Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   2

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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
09
  We Can’t All Be Mozart:
Lesser Child Prodigies
THE TOTAL FAILURE
Th
 e most accomplished child prodigy in American history 
was probably William James Sidis (1898–1944). With an IQ 
estimated to have been 250–300, Lil’ Will read the 
New York 
Times
 at 18 months old, passed the entrance exam to MIT at 
age eight, and learned scores of languages before he hit pu-
berty. (Sidis’s parents, needless to say, pushed him a little.) 
When Sidis graduated from Harvard at 16, he was at the pin-
nacle of his career. For most of his adult life, he lived alone 
and worked as a bookkeeper. His main hobby was writing 
books about extraordinarily obscure subjects. For example, 
The Success-But-in-a-Bad-Way
Psychologist Lewis Terman (1877–1956), one of the men respon-
sible for the modern IQ test, began the largest-ever study of 
highly  gifted  children  in  the  1920s.  Terman  and  his  colleagues 
followed young Californians with IQs above 140 for their entire 
lives. Surprisingly, almost none of Terman’s subjects made a sig-
nifi cant impact in any academic or artistic fi eld. The one excep-
tion, however, was George Hodel, who made an impact in the 
fi eld of serial killing.Hodel most likely killed a bunch of women in 
the 1940s and ’50s—including the actress Elizabeth Short, known 
as the Black Dahlia. Hodel was smart enough to evade capture in 
his lifetime, but in a plot twist so good it seems contrived, Hodel’s 
son, Steve, who became a homicide detective, ended up discov-
ering his father was probably behind California’s most famous 
unsolved murder.

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he wrote one about streetcar transfers, which his own biogra-
pher called “the most boring book ever written.”