ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates what it is that produces extreme intelligence and how this relates to exceptional performance. It engages with the nature versus nurture debate: could all individuals achieve equally if given equal circumstances? The many books are mentioned that popularised Ericsson’s research asserting that expertise is acquired by 10,000 hours of deliberate practise alone. More recent research that refutes this is outlined. The popularity of the “nurture” message is considered and its implications in, for example, the Tiger Mother phenomenon. Classifications of individual difference are discussed with reference to the Diversity Wheel, adding the term “neurodiversity”. An original schema is presented that shows the essential questions driving intelligence research to date and how this might develop in the future, together with the related issues of the ethics, cost-effectiveness, and risks involved. Areas summarised include the latest neurological and genetic findings on intelligence, the effects of socioeconomic status, and the stability/changeability of intelligence over time, including the Flynn Effect and Negative Flynn Effect. Attempts to increase intelligence are reviewed and a sci-fi type idea imagined of a brain–machine interface. The chapter ends with a computer analogy of intelligence that summarises how intelligence, performance, and social assumptions relate to each other.
