Monday, October 04, 2004

Child prodigies

I love Wikipedia. It's so useful. I looked up child prodigies and came up with the following:
Prodigies are masters of a specific skill or art, a talent which manifests itself at an early age. One generally accepted definition of a prodigy is a person who, by the age of 10, displays expert proficiency in a field usually only undertaken by adults. Some of the fields more common to prodigies are mathematics, chess, art, and music, but prodigies occur in a variety of areas.

Wikipedia discusses cognitive studies on child prodigies. This bit is most interesting to me:
Mathematical prodigies, so-called “calculators,” achieve blood flow to parts of the brain responsible for mathematical operations six to seven times the typical flow.

So why does extra blood to a particular part of the brain lead to amazing cognitive ability? And if it does, is there some way to create this effect artificially? And if so, why aren't people working on this? I am not a scientist, but doesn't this seem like a subject worthy of research. I suppose I'll have to keep looking into this. Perhaps this is a study out there somewhere which examined this idea. If anyone knows of one, let me know.

1 Comments:

At 1:48 PM, October 05, 2004, Blogger Matt said...

Thanks, Maria. I'll be sure to check out your blog, too.

 

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