Analytical Essay On Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Intelligence comes in many forms and many types. There’s crystallized intelligence, which is the stuff taught in school, and what tests measure. There’s also fluid intelligence, which is one’s ability to think critically and problem-solve, it’s one’s “street smarts”. People often revere intelligence as the most important trait to success, besides hard work and determination. Although that’s not entirely true, it definitely helps to be smart. Successful people are often labeled “geniuses”. People will list endless ways to increase one’s intelligence, such as eating a certain food, or doing a puzzle a day, but research has shown these three, legitimate contributors to an overall higher intelligence: genetics, diet as a child, and music lessons.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that some people are born smart. In Los Angeles, a neurologist named Paul Thompson and his team took brain scans and IQ tests from over 450 pairs of identical and non-identical twins. By looking at the similarities in the identical twins’ brain scans and scores, and the difference in the non-identical twins’ brain scans and scores, they identified twenty-four variants on six genes, that all changed something ever so slightly in the structure of the brain. Whether the gene variant made the hippocampus (the part of the brain that is responsible for learning and memory) slightly larger, or made the neural pathways around the brain better insulated, each of the variants lead to an increase in the person’s IQ score. Someone who carried all of the variants would have a significantly higher IQ than someone who didn’t, proving that some people are just genetically smarter than others. King’s College London did a similar study among more than 11,000 pairs of identical and non-identical twins, and their parents. They had each pair of twins fill out a questionnaire asking them to rate things like, “health and overall happiness to ratings of how much each teen liked school and how hard they worked…” What they found is that identical twins were more likely to fill out the same answer than non-identical twins, meaning that the traits causing the answer is probably inheritable. The people who said they enjoyed school more and worked harder did better on England’s version of an SAT or ACT test, the GCSE. So once again, some people are born with a predisposition to do better at school. Both studies show that intelligence can be attributed in part to one’s genetics, a factor that one can’t control.
Another contributor of one’s intelligence is what one eats during the first few years of one’s life. According to a study done by researchers at the University of Bristol, the more nutritious foods a child eats, the higher their IQ is later in life. They took the IQs of 4,000 children when they were eight years old, and asked their parents what the child’s diet was like when they were three, four, seven, and eight years old. The children who had eaten very processed foods, high in fats and sugars, when they were three years old did much worse than the children who ate nutritious food when they were three years old, regardless of how their diet changed after that age. Dr. Kate Northstone explains that, “The brain grows at its fastest rate during the first three years of life – indicating that head growth at this time is linked to intellectual ability…It is possible that good nutrition during this period may encourage optimal brain growth.” Like in the study of inherited intelligence, how the brain develops is extremely important to one’s measurable intelligence. If a child eats foods that aren’t nutritious for them, their brain and skull won’t have what they need to reach their fullest potential, proving that diet as a child is another factor of one’s intelligence, another that they themselves cannot control.
Musical training or lessons are another great way to increase IQ score, one that a person can make a conscious effort to do and improve upon. E. Glenn Schellenberg, a researcher at the University of Toronto, found that the longer a person takes music lessons, the higher their IQ is. He compared the IQ scores of children between six and eleven, half of which took music lessons and the other half did not. After tracking them throughout middle and high school, he found that on average, each additional month of music lessons increased one’s IQ by one-sixth of a point. After six years, a child’s IQ would be around 7.5 points higher than a child who didn’t take any music lessons. The association persisted even after taking into account gender, parent’s education levels, and family income. That’s an astronomical difference, and Schellenberg thinks it’s because school mainly boosts IQ, and music lessons are similar to school. When a child puts in extra time to an activity designed to boost IQ (or one similar), the child will see extra results. It’s not very shocking that it helps so much; as stated in an article by The Washington Post, “Musical training has shown to lead to improvements in a wide variety of different skills including memory and spatial learning… In addition, language skills such as verbal memory, literacy and verbal intelligence have been shown to strongly benefit from musical training.” Memory, verbal intelligence, and literacy are all critical to learning. If a student increases these skills during music lessons, it’s no wonder that those who take them have higher IQs.
Now, high IQ scores are great and all, but one cannot have a high IQ score alone and be successful.

One needs a mixture of different types, like analytical (crystallized) intelligence, fluid intelligence, AND practical intelligence, which is knowing how to argue, read situations, convince, people, etc. In the third and fourth chapters of Outliers, a book written by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell explains it very well. He takes two people with extremely high IQs: Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer. Throughout the chapter he compares the two men’s stories, and shows how although Langan had just as high of an IQ as Oppenheimer, he was unsuccessful in life. He hasn’t made any amazing new discoveries, or created something wonderful, he dropped out of college. Oppenheimer on the other hand helped design the first atomic bomb. In the chapter, Gladwell points out what Oppenheimer had that Langan didn’t: practical intelligence, the ability to argue, reason, and convince people of something. For instance, Oppenheimer had no consequences after he tried to kill his tutor in graduate school, Langan could hardly talk to his professors at college. Gladwell shows another example in the previous chapter, when he compares the answers of two students on a test. The test asked them to come up with as many uses for a blanket as possible. One student came up with nearly a dozen hilarious answers, whereas another student only came up with about three obvious ones. The first student did much better on that test and would probably do better in a real life situation, since he was more creative. However, the first student had a lower IQ than the second student. Normally one would expect the second student to do better in everyday life, although that wouldn’t be the case. Those two examples and many, many others help show that although having a high IQ score is certainly helpful, it’s not the most important thing to one’s success and

happiness.