I vividly remember two episodes from my childhood that I didn't fully understand until much later in life. The first episode occurred during sixth grade during our music class. There were about ten of us that had signed up for orchestra that year (the other two options were band and choir), and the middle school music teachers would come teach us every week. That's when I started to play the violin (unfortunately, I stopped playing a long, long time ago). During one of our classes, our orchestra teacher was sitting at the piano and playing notes one at a time. She would turn to us individually and ask us what note she was playing. We were supposed to say tell her the exact note - like "B flat" or "G sharp". I completely guessed and got a few right at first. She kept asking me what notes she would play, and eventually she figured out that I was just guessing and didn't really know.
What I now realize was that she was testing to see if any of us had what is known as perfect pitch or absolute pitch (not to be confused with the 2012 film Pitch Perfect). Perfect pitch describes the ability to identify or re-create a given musical pitch without the benefit of a reference tone. While the frequency of perfect pitch in the general population is not known, it is believed to be rare (perhaps as high as 1 individual in 10,000 people). Some would say that individuals with perfect pitch are musical geniuses. Our orchestra teacher couldn't have been too disappointed in us, and clearly we weren't musical geniuses!
The second episode occurred in middle school as well. I guess my memory wasn't as good as it used to be when I was younger! We had a substitute teacher who either (1) wasn't given the lesson plan by our regular teacher or (2) simply didn't want to follow the lesson plan. I remember that he showed us a "parlor trick" in which he was able to recall with almost 100% accuracy a very long list of numbers that my fellow classmates and I came up with and shouted out. Next, he showed us how to perform the same trick! He showed us a table that he had in front of him that was divided into rows and columns. Each square in the table had a picture of some object (tree, frog, baseball, etc). He told us that he would mentally "place" or "visualize" each number in the object as we called out the numbers to him. Once we had finished with our list, he would go back and look at each object in order, which would help him to recall each number in the exact same sequence and order that we gave him. As a final proof, he let us all try the same technique. I was surprised on how successful I was at recalling the long list of numbers!
What I didn't know then (and what I know now) is that our substitute teacher was using a technique called the Method of loci. The Method of loci uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments or objects in order to enhance the recall of information. Surprisingly, the method has been known since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans! Many memory contest champions report using this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.
I am not a genius. And there's a good chance that most of you aren't geniuses either. While definitions vary, it's still uncommon to be a genius. Psychologists typically define whether or not someone is a genius based on their intelligence quotient (IQ), based on a standardized test such as the Stanford-Binet test. If we set the threshold IQ at 140 and above, about 1 in every 250 people would be classified as a genius. However, if we use a much higher threshold, say an IQ of 180 or above, only about one in every two million people would be classified as a genius.
I think my two anecdotes make two different, yet important, points. The perfect pitch story tells us that true genius is rare, but I would also say that unless you are a professional musician, being able to name an exact note purely by sound is not a skill that is going to be transferable to a lot of other situations. Admittedly, I haven't kept up with the scientific literature enough to know whether perfect pitch is a sign of general intelligence or not. Regardless, I would rather focus on developing a wide range of skills and knowledge in a lot of different disciplines as opposed to just one (see my recent post "Da Vinci's Seven Principles"). The Method of loci story is important to me because it suggests that there are many tools out there to help us learn and be successful. We don't need to be a genius to do incredible things! We should leverage all of the tools at our disposal in order to maximize our chances of success.
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