Can you create child prodigies, or are they simply miracles of nature? TIME's Andrew Marshall hangs out with superkids and scientists in search of some answers
MICHAEL COYNE/BLACK STAR FOR TIME
Abigail Sin prepares for an upcoming performance at Sinapore's Victoria Concert Hall
When he was nearly three years old, Nguyen Ngoc Truong Son would watch his mother and father playing chess in the family's ramshackle home in the Mekong Delta, and, like any toddler, pester them to let him play, too. Eventually they relented, assuming the pieces would soon wind up strewn around the kitchen, a plastic bishop stuffed into a teapot, the white king face down in a bowl of phó. To his parents' astonishment, Son did not treat the chess set as a plaything. He not only knew how to set up the board, which was crudely fashioned with a piece of plywood and a felt-tipped pen. He had, by careful observation, learned many of the complex rules of the game. Within a month, he was defeating his parents with ease. By age 4, Son was competing in national tournaments against kids many years older. By age 7, he was winning them. Now 12, he is Vietnam's youngest champion and a grand master in the making.
Son's parents—teachers with a combined income of less than $100 a month—are at a loss to explain why their otherwise ordinary child is a whiz at the ancient board game. "It's an inborn gift," says his father, Nguyen Ngoc Sinh, content to chalk it up to cosmic happenstance. "You couldn't train an ordinary three-year-old to play like that." Son, for his part, doesn't seem to think the question is worth pondering. To him, the nuance-filled strategies and logic of chess play is something that comes as naturally as chewing bubble gum. "I just see things on the board and know what to do," he says matter-of-factly while capturing a TIME reporter's queen in four moves. "It's just always made sense to me."
How a child prodigy like Son comes by his preternatural ability is not something that has made much sense to scientists. Throughout history, prodigies have been celebrated as objects of envy and adulation. Rarely, however, have they been understood. Often taunted by their peers, hounded by the press, prodded by demanding parents and haunted by outsize expectations of greatness, they are treated as wondrous curiosities. Picture a young Mozart when in 1762 he was lifted, at the tender age of six, onto a pedestal to perform before Austria's Archduchess Maria Theresa. "Let's face it, prodigies attract attention in much the same way people with profound disabilities do," says Maria McCann of Flinders University in Adelaide, an Australian specialist in the education of gifted children. "They're our beautiful freaks."
Only recently has science begun to probe the cultural and biological roots of wunderkinder. New research is showing what scientists have long suspected: that the brains of very smart children appear to function in startlingly different ways from those of average kids. But the question on every parent's mind remains: Are prodigies born, or can prodigies be made? Is giftedness an accident of genetics, or can it be forged through environment—by parents, schools and mentors? In search of answers, TIME tracked down seven prodigies living throughout Asia—from a computer genius in India to a gifted young artist in Japan—to look for clues in their uncommon lives.
This much is clear: ethnicity and geography are irrelevant. Prodigies can materialize anywhere, and Asia produces more than its share of the superprecocious. In the past, poverty, lack of education and absence of opportunities meant their abilities may have gone undiscovered or undeveloped. But bigger incomes and the rise of an ambitious middle class have produced a boom in accomplished youngsters. A 1997 survey of 32 outstanding physics and chemistry students that was conducted by the National Taiwan Normal University found more than three-quarters of them were the eldest child in small, dual-income households—families with relatively high socioeconomic status. Today, there are so many Asian music students at New York City's famous Juilliard School that its students no longer need English to get by socially. Many of their classmates speak Japanese, Chinese or Korean.
