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The mental dexterity that the little boy with red glasses currently has is one of the characteristics that attracts the attention of the neuroscientific community, since several investigations have aimed to determine the levels of development that a person must reach to receive the title of “gifted”. ”, together with factors that influence intellect such as environment, repetition and genetics.
Pediatric neuropathologist Manuel Casanova, who represented the Smart State Endowed scientific group in child neurotherapy at the University of North Carolina, explained to EL TIEMPO that there are as many intelligences as there are people in the world, but that few really manage to master several skills with excellence at the same time.
However, it relates the practice and repetition of certain activities with the process of understanding. From a simpler perspective, the specialist explained how the organ of thought is formed with the following metaphor: “If you slide a sled down a hill full of snow, you will see that a path is being drawn. The more you slide down the mountain, the more the snow will be pushed away and the deeper the trail can be. This is how the grooves (responsible for giving the brain a wrinkled appearance) and connections work, since they are marked according to practice and repetition.
Secondly, he comments that passion is another characteristic, since they tend to be motivated to constantly learn in their area of expertise.
But still, extraordinary cases depend on brain structures that appear due to hereditary factors, but that through mental exercise they are reinforced to shape the brain and to obtain results that are even surprising.
On the behavioral component, Ellen Winner—Harvard graduate, Boston College professor of psychology, with research on cognition of typical and gifted children—explained that gifted children have three characteristics. “The first is very obvious, it relates to the ability to learn about a particular area, and usually these people have talents in a particular field, but not others,” she explained.
Secondly, he comments that passion is another characteristic, since they tend to be motivated to constantly learn in their area of expertise. Finally, they are different children from the rest, especially in their youth, so they follow their own path and even solve problems faster and in different ways. This is how it works “those who start reading at the age of two, three or four, before going to school, when nobody teaches them. Of course, they couldn’t do it if they didn’t have an adult to read to them a bit,” according to Winner.
As is the case of the young chess player who, since childhood, has spent entire days playing on black and white grids between the walls of the Jorge Garcés Borrero Departmental Library. There ‘Nico’ learned to perfect his strategies, to analyze players who seemed to be the age of his grandfather and, above all, to be passionate about the movement of each chip.
However, this story began when the protagonist was four years old. “My dad taught me to play chess and I liked it a lot because I discovered that I can take advantage of sharing with my family and developing qualities”, said who, after demonstrating ease on the board, went to the Cali League.
This is because neural connections are formed mainly in early stages and the faster they are structured, the more they can be forged over time.
The plasticity of gifted children is so marvelous that many neurologists point out that they are continually growing minds. Hungry minds eager for interaction
According to the scientist Casanova, the stimuli that a person receives when they are two years old will be —in 80 percent— the bases on which their knowledge will be based when they are adults. Therefore, it is easy to find a high number of connections in childhood, which are formed in the brain with the promise of being used in the future, “hence why babies are big heads”, He commented and added that it is normal for neural advances that have not been exercised to optimize body energy to be eliminated over time, since “thinking tires.”
Sabater also explains that another characteristic is that the cerebral cortex —of children with superior mental abilities— develops more slowly and changes shape, which allows the creation of new connections that facilitate learning. This is because their brain matures in a gradual and sophisticated way to reach its peak in adolescence. While those with a “normal” IQ reach the peak at 5 or 6 years.
“When a child pays attention to a new experience, his brain changes, specializes, new pathways are built, neural paths to communicate areas, regions, structures. The plasticity of gifted children is so marvelous that many neurologists point out that they are continually growing minds. Hungry minds and eager for interaction that we often don’t know how to attend to as they deserve”, said Sabater.
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In the case of the chess player, the connections that he has used the most seem to trigger ingenuity in terms of spatial capacity, memory and mathematics, since his abilities have not only revolved around sport. His good performance, especially in the numerical area, at the time was a factor that caught the attention of the rector of his school, who made the proposal to advance him one grade and also to strengthen his knowledge in mathematical logic to present it to a university.
“We were going by transport and in the time it took us to make the trip I taught him the multiplication tables, to add numbers with 15 figures, to get percentages. But it was only for a few months, he was left aside so as not to saturate him because he was already fully into chess, ”said Octavio Ramírez, father of the minor.
The above, added to the skills that Nicolás has shown since he was little and that have highlighted him above average. At five months he said his first word, when the rest do it after a year; with a little more age he indicated stations, streets and directions to those who he saw lost in public transport; now, he enjoys visiting cities around the world through Google Maps, among other hobbies such as reading Harry Potter and listening to classical music.
This, explained by Valeria Sabater —a psychologist from the University of Valencia with a master’s degree in neurocreativity, innovation and the sixth sense— who says that people like the little one have a greater volume of gray matter in certain brain regions, which is related to cognition, intelligence and the ability to process information. Which means that they have more skills to handle data, analyze it and draw conclusions.
“In the brain there are 28 regions related to the ability to reason, act, focus attention and react to external sensory stimuli. Children with high capacities show greater specialization in each of these areas”, says Sabater.
People like a 10-year-old child can be classified into two categories depending on the neuronal length they have to join one hemisphere of the brain with another. “A person who has many short connections can excel in his visual acuity, in his perception. On the other hand, whoever has long connections is capable of thinking outside the box and can solve a numerical problem, for example, to fix hygiene or public health issues”, said the expert Casanova who received scholarships to complete studies at the Faculty of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University.
Due to the behavior of Nicolás, at the age of six —recommended by psychologists who accompanied his learning process— a test was carried out to find out what his IQ was. The results showed how enormous the little redhead’s psyche is, since his score of 170 would even allow him to enter the International Association of the Gifted (MENSA), an institution that receives people with equal reasoning. or greater than 131 on the Weschler scale.
“Having an IQ between 85 and 115 is normal, it is considered an exceptional ability when the result is 130 upwards because we are talking about cases that only occur in two percent of the population or less”, explained Carlos José De los Reyes, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the Universidad del Norte.
In the brain there are 28 regions related to the ability to reason, act, focus attention and react to external sensory stimuli.
In the same way, they are the same tests that have been used for centuries to determine if there is intellect in a person or if he lacks it. The first known test, called the Metric Intelligence Scale, was commissioned by the French government in 1904 for the psychologist Alfred Binet and the psychiatrist Thèodore Simon, as they had to identify students in schools who found it difficult to follow the pace of the curriculum.
Over time, this form of measurement, popularly known as the Binet-Simon test, reached the United States and was modified by Stanford University to be disseminated in the Western world, used among children and renamed the Wechsler Scale.
These types of tests have a particular structure, “they are not designed so that everyone can solve them completely, but are designed in such a way that very few people manage to finish them, that is, the questions become more complex to the point to arrive at questions that probably most people will not be able to answer,” said De los Reyes.
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Despite the fact that these methods confirm the high reasoning capacity of the little Cali, nothing frees ‘Nico’ from losing a game of chess. “I love winning and I enjoy it a lot, but I know that it doesn’t always happen. Many times I have lost and I believe that you learn from mistakes, ”he shared.
Consequently, the fruits of his discipline and his lucky charm –some quartz that his parents gave him and that he wears around his neck– are materialized in each of the tournaments he has won, since today there are 30 and they come from the victory of four competitions in the United States, eight at the individual national level and six by teams, eight as departmental champion, along with one at the Cali fair, another at Exporfess and two in departmental library tournaments.
The six years that ‘Nico’ has spent as a chess player have forged the constant desire to dedicate his life to chips and strategies. This, despite the fact that both he and his father are aware that the economic factor does not stand out in this type of sport. “Once he won 250,000 in a championship and another time, 80 dollars in the United States,” says Ramírez about the only two monetary prizes his son has had.
For this reason, the invitation made to the government is to support the country’s talented youth: “the government supports adults, because they see that they can represent them very well, but they have not realized that everything starts with children. . They have to support them so that they are great in their activity”.
