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My Brilliant Brain

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  • Posted at 4:37pm
  • 27 November 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

When I was about nine years old, I played a piano piece called Silver Trumpets at the St Albans Music Festival in a small room in front of about 30 adults, all of whom were there to see their offspring play a piano piece called Silver Trumpets. Believe me, you've never experienced anything like the levels of boredom generated by 12 primary schoolchildren playing Silver Trumpets, one after the other. I can still hear it in my head now - ham-fisted attempts at musicianship, devoid of subtlety, and sounding more like a piece entitled Rusty Saxophones.

Marc Yu, however, is only seven years old, and is already playing piano concertos with orchestras in vast concert halls to a rapturous reception - certainly more rapturous than the applause offered to the final entrant to perform Silver Trumpets at the 1980 St Albans Music Festival. This programme looked at his extraordinarily prodigious talent, and posed the question "nature or nurture?" in as many different ways as it possibly could over 60 minutes.

While it was tricky to tell whether Marc's mother was a classic "pushy mum" or just indulged his boundless enthusiasm, it was clear that she was the driving force behind his success. (My mother, I should note, did drive me to the St Albans Music Festival, and when it was finished she drove me back home again.)

She taught him Cantonese when he'd barely emerged from the womb, English shortly afterwards, and now they're embarking on intense Mandarin Chinese lessons. She would play Beethoven pieces to him while he was still crawling, which he can now play effortlessly. (My dad would play Buddy Holly records to me, but sadly my repeated attempts to join the cast of the West End musical Buddy - "It's Buddy Brilliant!" - have proved fruitless.)

I'm not complaining, honestly. I wouldn't particularly envy Marc's childhood: while he's a bright lad who seems remarkably unaffected by his current level of fame, the programme did ponder at length how he would deal with the process of growing up and particularly puberty. I mean, I may not be able to play a Rachmaninov piano concerto, but at least I've retained enough social skills to be able to talk to women without making them back away in horror. Well, most of the time.

The programme featured lots of 3-D diagrams of brains with their synapses fizzing, and extraordinary information about how a child's brain grows and becomes more capable when stimulated at a very young age. They looked at the Abecedarians project in the USA, where children from low-income familes were given top-level education until the age of five: this demonstrated the "nurture" argument. Meanwhile, an educational psychologist countered that Marc's talent somehow had to be down to "nature", and that there must be a "gene for genius".

It's one of those questions that isn't likely to be answered satisfactorily in the near future, but watching it did make me feel as if I'd missed an opportunity. I'd never blame my parents, but who knows what I could have achieved if I'd been bombarded with mathematical formulae at the age of two?

My girlfriend concurred with my opinion. "God, we should really learn a language or something," she said. Sadly, the programme suggested that at our age, the part of the brain receptive to new languages had probably withered away through lack of use, so maybe we'll just stick to watching telly.

My Brilliant Brain can be seen on National Geographic (Sky 526, Virgin 230).

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