What Makes Musical Prodigies?

Chanel Marion-St-Onge,Michael W Weiss,Isabelle Peretz,Megha Sharda

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.566373

Abstract

Musical prodigies reach exceptionally high levels of achievement before adolescence. Despite longstanding interest and fascination in musical prodigies, little is known about their psychological profile. Here we assess to what extent practice, intelligence, and personality make musical prodigies a distinct category of musician. Nineteen former or current musical prodigies (aged 12–34) were compared to 35 musicians (aged 14–37) with either an early (mean age 6) or late (mean age 10) start but similar amount of musical training, and 16 non-musicians (aged 14–34). All completed a Wechsler IQ test, the Big Five Inventory, the Autism Spectrum Quotient, the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, the Dispositional Flow Scale, and a detailed history of their lifetime music practice. None of the psychological traits distinguished musical prodigies from control musicians or non-musicians except their propensity to report flow during practice. The other aspects that differentiated musical prodigies from their peers were the intensity of their practice before adolescence, and the source of their motivation when they began to play. Thus practice, by itself, does not make a prodigy. The results are compatible with multifactorial models of expertise, with prodigies lying at the high end of the continuum. In summary, prodigies are expected to present brain predispositions facilitating their success in learning an instrument, which could be amplified by their early and intense practice happening at a moment when brain plasticity is heightened.

Highlights

The observed result, was less likely than 96% of the null distribution. These results provide further support that prodigies differed in their practice habits in childhood and early adolescence
Because early intensive practice is one of the factors that differentiated prodigies from the other musicians, we explored whether the individual amount of accumulated hours between age 6 and 14 was related to psychological traits measured here (i.e., 10 correlations; p-values adjusted using Bonferroni-Holm): global intellectual quotient (IQ), working memory index, processing speed index, FIGURE 8 | Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores
Prodigies were compared with non-prodigies who began their musical training early, or later, and nonmusicians

Summary

Introduction

He’s a 26-year-old acclaimed professional musician who studied at Juilliard, has won numerous national and international competitions, and currently plays on a Stradivarius violin. He made his orchestral debut at 7 years old. A musician like CH, who showed “superior performance within a specific domain” before adolescence, is considered to be a musical prodigy in the present study (see Supplementary Table 1 for definitions). In the largest sample of exceptional musicians considered so far, we examine non-musical traits, such as practice, autistic traits, and intelligence, that have been associated with musical prodigiousness. We endorse the Multifactorial Gene–Environment Interaction Model proposed by Ullén et al (2016) (Figure 1), which assumes complex interactions between genes, environment, practice behavior, and psychological traits (Mosing et al, 2014)

Methods

Results

Conclusion