It was a comedy about child prodigies that sent clinical psychiatrist Thomas R. Verny down a rabbit hole of scientific inquiry — and out the other side with a provocative conclusion: being clever as a child has remarkably little to do with becoming a genius as an adult.
Verny, a psychiatrist, academic and award-winning author of eight books, found himself questioning everything he thought he knew about giftedness after watching Early Genius, a play performed by much-loved Stratford Festival veteran Steve Ross. The production centres on four children under the age of eight, each blessed with a genius-level IQ. But as Verny spoke with Ross about what had drawn him to the project, a far bigger question took shape: is a high IQ really enough to constitute genius?
What Verny discovered in the scientific literature would reshape his understanding entirely — and offer readers a fresh lens through which to view the architects of human progress.
The Play That Sparked a Revolution
The Stratford Festival has long been a crucible for theatrical talent, and Steve Ross is among its most revered veterans. His play Early Genius uses comedy to explore the lives of extraordinarily bright children, but it was the conversation that followed the performance that truly captivated Verny.
Rather than accepting the premise that raw intellectual horsepower is the sole ingredient of greatness, Verny began to dig. He turned his attention to the work of Rena F. Subotnik, an American psychologist and a leading scholar in giftedness, talent development and gifted education. Subotnik’s central argument is both simple and transformative: giftedness is not synonymous with possessing an unusually high IQ or displaying exceptional ability in childhood.
Instead, she contends that early potential must be actively transformed — through education, deliberate practice, opportunity, motivation, persistence and a range of psychosocial factors — into increasingly sophisticated expertise. Only in rare cases does this process yield what Subotnik calls eminence, her clinical term for genius.
It Is Not Just About Being Clever
The distinction between giftedness and genius is more than semantic. It carries profound implications for how society identifies and nurtures talent.
Consider the historical record. While figures like Marie Curie, Mozart and Picasso were conspicuously gifted as children, the overwhelming majority of gifted children never rise to the level of genius. Some become highly successful professionals; others do not. The reverse is equally true. Many individuals who eventually reach genius status showed little discernible promise in their youth.
Thomas Edison struggled through conventional schooling. Albert Einstein, despite his early mathematical flair, failed the general portion of the entrance examination to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic at the age of sixteen. William Shakespeare received only a standard grammar-school education before quitting in his mid-teens to help his family financially — and there is no historical evidence of extraordinary literary precocity in his childhood whatsoever. Yet he became arguably the greatest playwright who ever lived. Leonardo da Vinci fared even worse in terms of formal education. Born illegitimate, he was instructed mainly in ordinary spoken and written Italian rather than Latin, and received no teaching in Greek, philosophy or mathematics — subjects reserved for boys destined for higher learning. Still, he became one of the most diverse scientific minds and greatest painters in history.
The message is unmistakable. Giftedness is better understood as the potential for exceptional achievement within a given field, whereas genius implies that exceptional potential has actually been converted into consequential accomplishment and genuine breakthroughs. A child with an IQ of 160 is extraordinarily gifted, but no one automatically calls that child a genius. Einstein is considered a genius not because someone measured his intelligence, but because he fundamentally changed our understanding of space and time.
Inside the Mind of a Genius
The scientific quest to understand genius has, at times, taken extraordinary turns — none more dramatic than the post-mortem examination of Albert Einstein’s brain.
When Einstein died in 1955, the pathologist who performed his autopsy removed his brain. What followed was perhaps the most extraordinary foraging for genius ever undertaken across three pounds of greyish, gelatinous tissue.
The original and most famous study was carried out by neuroscientist Marian Diamond, a professor of anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her team were the first to publish evidence that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment — a phenomenon now known as neuroplasticity. Diamond and colleagues compared samples of Einstein’s brain with those of eleven other men. They reported that in the left Brodmann area 39, better known as the angular gyrus, Einstein had significantly more glial cells per neuron. Neuroscientists regard this region as a hub where different kinds of information are integrated to create meaning. The authors cautiously stated that the difference might relate to increased metabolic activity associated with unusually complex neuronal activity.
Other researchers found that Einstein’s prefrontal cortex had greater neuronal density, although neuron size and the number of neurons beneath a given cortical surface area did not differ. Dean Falk, a distinguished research professor at Florida State University, and her team analysed fourteen previously unpublished photographs of Einstein’s entire cerebral cortex. They compared his cortical anatomy with descriptions of eighty-five other human brains and reported that Einstein’s brain featured a complex prefrontal cortex and distinctive parietal anatomy — a brain area involved in mathematical, visuospatial and other forms of higher cognition. This finding was later supported by the research of Sandra F. Witelson, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Hamilton.
In a subsequent study, Falk collaborated with Weiwei Men at the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and found that Einstein’s corpus callosum — the brain’s main communication highway bridging the two cerebral hemispheres — was thicker than those of comparison groups. They interpreted this as suggesting unusually extensive interhemispheric connectivity.
Yet these studies examine one extraordinary individual after his death, often using small and imperfectly matched control samples. They cannot establish that Einstein’s anatomical peculiarities accounted for his genius. Apart from the research on Einstein’s brain, there is surprisingly little neuroscience devoted to studying genius itself — for the obvious reason that the designation is generally retrospective. Hardly anyone is considered a genius in their lifetime.
The strongest academic literature therefore emerges from two overlapping areas: exceptional creativity and high intelligence. One of the most relevant contributions comes from scientists at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Twenty eminent creators — individuals with remarkable accomplishments in their fields — and sixteen smart, well-educated individuals were asked to think of unusual uses for familiar objects while their brains were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The authors concluded that exceptional creativity may depend on how effectively brain systems responsible for generating ideas and judging them work together. Highly creative people do not necessarily possess different brain machinery. They may be unusually skilled at coordinating two normally competing mental processes: letting the mind roam freely enough to produce unexpected ideas, while maintaining sufficient control to recognise which ideas are worth pursuing. However, this was a very small study involving only thirty-six people, so it suggests a neurological difference associated with creative eminence rather than establishing that this brain pattern causes genius itself.
The Power of Place and People
In his pursuit of unlocking the mystery of what makes a genius, Verny stumbled across The Geography of Genius by Eric Weiner. The book demonstrates how creative genius flourished in specific places at specific times — Athens in 450 BC, Renaissance Florence, Vienna around 1900 and Silicon Valley in the present day, to name just a few. We learn of the importance for the growth of creativity of having the opportunity to engage in stimulating intellectual exchange with like-minded friends, within a society that values achievement in the arts and sciences, and that includes financial rewards. One cannot succeed, let alone become a genius, entirely alone.
Even the most solitary genius depends upon other people: teachers, patrons, publishers, institutions, audiences, rivals and a culture prepared to recognise and value their contributions. The Latin word genius originally referred not to exceptional intelligence but to a guiding or generative spirit associated with a person. Only much later did the word migrate from describing a person who has a genius to describing a person who is one.
Popular culture has long cherished the image of the “mad genius” — brilliant but eccentric, emotionally unstable, socially unconventional, hovering somewhere near the border between inspiration and lunacy. Science supports a small kernel of truth behind the stereotype while proving that creativity and mental illness are not synonymous. Many authorities report that highly creative scientists and artists tend to be open to experience, unconventional, self-confident, driven, ambitious and independent, while often being somewhat less conscientious in the conventional sense. Others associate artistic creativity with openness, imagination, perceptual sensitivity, fantasy, emotion and aesthetic engagement, while high intellectual versatility is more strongly connected with scientific creativity.
It seems that some unconventional traits associated with creativity may help, but any serious mental disorder itself would interfere rather than further the creative process. As cultural critic and author Joan Acocella once wrote: “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis, but its opposite, ‘ego strength,’ meaning among other things ordinary, Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.”
Consider the career of Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin. He chose to attend St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London partly because, as a teenager, he had played water polo against its team and made some friends there. While at St Mary’s, Fleming became an excellent shot, so his supervisor wanted to keep him on the institution’s rifle team. Thus encouraged, Fleming stayed to study bacteriology. Then came the famous accident — a mould contaminated one of his bacterial cultures. Plenty of scientists might simply have thrown the spoiled dish away. Fleming noticed something peculiar: bacteria were not growing around the mould. He pursued the observation, and penicillin was born.
Observe that Fleming was talented, certainly, but people also liked him, admired him and wanted to keep him around. Doors opened. He was invited to enter. He entered.
Not all geniuses are like Fleming. Geniuses may not always be “nice” people or easy to get along with. They have their faults like the rest of us. But they possess something that induces other people to take an interest in them. That something might be charm, confidence, usefulness, persuasiveness, excitement, or the extraordinary quality of the work itself.
For neuroscience and psychology, genius remains an unusually difficult subject to quantify because the designation is subjective and often retrospective. What is certain is that genius is not about psychometric tests, brain architecture or creativity alone — though all three are contributing factors. In the scientific field, it is sometimes a sudden flash, a lightbulb moment when a connection is made that no one else ever made, like Newton watching the apple fall. Or it is the gradual development in a person with talent and personality who patiently, often single-mindedly, keeps perfecting their craft over time. A compelling example is Toni Morrison, whose linguistic originality, psychological depth and treatment of history transformed American literature and earned her the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Life throws you a pass. Catching it shows you are gifted. Converting it to a touchdown is what places you in the pantheon of geniuses. Giftedness is potential. Genius is what you do with it.
Why it Matters
The distinction between giftedness and genius carries real consequences for how educators, parents and policymakers identify and nurture talent. If we continue to equate high IQ with future greatness, we risk overlooking the very individuals who, given the right combination of opportunity, mentorship and cultural support, could change the world. Verny’s investigation reminds us that genius is not a biological lottery — it is a process, shaped by environment, relationships and the courage to persist through disappointment. Understanding this has the power to transform not only how we educate the next generation of thinkers, but how we value the quiet, sustained effort that ultimately separates potential from legacy.
