Child Savant I Was Not

I was watching a news clip that popped up on Yahoo today about a young boy who is a kind of math savant, who was talking briefly about some problems related to one of Einstein's equations (not E=mc square) and the propagation of light. Needless to say it went over his mother's head, but the boy seemed to understand what he was talking about. Maybe he will learn how to explain it in simpler terms.

I guess the point I want to make is how impressed we are when children are really good at something, like math or music. Even more so when there is a disability or disease in the background, like this kid I saw on Yahoo today who was born with Asperger's syndrome. My biggest question is really how well do these kids understand the subject they are talented at? I know when I was a kid I was interested in all kinds of things that were completely beyond me, except in my case I was usually wrong in my assertions about the world around me. I thought I might list them here:

1. The "dome" for a sky. When I was really little, like 5 or 6, I remember observing the sky and concluding that it was a dome that started from the ground (the horizon) and covered the Earth from end to end. The problem with this meant the earth would be cut in half, so whenever I saw a globe I couldn't reconcile my understanding with what the Earth was supposed to look like. I thought about that a little too much!
2. The color of countries. Again while studying the globe I initially associated each country (like Canada and USSR, yeah it was before the Union collapsed) with the colors they were illustrated in (like Pink and Green). I'm not sure I really believed the land there was colored that way, I just couldn't help but associate each country with the colors on my globe. This actually helped me remember most of the countries in the world before they taught about it in school (US states were more difficult because they were each a different color).
3. Black and white movies. Again with the colors, or lack of color, I began to associate specific eras in time with the colors used in the movies from those years. So life in the 70s was always technicolor, while the 80s were dark and grainy (crappy VHS) until the 90s introduced vibrant colors (just search You Tube for some of the TV ads from the early 90s, it was out of control style). I really believed for a while that the reality from the days my parents and grandparents were kids was living in black and white. How bland!
4. The Devil. I was too young and too curious to know about Satan, the Ultimate bad thing. Mostly I wanted to make sure I would always avoid the devil, so one night I asked my mom exactly where is the devil? Her answer was "The Devil is everywhere!" Her response will always resonate with me, it's so deep, but inappropriate for a kid because kids think literally. I remember being outside that night, and staring at the moon after she said this, thinking "the Devil is in the moon right now, and he sees me!". She couldn't have said something else like "the Devil is in a place you will never go because God loves you" or something sweet like that? I know she was just being honest with me, but I was only 5 or 6!
5. Black Chinese people. This one has to do with politically correct language. Again I was too young to understand (not that adults do a good job making sense out of things) our label for African-Americans, and thinking like a kid, this made me wonder if there were literally African-Chinese, like Chinese people who were black, but from China and not America. I didn't know about slaves being taken from Africa, or the origins of different cultures yet, and just thought that every country had "white" Americans and "black" African-American-Japanese, Chinese, Canadian or whatever people. Oops! Even now, does PC language make sense in any other country? If a black person is a citizen of China, does that society deem it proper to call them African-Chinese, or just Chinese, or something else? And what about the people from Africa who aren't black, would they be considered African-American?
6. Clouds crash into each other, causing thunder. OK, sadly I was in 4th grade before this idea was challenged. At least most of the other kids in my class thought the same way. Where I was raised we didn't have many thunderstorms any way, so why give it much thought? In case it isn't clear what causes thunder, lightning is hotter than the surface of the sun (like I got to learn about this stuff in school, I read about astronomy on my own time, but skipped over meteorology) and that snapping, crashing, booming sound is from vaporized air that was expanded in a flash, followed by many echoes across the land.
7. The question of "why?". This subject still applies to life today, but usually in a more practical approach like "Why do I work so hard for so little? Is this what I was meant to do in life?" In third grade I was staring outside my classroom after finishing some test early, so it was a quiet moment. Gazing deeply into the dark blue sky of another early morning in class, I began to ponder "why", as in "What am I doing here, why am I alive, in this class, at this time, staring at this strange blue sky? Why is the sky blue, why are there giant planets and other stars beyond the sky, what point does my life have and why does this all make me feel so empty inside?" Whoa, crazy deep thoughts for a kid, it was actually so much I became depressed by it. I was scared of feeling this way, and afraid I might not want to live, so naturally I shared these difficult thoughts with my mother a few days later. Instead of hearing something comforting, or being acknowledged for having a curiosity about the meaning of life, my mother (being typical as we've seen) overreacted, which freaked me out as well, by scorning me, suggesting that "I was suicidal, and that my thoughts were frightening" to her. She added " I must not think that way any more" and that she "didn't know what put those thoughts into my head" (mind control, now that's a concept to introduce to a kid like me at a time like that). That quickly put an end to that nonsense, for a while any way. At some point I probably considered thoughts like these were being slipped in by the Devil, if I followed her logic. I was a weird and nervous kid (now I'm a weird and nervous adult)!