminent creators and leaders for whom we have comparable IQ estimates. In addition, the inventory of personality variables should expand to include several omitted factors, including traits associated with subclinical psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

In this chapter, I will sketch how the expert-performance approach could be extended to account for several aspects of the generation of major creative contributions in arts and science and, thus go beyond ideas in my earlier papers on genius, creativity, giftedness and organizational creativity. My chapter will start with a general overview of a few major facts about genius. Then, I will briefly describe the expert-performance approach and how this approach has proposed necessary conditions for attaining high levels of performance in many domains of expertise. I will then try to show how it might be possible to extend this model by specifying necessary conditions for making creative contributions and search tor empirical evidence for some of these ideas developed by several researchers. The fundamental issue discussed in this chapter concerns how the current work on expert performance in traditional domains, such as sport, chess, music, and ballet, might be extended to seemingly very different activities such as creative achievement in science and arts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

Although my own research has focused on genius, according to standard dictionary definitions, genius has considerable conceptual overlap with both giftedness and talent. Thus, the goal of this chapter is to disentangle any conceptual confusions among the three concepts. I begin with giftedness, endorsing unmodified the definition put forward by the National Association for Gifted Children. That endorsement allows me to introduce a distinctive definition for talent. Given those two definitions, I turn to genius, offering yet another conception that renders that construct distinct from either giftedness or talent. From there I advance to the practical implications by addressing the following questions about each of the three concepts: Is high IQ required? What’s the relative role of nature and nurture? Where is it placed in the life span? How is it identified? And can it be enhanced through interventions? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: book)

In this chapter, the author outlines some of the potential complexities of giftedness and talent. His initial focus is on the innate, particularly genetic, features of giftedness. After scrutinizing the intricacies of genetic endowment, the author turns briefly to the role of the environment in converting potential giftedness into actual outstanding achievement. The chapter closes with a discussion of the more practical implications of this more complicated view of giftedness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: create)

This chapter explores Shakespeare's observation (1601/1952) that "Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." Organized around these 3 central perspectives, this chapter explores the developmental process: the biological perspective—why some are born great; the sociological perspective—why some have greatness thrust upon them; and the psychological perspective—why some achieve greatness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

Catharine Morris Cox (later) Miles is most widely known in the field of gifted education as the author of Terman's second volume of Genetic Studies of Genius. Her contributions to research on giftedness included a study of historical figures who were highly gifted children using historiometric inquiry, contributions to handbooks and reviews. Her work influenced scholarly inquiry and popular culture. This chapter discusses her life and career. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: create)

Human beings usually live a long time. During their lifetime, certain attributes will follow them from birth to death. The question that has preoccupied me for more than 30 years is where giftedness falls along this dimension. Is giftedness confined to childhood and perhaps adolescence? Or can it be like gender—something that we possess from the moment of conception and which remains with us until the day we die? The attribution of giftedness appears to be a curvilinear inverted-U function of the person's age since conception, with the peak in childhood. Yet I would argue that the actual distribution should be more egalitarian. A gifted child was probably a gifted infant, even zygote, and may later become a gifted adolescent and adult, and may even die being gifted. The only difference across the life span is changes may take place in the nature of the gift or in the degree of its manifestation. To make this case I will offer a brief review of what we know about giftedness from a lifespan developmental perspective. The review starts with conception to birth, turns to childhood through adolescence, and ends with adulthood and maturity. The overview will stress giftedness of the highest order, giftedness that leads to exceptional achievement. In order words, the gift that the individual received eventually creates gifts that are given to others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

This chapter begins with a provocative enigma: On one hand, the absolute number of gifted and talented people in the world must be extremely large; they may even be considered “a dime a dozen.” For example, suppose that anyone in the top 10% of some ability distribution could be considered gifted or talented. That implies that for every million people, there are at least 100,000 who qualify. Therefore, every metropolitan area could contain enough gifted and talented citizens to populate a large town. This number may actually be an underestimate because this example assumes that there is only one cross-sectional distribution from which the gifted and talented are taken. Yet, that is very unlikely the case. In line with Gardner’s (1983) theory of multiple intelligences, the top 10% in mathematical ability need not be the same people as the top 10% in sports, art, or music. Accordingly, a city of a million would contain far more than 100,000 gifted and talented denizens. To be sure, some might argue that the 10% criterion is set too low and a top 1% threshold should be applied instead. Terman’s (1925) classic longitudinal study defined intellectual giftedness in terms of the top 1% of the school population in performance on an IQ test. Even when the bar is dramatically raised, the absolute number remains large: 10,000 gifted and talented people per million—and probably far more than this estimate if various abilities are largely uncorrelated. On the other hand, the absolute count of adults who have attained eminence in any given domain of achievement is appreciably smaller than the top 10% or top 1% of a population. When Zuckerman (1977) wanted to interview United States scientists who had received the Nobel Prize, only 56 laureates were then living in the country (out of which she was able to recruit 41). That figure is much, much smaller than even the number of scientific geniuses that would be expected to live in any major metropolitan area. Therefore, it seems that the probability of potential giftedness or talent developing to actual eminent achievement, or genius, is extremely small. Galton (1869) estimated that geniuses, as judged by eminence, number only around 250 per million adults, or about .025%—a very tiny proportion. Something seems to be happening between childhood and adulthood so that only a restricted elite progresses toward eminence. Many may enter the hopper at the beginning, but only a very small number emerge at the end. The purpose of this chapter is to examine this selection process by adopting a lifespan developmental perspective. The chapter begins with parental genetics and family environment, and then turns to education and training followed by a treatment of career trajectories and terminations, including death. To keep the discussion focused, the emphasis will be on creative talent. Even so, most of the developmental principles remain applicable to other forms of talent and giftedness, including exceptional achievement in music, sports, and games. Only simple talents, such as a gift for wiggling one’s ears, would likely fall outside the scope of these principles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

An unfortunate feature of much research is the tendency to attract attention—such as increased citations—by advocating extreme positions on difficult questions, the nature-nurture issue decidedly among them. The downside of this practice for our understanding of giftedness is that the complex interactions between genetic and environmental factors tend to get overlooked. Worse yet, in minimizing the function of one or the other side of the debate, proponents of single-factor explanations tend to vastly oversimplify the supposed operation of the neglected factor. That oversimplification is certainly apparent in the advocates of deliberate practice as the sole factor in talent development—a point that I wish to elaborate in this chapter. As will be seen below, the genetics of genius, talent, or giftedness is far more complex and nuanced than these extremists realize. I begin by showing that any innate gift or talent for a given domain must be defined in terms of deliberate practice for the definition to feature any scientific validity. I then focus specifically on the genetics side of the foregoing demonstration, showing that nature most likely operates in a far more complex and dynamic manner than often realized. A gift or talent does not work anything like the inheritance of eye color or even height. After these two arguments are presented, I close by discussing some implications for practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)

Musical expertise cannot be summed up by simply counting the sheer number of years or hours an individual has been practicing. This chapter describes some of the existing studies on expertise and how researchers have defined musicianship, and explains how musical training is related to the way we think (cognitive processing) and the way we perceive (perceptual processing) the world. Like the general definition of a genius, a musical genius can be defined in three ways: high general intelligence, exceptional talent or giftedness, and extraordinary eminence. Of these definitions, the third seems the most important because it alone acknowledges the need for any genius to make creative contributions to a genre's repertoire. Although very little is known about the genes that underlie music-related traits, individual differences in most, if not all, traits involved in human music playing are at least partly due to underlying genetic influences. And this even includes music practice. Both genes and the environment play essential roles in musical expertise, as predicted by the multifactorial gene-environment interaction model. Competitions play a significant role in the music industry. Music competitions are big business, whether they are prestigious classical music competitions or televised competitions for musical "idols". (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)