Williams Syndrome and learning by mimicking

Someone recently made fun of my assertion that learning by mimicking is a type of learning not related to intelligence. Someone else brought up the issue of Williams Syndrome; people with this syndrome are adept at a certain type of language skill but actually have very low IQs.

Lo and behold! With some Google searching, I discovered the link between Williams Syndrome and micry:

… children with Williams syndrome were more likely to mimic and/or imitate facial affect and vocalizations than children in the mixed comparison group.

People with Williams Syndrome are said to also be good at rote memorization, foreign languages and music relative to their IQ.

People with Williams Syndrome have excellent concrete vocabulary skills, but poor referential vocabulary skills. This means that they know a lot of words, but they don’t completely understand the subtle ways in which the words relate to each other. The latter ability is one of the most highly g-loaded tasks.

Talking about music, I previously noted the dearth of Ivy League attendees among musicians. Only folk rock musicians are likely to have gone to an Ivy League school, because folk rock musicians have to write meaningful lyrics, which is a highly g-loaded task. But merely playing a musical instrument or singing is not so highly g-loaded, which is why people with Williams Syndrome, and people from low-IQ racial groups, are good at it.

* * *

It occurred to me that Sarah Palin has a Williams Syndrome type of personality. She’s very talkative and sociable, and a good performer (as evidenced by her excellent speech at the Republican Convention), but she doesn’t fully understand the meaning of anything she says.

Comments

[hm]

Thanks for this post. Now I finally understand why some people like to throw out a lot of sophisticated words without any clue aout those words in their talking.

One of these people actually admits that throwing words around to intimidate and impress others.

[Rechill]

Great post on musicians, no one mentioned Frank Zappa though.

[chickenbarrel]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7067505/China-has-open-mind-about-cause-of-climate-change.html

I think this would interest you regarding your recent post on China and Volvo.

[Michael Levine]

Hi HS,

I'm not sure if you will be able to answer this question, but one of the other commenters might be willing to try:
- What is the best, fastest, and most proven way to increase general intelligence? I don't expect a 20 point increase in IQ, but every little bit helps. If we could just max out our potential, then that alone would go a long way.

I would have assumed that playing chess would lead to an increase (even slightly), but appartently not. Would playing logic games/puzzles help? What about creative writing? Are these just correlated to general intelligence or would they help to improve intelligence?

Thanks

[Peter A]

Ivy Leaguers, and their Little Ivy kin probably dominate alternative rock or "NPR Rock", and have for decades. Too Much Joy had a Yalie, Rage Against the Machine had a Harvard grad on guitar, Galaxie 500 is Harvard guys, Vampire Weekend is Columbia grads, etc. And God knows how many Wesleyan, Williams, Bowdoin and Berkeley grads are in bands. These guys are not making the cover of People, but there are a lot of Ivy Leaguers playing the club circuit. Most of them never make it big, true - but rock music is a very crowded market. The difference between them and proles is that the not so successful Ivy Leaguers, from what I can tell, give up in their 30s and get good paying jobs in marketing, fashion, the art world, or the music industry instead of wasting their remaining savings on crystal meth. But to your point, it's true that the music made by Ivy Leaguers tends to be more conceptual, literate and self-referential. Heavy Metal on the other hand is very virtuso focused - a talent that requires more practice and dedication than g. Going out on a limb - I wonder if the decline in Jazz among the intelligentsia is partly connected to the emphasis on what is really a non g skill - instrumental virtuosity. Jazz appears to be a more intellectual form of music than rock at first glance, but in reality it tends to attract a lot of musicians with a talent for mimicry (of older jazz) or virtuosity for its own sake. Rock music is certainly much simpler as a musical form - but so much of indy rock can't be appreciated without context, a knowledge of art, film, literature, etc. that it may actually require higher g to compose and perform (well) than jazz. This might also explain why open minded diversity loving high IQ whites have migrated over the last 30 years to a music form that seems to exclude black and latino participation to a degree that even classical music can't achieve. I'd never thought of it that way, might be an interesting avenue to explore.

[Days of Broken Arrows]

"Great post on musicians, no one mentioned Frank Zappa though."

Or Bach or Beethoven or George Gershwin.

[691]

In the post about Ivy Leaguers and music, you also wrote:

"Ivy League graduates seem much better represented in acting than they are in music. Outside of folk, there don't seem to be any famous Ivy League musicians besides Huey Lewis, but there are a huge number of Ivy League educated actors and actresses. I have to draw the conclusion that the second best way to break into Hollywood is to go to an Ivy League school. Of course, the best way is to have a parent who's a bigshot in the industry. "

I think this is pretty good observation. My thoughts, after graduating from an Ivy and then living someone completely different, is this: To be a successful band, you first have to appeal to a niche audience, build your credibility and audience, get a record deal, go on tour, etc... You have to get hipsters to like you and pay for tickets and albums. But to be a Hollywood actor, you just need some producer to give you a gig; there is a talent floor, of course, but beyond that, you just need to sell yourself to some suit. And if there is one talent that today's Ivy Leaguers have in spades, it is the ability to sell themselves to adults, not other 20-somethings. To get into an Ivy, there is an intelligence floor, of course, but to stand out from the pack and get accepted, you need to convince an admissions officer to pick you. Ivy Leaguers are bright but they combine that with very good social intelligence as well.

[ironrailsironweights.wordpress.com]

Williams Syndrome is caused by missing genes. Either a person has it or doesn't have it, there's no such thing as sort of having it. It's not like autism, where there's a whole spectrum. While Palin may have some characteristics in common with a WS person, she certainly does not have a mild case of it.

Peter

[HS: I didn't write that she had Williams Syndrome, I wrote that she had a Williams Syndrome type of personality.]

[J1]

"folk rock musicians have to write meaningful lyrics"

Based on the "folk rock" I've heard, "have to" is probably an overstatement. How about "the ability to write meaningful lyrics is arguably of greater use to FRMs".

[HS: The very definition of "folk" is that it's not up to commercial l standards, but the artist makes up for it with more meaningful lyrics (in the case of folk music).]

[Linda]

"Ivy League graduates seem much better represented in acting than they are in music. Outside of folk, there don't seem to be any famous Ivy League musicians besides Huey Lewis, but there are a huge number of Ivy League educated actors and actresses. I have to draw the conclusion that the second best way to break into Hollywood is to go to an Ivy League school."

Wouldn't a simpler explanation for the surplus of Ivy Leaugue actors be that acting requires more intelligence than music? There's not much evidence that going to an Ivy League school itself advances ones career; rather Ivy League schools get credit for achievements their students would have made regardless of what school they went to. In Sigma speak, they transfer value from their students to themselves to enhance the value of their brand & dupe their students into thinking they need an Ivy League degree to do well in life.

[Chris]

Hmmm.. the Ashkenazi, not exactly known to be dullards, still seem to produce a hell of a lot of exceptional musicians-- just starting with the violinists, we've got Josef Gingold, Gil Shaham, Itzhak Perlman, Yehudi Menuhin. These guys stand out in their field the way Nobel Prize winning physicists stand out in physics. I'm sure you'd be happy to give credit to Ashkenazi intelligence for the relative success of the latter-- but from this post it sounds like you'd say that what these violinists' success have little to do with their intelligence? Is it "cultural"?

[Matt]

Sigma,

Sailer actually has an interesting post on dog genetic variation (http://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/03/dog-dna.html) in which he relates the following finding -

"His team has also used the dog SNP chip to scan for genes that show signatures of selection. One such favored dog gene has a human counterpart that has been implicated in Williams syndrome, where it causes exceptional gregariousness."

Perhaps the mimicry link is also found here and is what makes dogs easy to train... (perhaps more functionally "domesticated" human populations will eventually show some degree of variation around this locus, relative to the ancestral frequency/variants).

[Generation Flex]

re: the fastest method to increase general intelligence --

Since dual n-back training seems to be discredited, the best route would seem to be to exercise regularly. Alternatively one could try various nootropics, but the effect size is fairly small, unless you're willing to take speed; and speed is a devil's bargain, because you'll burn out in the long run.

[rob]

"Since dual n-back training seems to be discredited"

I hadn't heard this. Do you have a citation?

[Blumenthal]

***, I previously noted the dearth of Ivy League attendees among musicians.***

Some other examples are Kris Kristofferson got a Rhodes to Oxford and Mick Jagger who attended the London School of Economics.