Saul Kripke in response to an invitation to apply for a teaching position at Harvard 'My mother said that I should finish high school and go to college first.'

Other areas of the brain showed use by the subject, including a sector of the brain generally related to childlike 'finger counting', probably used in his mind to relate numbers to the visual cortex. Some of the areas that he and presumably prodigies use are brain sectors dealing in visual and spatial memory, as well as visual mental imagery. His brain, compared to six other controls, was studied using the PET scan, revealing separate areas of his brain that he manipulated to solve the complex problems. One subject never excelled as a child in mathematics, but he taught himself algorithms and tricks for calculatory speed, becoming capable of extremely complex mental math. The PET scans also answer questions about which specific areas of the brain associate themselves with manipulating numbers. For example, experienced waiters have been found to hold the orders of up to twenty customers in their heads while they serve them, but perform only as well as an average person in number-sequence recognition. This memory, specific to a field of expertise, is capable of holding relevant information for extended periods, usually hours. PET scans performed on several mathematics prodigies have suggested that they think in terms of long-term working memory (LTWM). Main article: List of child prodigies Memory capacity of prodigies

Child prodigy