The Greatness Code

Making most of the codes we are dealt with

- Smt. Sujatha Rao

Swami Vivekananda, born in January 1863, was known to be a "Shrutidhara" (a person with a prodigious memory) from a very young age.

Subramania was conferred the title of "Bharathi" (one blessed by the Goddess Saraswathi) at the age of eleven.

Adi Shankara was a genius at the age of 16.

Several others became great when they were very young.

Is it because their parents were brilliant and the children inherited it from them? Or was it because they were brought up in an environment which made them great? Heredity or Environment? The belief of the Nazis, about the superiority of certain races over the others, led to the Holocaust as we know it, wherein more than six million Jews were exterminated.

In an attempt to prove the veracity of its claim, the Nazi regime encouraged experiments on Jewish identical twins at the concentration camps without any consideration for their health or safety. These were conducted by Dr.

Joseph Mengele, popularly known as the "Angel of Death", on more than one thousand twins between 1943 and 1944.

Thankfully, the studies thereafter were more considerate of the overall health of the subjects being studied. Nowhere was the debate of "nature" vs "nurture" as strong as the one that raged around the subject of "general intelligence" measured mostly by the IQ scores. The findings of some of these studies could be summarized as follows: Across researches on identical twins, psychologists found a very high correlation value of IQ between identical twins reared together, indicating the influence of genes.

When they tested the IQ values of identical twins reared apart, the correlation fell a bit, indicating an influence of the environment.