How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

by Paul Tough

The first person to study that question seriously was Alfred Binet, a French psychologist who helped create one of the earliest intelligence tests. In the 1890s, people in the chess world and beyond were captivated by the odd phenomenon of blindfold chess, in which masters played chess blindfolded against multiple opponents at once. Binet sought to understand the cognitive ability behind this unusual skill. His hypothesis was that masters of the blindfold game possessed photographic memories. They must have the ability, he thought, to capture a precise visual picture of what was on each board and to hold it in their memories. Binet began interviewing blindfold-chess players, and he quickly discovered that his theory was completely wrong. The players’ memories weren’t particularly visual at all. Instead, what they remembered were patterns, vectors, even moods—what Binet described as “a stirring world of