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Geniuses
come from National Geographic. I do not mean the
capacity of the media company to capture complex
concepts like sustainable development and environmental
degradation and space exploration, and turn them into
eye-popping images. A tested popularizer in the good
sense of the word, National Geographic conjures
photographs of deserts and other panoramic vistas to
remind us how small we are but how powerful, too, we are
in destroying the beauty of our planet.
There
is, however, National Geographic Channel, and for the
month of November, it pushes the boundaries of its
exploration from outside into the inner workings of the
brain. The presentation is awesome with
computer-generated scans and vivid illustrations of the
human brains and its workings. Not merely technological,
the episodes are storytelling at its heartwarming best.
Marc Yu
is a genius. He is 13 years old. At two, he taught
himself how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the
piano. Only the song is child-like, the playing and the
process of knowing how to work around the keys is
intensely adult in form. His mother exposed him to music
at a very early age. That is not unusual. Many mothers
did that to their kids but not many saw their children
play Beethoven at the age of three.
Marc
makes faces. He silently assures us he is a little boy,
a real human, a small kid. He runs endlessly with other
kids, rolling down the soft, grassy slopes in the
neighborhood, smiling and chatting with his playmates.
He has playmates after all.
Later,
we see the boy trailing his fingers on the piano and
giving the audience no time to think about the thin line
between the great and the monstrous, the entertaining
and the puzzling. In one audition, Marc is lost in the
music...it seems. We like to think he is aping the great
piano player. And yet, the sound that comes out is not
an imitation but the sincerest sound ever produced by
someone who knows his way with the musical instrument.
One feels like crying at the end of this boy’s
performance. There can be no explanation for the tears.
Perhaps, it is an amazement at how the human brain can
function, or malfunction. Perhaps, it is joy at finding
out that some humans can truly mirror the memory of our
perfect template. Perhaps, they are tears of a viewer
scared of the possibilities that a genius can offer.
I will
discover throughout the episode that Marc has a perfect
pitch, which means he is able to identify musical notes
the way we good children can identify colors and other
shapes. An expert tells us being pitch-perfect is not
unusual. Good musicians should be able to tell notes
with greater grace than the nonmusicians. The problem—or
the terrible beauty—is that Marc has never studied
music.
Professor Ellen Winner is a developmental psychologist.
She has studied gifted children. One of them is Marc Yu.
Having finished playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with
his back turned against the keys and his tiny body
almost bent over the piano seat, Marc is now standing
beside his mother, Chloe. The professor asks Marc what
he wants to be when he grows up. The boy answers, “Isn’t
it obvious? I want to be a psychiatrist.” Professor
Winner laughs and the kid takes back his answer and
replaces it with: “I want to be a musician.”
Marc is
friends with Lang Lang, a child music prodigy and now a
world-renowned pianist. Lang Lang promises Marc they
will be in a concert in the near future.
The
story of Marc is part of the three-part series from
National Geographic Channel International, called My
Brilliant Brain. It draws us to the question of how
much of us can be located in the brain, and to what
degree are we part of that great exterior called
Culture. Is there such a thing as a born genius? Marc
seems to fall under that category.
There is
another genius: George Widener. Give him a date in the
past and he is able to tell you in seconds what day it
was. He does not have a formula but he is able to see
calendars and numbers and dates all lined up in his
brain. To better understand how our brain works, or how
the brain of this calendar calculator functions, George
submits himself to a brain scan. With all the
technologies now available to read the internal organs
of the human body, why not indeed? The episode tells us
that it is not always easy to subject savants to this
regular procedure: most of them have disabilities that
make a process like a brain scan difficult or
impossible.
At the
end of the scan, the doctors see George’s brain as
“structurally normal.” Where that part of his brain
calculates for dates, though, the experts see them as
mysteriously ablaze.
The
episode goes on to carry us the story of another
“genius,” the Accidental Genius, Tommy McHugh. After
enduring a near-fatal brain aneurism, Tommy is engulfed
by emotions and words that push him to go into something
that was never there before. He begins to write poems
and is wracked with the desire to paint. And paint he
does, because there is something in him—in his
brain—pushing him to be a manic artist.
What are
in these people’s brain that can be unlocked? Can we
study them so that we, too, may learn from the lessons
of those nerve endings—and maybe, just maybe, we can
chart more prodigiously the shelf life of our seat of
wisdom? Can we study that which helps us to study?
The
questions become moot because the third episode is about
the potentials of genius in all of us. This is the story
of Susan Polger, who is, in a sense, through exposure
and experiment, plus fatherly guidance, trained or, more
appropriately, transformed into the world’s first female
chess grandmaster. This young woman does not have a
legacy to back off her present status. Her father knew
chess, but was not particularly a gifted player. Susan,
however, grew up diligently, keeping track of more than
100,000 chess patterns.
Pattern
is the core concept. Susan is working her power of
recall by means of what psychologists call clumping, or
gathering elements together so they could be recalled or
memorized easily. Her genius in chess may look like
wizardry but to Susan it is but a technique. Despite
this attempt to demystify her own talent, Susan remains
a genius even more admirable because her case, tough as
it may seem, looks replicable.
At the
end, the most exciting discovery of My Brilliant
Brain is not only the grandeur of the human brain
but as well the implied opposite of that organ we will
always be in awe of. This, National Geographic Channel’s
incursion into geniuses and the structure of the human
brain, beautiful and powerful, is also a guided tour
into the waysides and byways of the seat of the human
mind. For every lyrical and exceptional childhood
undergone by someone like Marc, there is the extreme
case of a little girl made to spend her childhood in
isolation. At 13, the girl possesses the mental state of
an 18-month-old infant. For every image of a savant able
to memorize the content of numerous books, there is
somebody like Mary Ann Sieghart, a British journalist
who suffers from a condition known as “face blindness.”
Mary Ann is unable to recognize faces.
Science
can go on and on with its explanation about the human
brain, for that is its reason for being. But when you
see someone like George focused into completing a
calendar designating the dates for every Monday in the
next 500 years, we know that the story of the human
brain will continue to be told.
The
episode on Marc was aired yesterday with a repeat today.
Check the web site of National Geographic International
for the latest schedules of the other episodes of this
entertainingly intellectual/intellectually entertaining
My Brilliant Brain. |
