Prodigies should not put away childish things simply because they perform as adults, say experts. "Children still need time to be children," says McCann of Flinders University. Violinist Yeou-Cheng Ma—the lesser-known older sister of cellist Yo-Yo—once poignantly remarked of her eight-hours-a-day practice sessions, "I traded my childhood for my good left hand." Even the devoted Singaporean pianist Sin sometimes wants a break from her beloved instrument. "Most of the time I enjoy practicing," she says, "but sometimes I only want to play with Jacky." Jacky is her 18-month-old Yorkshire terrier.
Usually lost in the media celebration surrounding child prodigies is a sobering truth: most do not mature into adult leaders in their fields. (Parents of underachievers can console themselves with the fact that many adult pioneers—like late-bloomer Charles Darwin were not child prodigies.) Some burn out spectacularly, others carry on in their specialties in adulthood but never match their remarkable childhood achievements. Still others just become bored with pursuits they once found all-consuming and move on.
It is no coincidence that prodigies tend to master adult fields that are formal and rigorously rule-bound, such as music, chess or math. You don't hear of kids winning Booker Prizes or devising U.S. national security strategies. To make the leap from pint-size prodigy to grownup genius—that is, into a person who not only excels in a subject but revolutionizes it—requires more than mere technical prowess. It takes intuition, creativity, originality and years of patience and diligence. "If precocity and technical skill are all that prodigies have," observes Winner, the psychologist, "as adults they are no longer special. Late bloomers have caught up with them."
While they are young, though, they seem uncatchable. Each day, Tathagat Avatar Tulsi, 15, pedals his red bicycle through the hallowed grounds of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India's premier science school, where he is on his way to becoming the nation's youngest Ph.D. Hailing from Patna in Bihar—one of India's most underdeveloped states—Tulsi earned his undergraduate degree in physics at age 10. He has been famous since he was six years old, when the local newspapers nicknamed him "computer brain" for his ability to take a random date and immediately calculate which day of the week it fell on. Years later, amid great public controversy, Tulsi and his father claimed that he had discovered a new particle to explain the presence of dark matter in the universe—a claim the young physicist never substantiated, which briefly brought the media tag "fraudigy" upon him. (Tulsi says he had merely suggested an idea that, if proved mathematically, might explain dark matter, but the Indian press misrepresented his theory. He later filed a defamation suit against a wire service and a government official who was critical of him in the press.)
Hype and hyperbole aside, Tulsi is the real thing. If he completes his doctorate within three years as planned, he will have gained a place in the record books. Still, he wants more. His next aim: to get a paper published in such globally renowned journals as Nature or Physical Review—and shake the label of "beautiful freak" once and for all. "I want to show I am an original thinker," says Tulsi, "not just a kid who passes his exams ahead of time." For most kids, trying to pass exams is hard enough; for prodigies, that's the easy part.
—With reporting by Joyce Huang/Taipei, Kay Johnson/Hanoi, Hanna Kite and Toko Sekiguchi/Tokyo, Saritha Rai/Bangalore, Bhagwan Singh/Madras and Genevieve Wilkinson/Singapore
