Marc Yu is a seven-year-old concert pianist with a repertoire of some 40 classical pieces. At the age of two, Marc heard a rendition of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ at a birthday party, pulled himself up to a piano and played it back flawlessly. A year later, he was playing Beethoven from memory. But are his remarkable abilities based on hard work or was he simply born with a brilliant brain?
Developmental psychologist Professor Ellen Winner explains that people have always been fascinated with child geniuses because they are doing things at “the wrong age”. “They’re not supposed to be doing things so advanced,” she explains, “so they shock us.”
