Members in the Media
From: NPR

Studying The Science Behind Child Prodigies

NPR:

Matt Haimovitz is 42 and a world-renowned cellist. He rushed into the classical music scene at age 10 after Itzhak Perlman, the famed violinist, heard him play.

“By the time I was 12, 13 years old I was on the road playing with Israel Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic and some of the great orchestras. So it was pretty meteoric,” Haimovitz says. “I grew up with a lot of classical music in the household. My mother is a pianist and took me to many concerts.”

But nothing in his family history explains where Haimovitz got his extraordinary talent. And that’s typical, Ellen Winner, a psychology professor at Boston College who has studied prodigies, tells NPR’s David Greene.

“People are fascinated by these children because they don’t understand where it came from. You will see parents who say, ‘I wasn’t like this; my husband wasn’t like this.’ It seems to sometimes just come out of the blue,” Winner says.

Read the whole story: NPR

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