Reflections on early, prodigy, genius and gifted based on cognitive neuroscience

Abstract

In special education, high skills designate people who demonstrate the capability, potential or performance in human activities, well above average. Our objective, using neuroscience to understand the early, prodigies, geniuses and high abilities as a result of a unique process of memory formation. It is a literature search, in which the works were identified, located, compiled, analyzed and blacklisted. The material was located from keywords in databases. For the compilation were used as inclusion criteria, adopted the intersection of the keywords as well as the work of researchers from education, psychology and neuroscience, published between 1966 and 2009; qualitatively analyzed 40 references, 18 articles and 22 other texts. The trajectory analysis was developed with the question: no need to explain differently the precocious prodigies, geniuses, and AH? We reached three logical propositions. We demonstrate through this exercise of course, that there would be no need to explain differently the precocious prodigies, geniuses, and AH, but conclude that there is need for such differentiation, even within the field of neuroscience, however, the statement above points to Renzulli’s theory as valid for geniuses and AH, with exceptions for early and wonders that deserve a closer look.