Child prodigy
The Multifactorial Gene-Environment Interaction Model incorporates the roles of adequate practice, certain personality traits, elevated IQ, and exceptional working memory in the explanation of music prodigies.
[10] A study comparing current and former prodigies with normal people and musicians who showed their talents or were trained later in life to test this model.
[11] PET scans performed on several mathematics prodigies have suggested that they think in terms of[clarification needed] long-term working memory (LTWM).
[12] This memory, specific to a field of expertise,[clarification needed] is capable of holding relevant information for extended periods, usually hours.
For example, experienced waiters have been found to hold the orders of up to twenty customers in their heads while they serve them, but perform only as well as an average person in number-sequence recognition.
never excelled as a child in mathematics, but he taught himself algorithms and tricks for calculatory speed, becoming capable of extremely complex mental math.
[14] The fMRI scans showed stronger activation of brain areas related to visual processing for Chinese children being trained with abacus mental compared to control groups.
Additionally, the right middle frontal gyrus activation is suggested to be the neuroanatomical link between prodigies’ abacus mental calculation and the visuospatial working memory.
According to Vandervert, in the emotion-driven prodigy (commonly observed as a "rage to master") the cerebellum accelerates the streamlining of the efficiencies of working memory in its manipulation and decomposition/re-composition of visual-spatial content into language acquisition and into linguistic, mathematical, and artistic precocity.
[22] In child prodigies, Vandervert believes this blending process is accelerated due to their unique emotional sensitivities which result in high levels of repetitious focus on, in most cases, particular rule-governed knowledge domains.
He has also argued that child prodigies first began to appear about 10,000 years ago when rule-governed knowledge had accumulated to a significant point, perhaps at the agricultural-religious settlements of Göbekli Tepe or Cyprus.
This theory states that the integrative of various factors in the development and expression of human potential, including:[25] Prodigiousness in childhood is not always maintained into adulthood.
Dr. Anders Ericcson, professor at Florida State University, researches expert performance in sports, music, mathematics, and other activities.
[26] Rosemary Callard-Szulgit and other educators have written extensively about the problem of perfectionism in bright children, calling it their "number one social-emotional trait".
Gifted children often associate even slight imperfection with failure, so that they become fearful of effort, even in their personal lives, and in extreme cases end up virtually immobilized.
[16] Additionally, the attentiveness to details, a typical characteristic of AQ, is enhanced among prodigies compared to normal people, even those with Asperger syndrome.
