Outliers, The Story of Success
1.
In the fifth episode of the 2008 season, the American television quiz show / vs. 100 had as its special guest a man named Christopher Langan.
The television show 1 vs. 100 is one of many that sprang up in the wake of the phenomenal success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It features a permanent gallery of one hundred ordinary people who serve as what is called the “mob.” Each week they match wits with a special invited guest. At stake is a million dollars. The guest has to be smart enough to answer more questions correctly than his or her one hundred adversariesand by that standard, few have ever seemed as superbly qualified as Christopher Langan.
“Tonight the mob takes on their fiercest competition yet,” the voice-over began. “Meet Chris Langan, who many call the smartest man in America.“ The camera did a slow pan of a stocky, muscular man in his fifties. ”The average person has an IQ of one hundred,“ the voice-over continued. ”Einstein one fifty. Chris has an IQ of one ninety-five. He's currently wrapping his big brain around a theory of the universe. But will his king-size cranium be enough to take down the mob for one million dollarsFind out right now on One versus One Hundred”
Out strode Langan onto the stage amid wild applause.
“You don't think you need to have a high intellect to do well on One versus One Hundred, do you?” the show's host, Bob Saget, asked him. Saget looked at Langan oddly, as if he were some kind of laboratory specimen.
“Actually, I think it could be a hindrance,” Langan replied. He had a deep, certain voice. “To have a high IQ, you tend to specialize, think deep thoughts. You avoid trivia. But now that I see these people”he glanced at the mob, the amusement in his eyes betraying just how ridiculous he found the proceedings “I think I'll do okay.”
Over the past decade, Chris Langan has achieved a strange kind of fame. He has become the public face of genius in American life, a celebrity outlier. He gets invited on news shows and profiled in magazines, and he has been the subject of a documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris, all because of a brain that appears to defy description.
The television news show 20/20 once hired a neuropsychologist to give Langan an IQ test, and Langan's score was literally off the chartstoo high to be accurately measured. Another time, Langan took an IQ test specially designed for people too smart for ordinary IQ tests. He got all the questions right except one.“” He was speaking at six months of age. When he was three, he would listen to the radio on Sundays as the announcer read the comics aloud, and he would follow along on his own until he had taught himself to read. At five, he began questioning his grandfather about the existence of Godand remembers being disappointed in the answers he got.
In school, Langan could walk into a test in a foreignlanguage class, not having studied at all, and if there were two or three minutes before the instructor arrived, he could skim through the textbook and ace the test. In his early teenage years, while working as a farmhand, he started to read widely in the area of theoretical physics. A t sixteen, he made his way through Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's famously abstruse masterpiece Principia Mathematica. H e got a perfect score on his SA T, even though he fell asleep at one point during the test.
“He did math for an hour,” his brother Mark says of Langan's summer routine in high school. “Then he did French for an hour. Then he studied Russian. Then he would read philosophy. He did that religiously, every day.”
Another of his brothers, Jeff, says, "You know, when Christopher was fourteen or fifteen, he would draw things just as a joke, and it would be like a photograph. When he was fifteen, he could match Jimi Hendrix lick for lick on a guitar. Boom. Boom. Boom. Half the time, Christopher didn't attend school at all. He would just show up for tests * The super IQ test was created by Ronald K. Hoeflin, who is himself someone with an unusually high IQ. Here's a sample question, from the verbal analogies section. “Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to ?” If you want to know the answer, I'm afraid I have no idea.
and there was nothing they could do about it. To us, it was hilarious. He could brief a semester's worth of textbooks in two days, and take care of whatever he had to take care of, and then get back to whatever he was doing in the first place."*
On the set of / vs. zoo, Langan was poised and confident. His voice was deep. His eyes were small and fiercely bright. He did not circle about topics, searching for the right phrase, or double back to restate a previous sentence.
* To get a sense of what Chris Langan must have been like growing up, consider the following description of a child named “L,” who had an IQ in the same 200 range as Langan's. It's from a study by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, who was one of the first psychologists to study exceptionally gifted children. As the description makes obvious, an IQ of 200 is really, really high: "Young L's erudition was astonishing. His passion for scholarly accuracy and thoroughness set a high standard for accomplishment. H e was relatively large, robust and impressive, and was fondly dubbed 'Professor.' His attitudes and abilities were appreciated by both pupils and teachers. He was often allowed to lecture (for as long as an hour) on some special topic, such as the history of timepieces, ancient theories of engine construction, mathematics, and history. He constructed out of odds and ends (typewriter ribbon spools, for example) a homemade clock of the pendular type to illustrate some of the principles of chronometry, and this clock was set up before the class during the enrichment unit on 'Time and Time Keeping' to demonstrate some of the principles of chronometry. His notebooks were marvels of scholarly exposition.
“Being discontented with what he considered the inadequate treatment of land travel in a class unit on 'Transportation,' he agreed that time was too limited to do justice to everything. But he insisted that 'at least they should have covered ancient theory.' A s an extra and voluntary project, 'he brought in elaborate drawings and accounts of the ancient theories of engines, locomotives etc'... He was at that time 10 years of age.”
For that matter, he did not say um, or ah, or use any form of conversational mitigation: his sentences came marching out, one after another, polished and crisp, like soldiers on a parade ground. Every question Saget threw at him, he tossed aside, as if it were a triviality. When his winnings reached $250,000, he appeared to make a mental calculation that the risks of losing everything were at that point greater than the potential benefits of staying in. Abruptly, he stopped. "I'll take the cash/' he said. He shook Saget's hand firmly and was finishedexiting on top as, we like to think, geniuses invariably do.