Transcription
Child prodigies: they pack an awful lot of brilliance into one very small package. With Susan Spencer, we go inside their rarified world.
Watching him play badminton with his dad, you'd probably figure Suborno Bari for your typical 12-year-old kid. You'd be very wrong.
"Math and physics is all you want to do? Yeah, most of the time I'm having the most fun when I'm doing math and physics."
What is this really? It's a circumscribed quad—indecipherable homework assignments that would mystify mere mortals are child's play to Suborno. Something his parents marveled at early on: he fell in love with math.
Suborno's dad, Rashidul, also a mathematician, says that by the age of four, his son was stumping him with math problems.
"You had a hard time doing what he was doing at four?"
"He—all the books I had—"
"Wait, he's four at that time?"
"Yes, and he was uh, he was challenging me from the book that I wasn't able to give him uh, satisfactory answer."
So it's no surprise today to find Suborno delivering university lectures in India—something he started doing at age seven. That's right, seven.
"The natural assumption would be to write this, but is this correct? Does anyone have any idea?"
Since then, Suborno has skipped multiple grades, scored a 1500 on his SAT, and, at the ripe old age of 12, believe it or not—
"But now I'm actually an NYU student."
"No way!"
"Started college this past September at New York University."
"Was it a big decision to go to college now, and how's it going?"
"Uh, feels like just the next natural step. Most kids go to a college after high school, so I said, why not me?"
"Most kids aren't 12."
"I just got this ID, so—oh my God, it finally works! I've worked for this for so long."
"One of the questions I had was whether or not this kid's going to have a really swelled head, but you don't—you seem to have a pretty balanced point of view."
"I know it sounds strange because uh, it sounds like you're talking to some business CEO on 60 Minutes uh, that's like 35 years old, but instead I'm only 12. Feels like the voice isn't matching up with the person right in front of you."
"Do you sometimes wonder at the fact that you're only 12?"
"Not really. I've seen my birth certificate."
We interviewed a 12-year-old math whiz. He got 1500 on his SATs; he did his first college lecture at age seven. Probably is on track to be a college professor by the time he's 16.
"That sound like a prodigy to you?"
"Yes, that is totally a prodigy."
Psychologist Ellen Winner is professor emerita at Boston College and a leading authority on child prodigies. She says virtually all exhibit something she calls a "rage to master."
"All the child wants to do all the time—and not even wanting to go out and play—the kid wants to stay inside and work on whatever it is that that child is gifted in. I mean, these are kids that really live in their own minds."
"Is this fairly obvious when you talk to these kids?"
"Yes, it is very, very clear, especially in certain domains—in music performance, in mathematics, in drawing realistically."
But there is one area where she thinks prodigies are overlooked because they excel at something a lot murkier: art—but abstract art.
"It's much harder to detect because the work doesn't look totally different from typical kids, but it doesn't look totally the same either. It's more complex; it's more structured."
So while we've all marveled at the obvious skills of math prodigies like Suborno Bari, music prodigies, chess prodigies, what about young artists who seem to be following in the footsteps of, say, Jackson Pollack?
"August, what are you making?"
"I'm cutting out some shakes."
Meet four-year-old August Gardener, Professor Winner's grandson, who has been obsessed with abstract art for most of his young life.
"How many paintings has he done?"
"Oh, I mean, mean hundreds. I mean, it's not always, always paint, too. I mean, there's paint, and then there's sculptures and little drawings, and there's this whole mixed media thing."
Vanessa and Andrew Gardener are August's parents. Andrew is a former school teacher.
"How does what he's doing compared to the scribbling of the average four-year-old?"
"It's the drive, it's the desire to continue doing it and keep working and the top-of-mindness of it. Then after I added these for the moov—"
He's often incredibly deliberate for a four-year-old boy, who, like when he's not doing that, you know, he runs around like a maniac, like a lot of four-year-old boys. But when he's working on his art, everything is very thought out—in, you know, particular—"
"What did you start with first? Did you start with the bells or some of the colors?"
Deliberate process is the hallmark of an abstract art prodigy, says Jen Drake, psychology professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
"I like it because it has rainbow tape—my favorite color."
Drake, who's worked with Winner in the past, is now conducting a major study of art prodigies, and August is part of it.
"I'm really struck by his focus—that one drawing he spent several days working on—um, that is definitely a rage to master where you're, you know, their willing to go back to the drawing to add something to it."
"Some people might look at this and say, well, that's well and good, let's look at the end result—is that art? I mean, that's a really um, a good question um, and it's—I think because his work is abstract, it may be difficult to assess the skill in there, but there is a use of color and line and form that's not found in in typical preschoolers."
No matter what you think of August's art, Drake says his focus in making it is what really sets him apart.
"Are we talking prodigy?"
"I would say yes, definitely."
And August is in good company. Pablo Picasso was a child prodigy. In fact, from Mozart to Einstein to Stevie Wonder, the list of brilliant people who started young is long. But being a prodigy doesn't guarantee future greatness.
"Most prodigies do not go on to be major adult creators in their area of giftedness."
"That surprises me, really."
"The reason is that being a child prodigy means you're mastering something that's already been invented, and to be a major adult creator, you have to go beyond what's already been done and develop something really new."
"So how often do we get the Picasso or the Mozart?"
"Very, very rare."
But don't tell that to August just yet, and certainly not to math whiz Suborno Bari. He's got his eye on a PhD by 16.
"Then what happens? So I mean, I don't want to just be like a a superstar for 5 years and then completely vanish and have videos made on me 10 years later saying what happened to Suborno Bari. I I want to actually uh, leave a mark that people will remember me for."