Born Eyes Wide Open: The Neuroscience of Gifted Babies and Infants

Jenna’s daughter, Abigail,1 was literally born eyes wide open. As this was Jenna’s first child, she had prepared herself for the classic newborn experience: a sleepy, inactive baby needing frequent feeding and coaxing to wake. That was not Abigail.

After delivery, the midwife placed Abigail on Jenna’s chest. Only moments after birth, the newborn began rubbing her eyes and quickly shifting her head left and right on her mother’s chest, looking for the sources of the voices in the room.

Despite the baby’s limited visual ability, when she caught her mother’s gaze, Abigail’s bright blue eyes seemed to take in her mother's face with an unnerving intensity.

Even the most alert newborns typically settle back into sleep within an hour or so of birth, but Abigail remained awake for the next four.

Around this time, Jenna gently placed Abigail on her belly next to her father, who was sitting on the birth center’s bed. Abigail promptly pushed herself up on her arms and, for a moment, lifted her chest and head off the bed, attempting to get a good look at her dad.

Most babies don’t manage this until they are around two or three months old, when they’ve developed sufficient muscle tone and head control to support themselves. The nurse-midwife stopped what she was doing, set down her clipboard, and asked,

“Did that really just happen?”

In her twenty years of midwifery, she had never once seen a newborn with that kind of motor ability. Just hours old, Abigail was already showing traits of the child she would become: deeply curious, gregarious, and hyper-interested in her surroundings.

That day, Jenna suspected there might be something different about her child. It turns out she was right.

Today’s deep dive is all about gifted infants and young children—those children, just like Jenna’s, who seem to have an uncanny awareness earlier than most.

I’m covering:

• What neuroscience can tell us about gifted infants and toddlers

• Early behavioral, linguistic, cognitive, and motor indicators of giftedness

• The 30% guideline to help you identify whether your child is gifted

• Whether there are specific signs in babies that reliably predict future gifted identification

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The Gifted Child Taboo

Stories like Jenna’s are commonly shared in the gifted caregiver groups I lead, yet most parents never dare share these stories outside our private groups. Many fear being seen as braggarts—or worse—liars.

Often, parents of bright children simply aren’t believed when they share that their three-month-old uttered the word “hungry,” or that their two-year-old taught themselves to read.

When bright children display their gifts publicly, forcing others to confront the reality of their abilities, parents are often accused of “hot-housing” their children: forcing them to memorize material, complete endless academic drills, and pushing them towards accelerated development.

When a young child demonstrates advanced skills, other parents may feel privately envious, ashamed that their own parenting has not yielded comparable talents in their children, and even suspicious that this other person’s child hasn’t “earned” those abilities. It is a strange truth that while we often marvel at child prodigies, we frequently condemn them and their parents.

Our society promotes the idea that we live in a meritocracy where parents who work hard at intensive parenting will see their children rapidly advance, secure the best opportunities, and come out ahead in life. Yet we only have so much control over our children’s lives. While you can create supportive conditions where your child is more likely to thrive, you can’t make a gifted child any more than you can make a child dyslexic.

It can be a lonely road parenting a child whose abilities are apparent so early, particularly because these children are often emotionally intense and their abilities develop asynchronously. The two-year-old who is reading independently may not yet be toileting independently; the three-year-old who can play the piano is unlikely to have sophisticated emotional control as well.

Confused by this discrepancy and unsure whether to trust what is happening before their eyes, parents frequently turn to online forums, asking, “Does this thing my baby did mean they’re gifted?”

Misinformed commenters often reply, “You can’t possibly know whether they’re gifted when they’re that young,” or, “You just want your child to be special, so you’re reading into things that aren’t there.”

This is unfortunate for families whose children are truly gifted, because they miss an early opportunity to recognize and support them.

Because of the stigma around having a young, gifted child, there are undoubtedly more gifted infants and toddlers than will ever be formally recognized. Daycares and preschools rarely accommodate such children, requiring all children to complete the same activities, nap on the same schedule, and maintain the same developmental pace regardless.

Pediatricians similarly tend to have very little, if any, advice for parents of gifted babies; others will tell you it simply isn’t possible to know if your child is gifted at such a young age. Fortunately, science has a lot to say about the matter.

What Neuroscience Can Tell Us About Giftedness in Babies

Research on gifted children outside of school settings is limited, particularly in children under age five. Importantly, giftedness encompasses much more than cognitive ability, including socioemotional differences, specific talents, and creativity.

However, existing research on giftedness in infants is usually limited to cognitive ability and intelligence, in part because these can be measured, and in part because other talents and abilities require time, fine motor skills, and practice to develop.

It’s also important to understand that intelligence itself doesn’t crystallize until children’s brains develop more fully, so while there are tests available to measure IQ in children as young as four, formal IQ testing isn’t reliable until children are closer to eight or nine years old.2

As a result, researchers have turned to various other creative measures to look at cognitive ability in babies and young children, which I’ll cover below.

Habituation and Early Learning

One body of research on infant cognition concerns a principle called habituation, which is considered to be a form of early learning. In these studies, an infant is presented with a stimulus, such as a toy duck, and then shown something new, like a toy car, alongside the more familiar object.

Research has found that how quickly and reliably an infant habituates to the old object (i.e., how quickly they learn the initial object and subsequently ignore the original stimulus in favor of the new one) correlates with later intelligence scores, in the range of 36-45%.3

The gifted brain, throughout the lifespan, has been found to be more connected, efficient, and organized—making it primed for rapid and continuous learning.4 It is unsurprising then that a child who learns quickly in infancy is statistically more likely to demonstrate advanced development throughout their lifetime, and to later be identified as gifted.

Neural Connectivity and Modulation

Neuroscience research using fMRI has also found that infants whose brain information pathways are more connected in the first year of life (i.e., those who show greater whole-brain white matter connectivity) tend to also have higher IQ scores when measured at age 4.5

Further supporting this theory, EEG studies have found that in babies, more effective frontal theta modulation, or well-coordinated brain activity, is also tied to later cognitive performance.6

These findings again align with what we know about giftedness throughout the lifespan: greater neural connectivity and more efficient organization likely contribute to more efficient cognition, rapid learning, and accelerated development over time.

Gifted Infant Milestones and Indicators

While neuroscience research can tell us what kinds of brains we’re generally dealing with at the group level, parents can’t just take their babies to a neuroscientist to scan their brains and predict their future abilities.

Instead, parents will want to observe their children’s behavioral markers and developmental milestones over time, many of which correlate with later identification as gifted.7

What follows are the research-backed signs that your infant or toddler may be gifted, along with gifted and neurotypical milestone charts to help you gauge whether your child is generally advanced for their age.

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