The witty Michael Dowling sums it up in Episode 4: “when you’re young you think you will do something spectacular but then you realise maybe you’ll just be a boring guy working in an office for the rest of your life!” – a wise statement for a 16-year-old, for sure, but also a form of resignation to the fact that being a “child genius” guarantees very little for the later course of life. If you happened to watch the Channel 4 series “Child Genius”, you may have noticed a subtle effect in the choice of “prodigies” featured: as the young “geniuses” featured in the first episodes that the programme set out to follow over the years, suddenly featured very little or not at all in the later series and were replaced by new and younger “geniuses”, and from the little we saw of them in their mid to late teens, they seemed to have turned into relatively “normal” (albeit highly intelligent) teens.

For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand (Albert Einstein) Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Child prodigy