On brilliance and boredom

[bironic]

I just read a riveting article in this week's New Yorker about an extraordinarily gifted boy from Nebraska -- his IQ was measured at 178 when he was five years old -- who committed suicide last year at 14. It's in the Letters from Nebraska section and it's called "Prairie Fire: The life and death of a prodigy," by Eric Konigsberg. I wish the text were posted on their website so you could all read it.

The beginning of the article focuses on his achievements: home-schooled by encouraging parents who'd chosen to forego enrolling him in a program for gifted children only because the classes are geared toward students with an intelligence level several magnitudes below his, which would have left him frustrated and unchallenged, Brandenn Bremmer knew his alphabet at 18 months, was reading aloud at two years old (even as his facial muscles struggled to form the sounds), drove a car at nine (sitting in his father's lap), started long-distance high school coursework at six and graduated at ten (dressed as Harry Potter for his photos), released the first of two CDs of original piano compositions at 13, and enrolled in a pre-med course at 14 with the eventual goal of becoming an anesthesiologist. We're talking about the kind of intelligence that allows you to pick up woodworking over one weekend while refurbishing a barn with your father, to invent a better sprinkler system for your family's farm at the age of eight.

Just to be clear, the article paints a portrait of a decent kid with none of the neuroses that seem to plague the exceptionally bright, who got along well with both children and adults, regularly phoned his semi-estranged older sister to talk, corresponded with a few good friends he met at yearly retreats for the gifted and their families, was motivated rather than pushed to achieve.

One afternoon while his parents were out running errands he shot himself in the head in his bedroom. He was still breathing when they found him and they rushed him to the hospital, but the doctors couldn't save him, and they ended up donating all of his organs (some of which were rare matches), down to his skin and blood vessels -- everything except his brain, which had been too severely damaged by the bullet. Poetic, if morbidly so. (The article, oddly enough, doesn't touch on the possible psychological implications of death by head wound as selected by someone who was marked throughout his life by his intelligence.)

Why did he do it? Even looking back one year later, Brandenn's parents, who seem like bright and caring people themselves, say they saw no signs in the months leading up to his suicide that their son was troubled. His sister and his sort-of girlfriend, on the other hand, mention emails and phone conversations in which Brandenn admitted to pervasive boredom, listlessness and depression.

Like his parents and the psychologist who tested his IQ, you can say he was an angel on Earth who somehow sensed that other people needed his organs and sacrificed himself for them. You can call him an Indigo Child or argue "Those who burn twice as bright..." or that sort of stuff. The article never leans toward one explanation over another. But I think boredom and the threat of more in the future is what did him in, especially when you consider that for all his intellectual maturity he was still going through the emotional turbulence of adolescence.

There are hints that he struggled with perfectionism, stories of moments when, if he didn't get something right straight off, he would quit or physically walk away. Something about the college bio course didn't sit right with him; he got a low B or C on his first exam; and my guess is he started to brood. After a childhood spent tearing through textbooks and achieving breathtaking success at almost everything he tried, what was left? I imagine he asked himself, seeing his future yawn before him, How can I possibly continue to be challenged in this world? Is it worth the effort?

"I don't know why I'm so depressed," he wrote to his semi-girlfriend; "before it was just every now and then, and you know, it was just 'bummed out' depressed. But now it's constant and it's just, 'What's the point of living anymore?'"

Two days later, he shot himself. In the head.

There was a half-page article in the newspaper last year that told a similar story: If I'm remembering it correctly, a brilliant, relatively well-known American physician credited with saving hundreds of newborns had committed suicide because he was unable to live with the pressure of the knowledge that he couldn't save enough people, and was therefore a failure. People were angry at him for taking his life. For me that story raised the question of whether someone with that kind of talent has a moral responsibility to live and continue practicing despite the crushing despair, which is not quite the topic here, but it still seems appropriate -- The spectacularly bright, multi-talented "overachievers" are particularly susceptible to the emotions that drag you down. And people don't seem to understand why. 'He had everything going for him,' they say, or 'She was always so cheerful, so engaged.' Don't they understand how a person who rises above the intelligence of those around them might look down and see only a wasteland?

Anyway, Brandenn's story hit close to home. Not that I've got anywhere near the kind of mind he had, not that I'm contemplating suicide, but in a scaled-down way I've wondered many times since college whether I've been winding down, outliving my intellectual height. I know some of you reading this feel or have felt this way.

According to the article Brandenn's 14-year-old friend, the one to whom he wrote the above-quoted email, "is a full-time college student, plays three musical instruments, competes on a high-school gymnastics team, and cantors at her synagogue." At 14. How do you move on from that? Don't you get bored? Desperately, furiously, hopelessly bored? Or at least jaded, embittered with the world and those around you? I have a friend with a similarly unfathomable list of accomplishments, an ex-boyfriend with a frighteningly sharp mind, and I worry for them, and for some of you, sometimes.

Now my thoughts have jumbled, and I'll stop. But I wanted to share this with you because I saw a part of us in this small, familiar tragedy.

Comments

[pynelyf.livejournal.com]

I found the subject and your thoughts on it interesting especially because they diverge so greatly from my own. Although I could not read the original article, after reading your post, I came to opposite conclusions. Or rather, where on some level you could empathize, the event left me feeling alienated.

I can't understand how if you're that talented that you could get bored with life. There is just so much to do and life so short. If I had that kind of intellectual capacity, I'd like to learn so many more languages and study the cultures they stem from, learn to play even one instrument, or craft or what have you. It's an overly simplistic view point, but regardless of intllectual ability, I don't think it's possible to get bored of life--surely one can get bored of the abstraction, but not of the feeling of the sunrise, of the taste of tira misu, of the smell of jasmine, and a million other minor details.

It's tragic, ironic, or any other number of adjectives, but ultimately it leaves me feeling hollow because on a fundamental level, I cannot understand it.

On a related note, I just finished reading The Professor and the Madman and deals with similiar ideas. You might be intersted--about the construction of the OED.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

If I had that kind of intellectual capacity, I'd like to learn so many more languages and study the cultures they stem from, learn to play even one instrument, or craft or what have you.

I'm sure there are plenty of uber-gifted people who feel exactly like you do, and I can sympathize with that attitude as much as the other. It's only that for some percentage of them -- and the article dips briefly into whether there is a higher suicide rate among gifted children -- maybe temporarily or maybe for a long time, the endless litany of new things to learn and try and enjoy seems stale rather than exciting. 'Learn French? Just another language. Master sculpture? Another artistic medium, sigh.' I'm sure it's to do with your personality to begin with, whether you're susceptible to depression. I'm curious -- When you were in Japan, packing your days with lessons and tastes and sights, did you ever, even for a day, sit back and feel sick of it all, convinced that every new museum or play would be no different from the museums or plays you'd been seeing?

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

I think I can understand - intellectually at least - the picture you paint of the immense boredom of the mind to which nothing presents a challenge, but I wonder whether his depression didn't have as much to do with the pursuit of meaning as with the pursuit of challenge. There has to be a time, when you've spent your whole life basically on the work of improving yourself, constantly evolving into a more and more astonishing prodigy, that you wonder, "What am I doing all this for? Is there an end point? Is there a purpose to it? Or do I just go on accumulating knowledge and skills for their own sake, forever?" Sure, most children have spent their lives to date simply developing themselves - growing up, if you like - but it's usually a more absorbing task. Young teenagers usually aren't angsting about how they'll change the world yet because changing themselves is taking up all their mental energy. Perhaps Bremmer sort of outgrew the work of self-development mentally before he outgrew it emotionally.

The need for purpose might be suggested in his own plans for his future. I mean, being an anesthesiologist is a perfectly good calling, but it strikes me as distinctly unambitious for someone with that kind of mind. It's not a profession that's devoted either to changing the world or to solving the great mysteries of existence, the way theologians, philosophers, theoretical mathematicians, and others try to do. It's certainly not the kind of profession to which most fourteen-year-olds with average intelligence (and therefore much less ability to simply write their own future the way Bremmer could have) aspire.

Either way, it must be terrifying to be the fourteen-year-old who really DOES know everything. How can you go to anyone for help or advice when they're all miles behind you, intellectually?

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Young teenagers usually aren't angsting about how they'll change the world yet because changing themselves is taking up all their mental energy. Perhaps Bremmer sort of outgrew the work of self-development mentally before he outgrew it emotionally.

Yes, exactly, that had to be a part of it. And what you say about anesthesiology being an unambitious pursuit for someone with his capabilities did contribute to my argument, though I hadn't realized it quite so clearly as you've put it. Maybe if he'd been shooting for President or ambassador or head of a world aid organization, his future wouldn't have seemed so bleak to me (or to him?).

[bironic.livejournal.com]

As for the last question, I think that's why the gifted-children and -parents programs organize annual conventions: so the kids can connect with others the same age and intelligence, make friends in comparable situations who can support them in ways no one else could. I wonder if they have mentoring programs too, with adults of high intelligence who have gone through the same thing but also have experience and can provide informed, sympathetic guidance.

[pynelyf.livejournal.com]

I thought long and hard about your question because I didn't want to brush it off with a shallow "of course I enjoyed every day in Japan." I had my miserable moments of homesickness or loneliness, but I can't rememeber a single instant when I was tired of exploring. Kyoto is a city of temples and shrines and there's a running joke among Kyoto-ites that the only one worth taking visitors to is Kinkakuji [the one plated in gold] because at least it stands out in memory so that when you look back at the photographs again, you'll remember which one it was. All the others are considered foregettable wooden constructions [even by residents of Kyoto and other Japanese]. Perhaps it's because I'm interested in gardening, I don't know. But I found each temple or shrine distinct and fascinating--Ekandou with it's ethereal temple light up, Ryoanji's rock gardens, Heian Jingu's big torii, Nanzenji's villa, the list is endless. Maybe I'm just obsessed with traveling. Maybe I was exoticizing Japan. I don't know. It was all very beautiful and new and I was in excellent company which allowed me to enjoy the newness and the beauty.

How do your days in London compare?

[bironic.livejournal.com]

A few months in, I found that I needed to space things out or at least ensure that there were a variety of activities on a weekend or else I risked losing interest -- for instance, I wouldn't go to two large art museums in a row. By the end of the semester, having packed so much in over the past few months, I really did start to get jaded about things. I'd tried so many new foods that it was no longer exciting to try another; gone to so many new places that each trip felt like the last; seen so many paintings that a new museum felt like just another set of portraits, some more Turners, yawn. And I'm usually a huge culture freak. It just got to this awful point where I couldn't muster up the sincere excitement I'd been filled with at the beginning of the trip, and yet when I returned home I was restless with the desire to go out and *do* something, *see* something.

[housepiglet.livejournal.com]

Hello. I noticed this discussion on your LJ after reading your House fics, and hope you don't mind me joining in.

I have a facinating book by Miraca Gross - "Exceptionally Gifted Children" - in which she describes her longitudinal study of a group of children of similar intelligence to that of the boy you wrote about.

She, the children, their parents and occasionally their teachers talk about the unique and significant challenges that they encounter on a daily basis, in their attempts to function in a world populated almost exclusively by people who can't relate to them. If you've not already seen it, you might enjoy it.

I was also interested in what was said above about this boy's decision to become an anaesthetist being unambitious, given the level of his intellect. I thought that was an interesting perspective, though, because it seemed to me to suggest that intellectually gifted people would necessarily wish to use their intellect to its fullest extent. Naturally I see that people wouldn't wish to be bored, but assuming - and I realise it is an assumption - that most people are ultimately seeking happiness rather than raw achievement, I'm not sure it necessarily follows.

Anyway, and again, I hope you don't mind me butting in. I was so moved by the thought of that young boy killing himself that I couldn't help reading the discussion.