It is possible that a highly intelligent person will be slow to acquire speech. Albert Einstein was so slow in learning to talk that his parents consulted a doctor. His sister Maja reported, “He had such difficulty with language that those around him feared he would never learn [to speak].” In fact, one of his schoolmasters predicted that he would never amount to much.
An evolutionary asset of the human brain is its adaptability. By the time a fetus emerges from its mother’s womb, its brain contains about 100 billion neurons ready and waiting to connect with each other in response to the sensory experiences throughout infancy. During an infant’s first two years on the planet, the neurons in the child’s brain connect, in what are called synapses, at the rate of about 2 million per second, so that by age 2, the brain has about 100 trillion synapses–twice the number in adulthood.
Neural Pruning
Unable to sustain the biochemical reactions across all these synapses, the infant’s brain enters a stage known as neural pruning, removing the synapses for which there was little use. The brain was fine-tuning itself to function effectively in the environment into which it was born. So much in this early stage of brain development determines the cognitive proclivities, such as speech, musical sense, etc. that will emerge throughout the life of that individual.
In the years following infancy, the brain continues to restructure itself in accordance with environmental stimuli. Early demands for certain types of cognitive tasks such as, learning a language or counting, played a role in determining which cognitive capacities would become most highly developed. Stanford University neurologist David Eagleman observes:
In a sense, the process of becoming who you are is defined by carving back the possibilities that were already present. You become who you are not because of what grows in your brain, but because of what is removed.
However, there is a window of time in which a person can acquire language. If an individual reaches age 12 without experiencing speech, then the acquisition of speech becomes impossible. For example, in 1970, a girl nicknamed, “Genie” was found imprisoned in a Los Angeles home. She had been confined from birth to a locked room and subjected to beatings whenever she made a noise. The only sounds she heard were muffled by the confining walls of her prison. When rescued at age 13, it was discovered that she had no speech capability. Four years of speech therapy and sign language training enabled her to develop a very limited vocabulary, pairing words with objects, but she could not formulate sentences. The deprivation of speech stimulation had resulted in a neural pruning that removed her capacity for language. Even years of rehabilitation, could not repair the irreversible damage done by her sensory deprivation.
Without language facility, the mastery of concepts through abstract representation would be seriously impaired and consequently. the IQ would be very low. Einstein’s slow acquisition of speech may have been caused by an earlier development of other cognitive functions that took precedence during the early stimulation and pruning phases. Children who learn to speak very early are not necessarily those who emerge in adulthood with the highest IQ.
