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."
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.
Strictly speaking, however, most of the smart kids in any given home or classroom are not prodigies, no matter how diligent or talented they may be. The standard definition of a prodigy is a child who by age 10 displays a mastery of a field usually undertaken only by adults. "I always say to parents, 'If you have to ask whether your child is a prodigy, then your child isn't one,'" says Ellen Winner, a psychologist in Boston and author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. Prodigies are, by this definition, exotic creatures whose standout accomplishments are obvious.
One of the region's young hothouse flowers is Abigail Sin who, at 10 years old, is Singapore's most celebrated young pianist. Sin started reading at age 2, and for the past three years has been ranked among the top 1% in the city-state in an international math competition sponsored by Australia's University of New South Wales. She's smart, but it was only through her music that she qualified as a bona fide prodigy. The youngest Singaporean ever to obtain the coveted Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music diploma in piano performance, Sin demonstrates one of the hallmark qualities of the breed: a single-minded drive to excel. Winner calls it a "rage to learn," which in Sin's case was manifest in her almost unstoppable urge to master the keyboard since she took her first lesson at age 5. "A lot of kids don't like to sit at the piano for hours," says her tutor Benjamin Loh. "Abigail is different," practicing 25 hours on average a week. "She loves to play, and she learns extraordinarily fast." Her intensity is all the more obvious when she is compared with her twin brother, Josiah, who like his sister is good with numbers but doesn't share Abigail's passion for music. "She always practices the same stuff over and over again," he complains.
Where does the drive come from? Researchers are just beginning to understand that there are differences in the functioning of the brain's neural circuitry that appear to differentiate prodigies from their ordinary peers. Neuroscientists have learned more about human gray matter in the past 10 years than in all of previous medical history combined, partly due to the advent of sophisticated technology such as a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures blood flow to different segments of the brain, revealing which parts "light up" during various mental activities. The only fMRI scanner in the Southern Hemisphere can be found in Melbourne, where American psychologist Michael O'Boyle has been scanning the brains of young people gifted in mathematics.
He's making some startling discoveries. O'Boyle found that, compared with average kids, children with an aptitude for numbers show six to seven times more metabolic activity in the right side of their brains, an area known to mediate pattern recognition and spatial awareness—key abilities for math and music. Scans also showed heightened activity in the frontal lobes, believed to play a crucial "executive" role in coordinating thought and improving concentration. This region of the brain is virtually inactive in average children when doing the same tasks. Viewed with fMRI, "It's like the difference between a stoplight and a Christmas tree," says O'Boyle, the director of the University of Melbourne's Morgan Center, which researches the development of children who have high intellectual potential. "Not only do math-gifted kids have higher right-side processing power, but this power is also fine-tuned by frontal areas that enhance concentration. These kids are really locked on."