how did you do that?

AmericanFurryBoy

I guess this is simplistic, but I guess that children with high IQs become fascinated with a particular subject, instrument, or machine and do their best to achieve a high goal in relation to the aforementioned things.

MayCaesar

While some kids have mental deviations that give them extraordinary natural abilities (usually at the expense of some other abilities), I think that in most cases it is the fact that they are very early exposed to something.

Children naturally learn much faster than adults, and so a child that has been exposed to some particular discipline at a very early age, preferably before they learn to speak, become outstandingly capable at it, very early detecting some patterns most people never learn. A child who has been given drums at the age of 1, with jazz concerts playing in the background 24/7, most likely will grow to be an outstanding drummer, and may be a better drummer at the age of 10 than most professional drummers are in adulthood.

I personally was exposed to mathematics very early; I learned multiplication and division before I hit the age of 3, for example. At the age of 9, when most of my peers were learning how to sum simple fractions, I already dabbled in trigonometric functions. Mathematics comes naturally to me; for example, I can easily sum 6-digit numbers in my head, or multiply 3-digit numbers within 15-20 seconds. Do I have any extraordinary abilities? Not really. But as a kid, able to completely focus on numbers and relations between them, I probably figured some mathematical patterns that most people are not aware of, and those patterns allow me to learn mathematics at a very fast pace.

On the other hand, I have always been awful at electric circuits. They just do not make sense to me. On the 2nd undergraduate year we had a radio engineering class, where we had to assemble complex circuits from basic components. I could never get it right, yet my friend would do everything in half the time with zero effort. When I asked him how he learned to do all that, it turned out that, when he was a little kid, his parents bought him an amateur radio assembling kit, and he would play around with the components, trying out different electric schemes. Figures.

maxx

actually most studies on what I have read, points out that prodigies do not  have a higher iq than other children. as well there are savants who are actually retarded who can perform higher math equations in their head very rapidly.@AmericanFurryBoy