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This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.

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The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.

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The Superchild

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The Superchild stands apart from the rest of us.

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Whether it be a highly accomplished ballerina at the age of 14, or a 13-year-old computer genius,

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Superchildren are somehow different.

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To some, the secret rests in the deepest recesses of the human brain.

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Yet there are methods already known which can reshape the minds of children.

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Where's the bullfrog? Can you touch the bullfrog for mommy?

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This normal 18-month-old baby has a 10,000-word vocabulary.

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Is it possible that more such Superchildren can be created?

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The Superchild

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The Superchild

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What is a child prodigy?

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Leslie Ann Cope's is just such a genius.

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The Superchild

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The Superchild

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In 1979, she was the only pianist to win the prestigious Los Angeles Philharmonic Symponies for Youth competition.

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In the little investigation that has been done of the gifted or genius child, there are a few indications that genius spawns genius.

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What then is the determining factor?

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It seems highly likely that environment may play a key role in the nurturing of the gifted child.

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The Superchild

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Melissa Allen at 14 is considered by some at the American Ballet Theater to potentially be one of the prima ballerinas in America.

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The Sacrifices

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The sacrifices have been many. Melissa explains the rigors of her daily schedules.

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It's really strenuous. I get up in the morning about six o'clock, get ready for school, go, school starts at eight o'clock.

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Then I go from there, I eat my lunch and do my homework on the way to ballet.

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I take three classes and then I come home about 7.30. I'm home about 8.30.

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You got a lot of homework there?

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Yeah, biology and English. I'm a lot in it.

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You better get started on that.

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Yeah, you better get started.

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Despite her harried schedule, Melissa will finish high school a year early.

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The necessary ingredients to create such a Superchild are discussed by her teacher, Margaret Graham Hills.

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I don't like the word genius, but she has something very close to it.

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Genius in a way to me implies something that's not as down to earth as the people who really work.

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Genius is almost as though it happens to you and you don't have to work for it.

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And Melissa works for it. She's got the body, she's got the brain and firing accidents and that sort of thing.

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I think she will go very far.

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Because of her outstanding potential, Melissa is expected to work with the American Ballet Theatre in New York within a year.

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Time, effort and talent will determine if she will become a permanent member of the troupe.

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There's many instances that I feel like I'm a gifted child, but it's not an ego.

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It's just being proud that you know that you can do something other people can't.

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The work is worth a thousand times more than you put out.

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It gives you a feeling of satisfaction knowing that you've done it.

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As far as Melissa and Melissa's type are concerned, I think yes, they would be very, very good at anything they set out to do.

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The brain is essential. People say, ah well, you know, she's no good for anything, let her be a ballet dancer.

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Doesn't work. The brain's got to be absolutely first class.

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The abilities of Leslie and other such super children have just begun to motivate scientists to investigate the source of their talent.

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No organism is as mystifying as the human brain.

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Its complicated methods of relaying messages are beginning to be understood.

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For Leslie to play with her precision, electrochemical impulses must be relayed to her fingers at a speed of 120 miles per second.

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These impulses probably emanate from this illuminated section.

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The area that responds to melody and tone may also be more highly developed.

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This alone, however, does not fully explain her genius capabilities.

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Perhaps probing even deeper into the interior of the brain will provide the answers.

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Marilyn Ferguson, editor of Brain Mind Bulletin.

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The human brain has tremendous capacities which can either unfold or be left sleeping.

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And we all have the brain that we need right now to learn anything we want to know.

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The capacity has always been there. I don't think it's a matter of some sudden evolution that is going to change things.

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It's just that the tool we've always had is there and we are only recently discovering that it is.

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Perhaps each of these children possess within his or her brain abilities associated with Da Vinci, Mozart or Michelangelo.

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Are we simply wasting our children's minds?

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Our whole educational system and in many ways our whole culture has valued only one half of human intelligence, one aspect of human intelligence.

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In the current parlance this is referred to as left brain intelligence, which means the left half of the brain tends to specialize in analytical learning into breaking things into their parts.

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The right hemisphere, on the other hand, tries to see patterns and see things as a whole.

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And it's more artistic, in a sense, more aesthetic, musical, more sexual, more closely related to our dreams.

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And in many ways a quicker learner.

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And now what's happening is educators all over the country are going to courses called Teaching Both Hats at the Brain, Educating Both Hats at the Brain.

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And beginning to appreciate the fact that whole brain learning is what really unlocks our hidden talents, our hidden genius and our hidden understanding.

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One of the few schools to stress nurturing the whole child is the Merman School in Los Angeles.

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The school is restricted to children of IQs over 140.

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Nevertheless, they are taught to be well-rounded individuals.

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Teachers strongly encourage their students to be intimately in touch with the world around them.

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Discussions range from topics such as the recycling of industrial resources to the preservation of wildlife.

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Animals, okay, what else?

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If you had an aluminum recycling center they would recycle it and melt down the aluminum to make new camps.

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Also aluminum is a finite resource of yours and will run out Sunday if we don't recycle it and keep using it.

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What else, Max?

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Well imagine 2,000 years from now somebody decides to build a garden in his backyard but his backyard is on top of a former nuclear waste dump.

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Oh, how can that present a problem?

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For being radioactive food.

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These students far exceed their peers in verbal abilities.

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The school's curriculum is explained by Dr. Norman Merman.

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We feel that our program is important in enabling the bright child to develop a positive self-concept.

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So often these children are perfectionists and they need the reassurance in a school situation like ours to make mistakes, to learn from their mistakes and to realize that that is how we grow.

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They also, we feel, learn that there are other people like themselves with similar interests, with similar enthusiasm for learning and they are not in a sense the loner out in left field.

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An animal that hasn't really changed a lot is the cockroach which has stayed the same for about 3 million years, sort of gotten its own little niche right there.

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That brings up the theory of punctuated equilibrium which states that equilibrium or evolution is not, as some people think, a gradual, continuous change, very slight changes though.

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But instead it's a million years or a few million years of something staying the same and then all of a sudden a spur of change.

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Consider the bright child in a conventional situation, how he or she feels that they are really number one, so to speak, a top banana.

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And when they come to us, it sort of takes the hot air out. They really have to produce and think through what they're saying and this is so often brought about not necessarily by the teacher but by the other children in the classroom.

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Specialized schoolroom programs provide a fertile ground for capable children. Their potential is being carefully nurtured. For them, education is a challenge.

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Given an opportunity equal to that of the Merman children, some believe children of average intelligence could become gifted.

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A startling new process used only in Philadelphia provides this child with a 10,000 word vocabulary. Will this program make it possible for every child to be a genius?

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Every summer, over four million children attend camp in America. They enjoy the usual pleasures of nights around the campfire.

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They spend lazy days exploring nature from horseback. Camp Rancho Oso near Santa Barbara, California is like no other in the country.

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While it is different, the young campers are just regular kids. Camp founder, Dennis and Boley.

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Basically, the kids that come to this camp come from all over the country and indeed all over the world and they're basically a very normal kid.

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What they're here to do is to build very specialized unique vocabulary that's known only to the computer and therefore they can use the computer as a tool to work for them.

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There's a segment string out of that so that eventually you wind up with the words, computer camp written on one line.

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Are there any questions?

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Yeah. It doesn't work on the idea. How can we get it to work?

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Every different home computer has a little bit different syntax in order to perform the same function.

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The interaction amongst the kids is fantastic. They all teach each other the skills.

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It's like you work with one person and you show them how to do it. Pretty soon five minutes later you'll see them showing a friend how to do it.

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And it passes on incredibly quickly how to program the computer. So they really teach each other. It's fantastic.

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A normal program at the camp here would consist of spending several hours on the computers getting in various facets of learning about how to use computers and interacting with them.

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And the rest of the time is spent in a very well-rounded activity. They go horseback riding and they go swimming and they play tennis and go hiking.

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And they're really normal kids having a normal time and what we've done is integrate into that a way to learn to use a new tool, a computer.

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With the knowledge these children now possess, one young man was able to create a computer program to catalog his lawyer father's personal injury cases and antique collection.

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Another plans a program to analyze his parents' stock purchases.

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Camp Rancho Oso provides us with some intriguing questions. The children there are aged 10 to 15. What if they were much younger? Would they have an even greater capacity to learn?

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We are taught that the capacity of the brain at birth is limited. Parents may hold the key to actually expanding their children's intelligence.

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In a sense the teaching, if we want to use that term, involves stimulating children, answering their questions, talking to them when they're very tiny.

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The capacity that is there in the average child is, it dwarfs what we think children can do.

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And we're just now becoming aware of that every normal that is not brain damaged baby who is born has the capacity to be what we think of as intellectually gifted.

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At the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia, children like Sean Katz and his sister Brandy are part of a unique program.

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Contrary to most school traditions, mothers such as Joan Katz actually enroll along with their children in the Institute.

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There they learn how to expand their youngsters intelligence.

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Is the jute founder, Glenn Dorman?

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Well first of all, most professionals have an unspoken law that says that all mothers are idiots and they have no truth in them.

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And nobody talks to mothers and God knows nobody listens to them. Well, that's nonsense.

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Mothers know more about their kids than anybody in the whole world knows about them. And they are superb teachers.

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Mothers are the best teachers the world has ever seen. All we do is teach mothers and all the things that happen.

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The paralyzed kids who walk and run and jump, the blind kids who read, the deaf kids who are, that's all done by mothers.

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And so teaching their children things such as Japanese or violin or history is a cinch for mothers.

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Christine Hagg and her daughter Tagan.

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Tagan was started on the program at birth, the first day of her life.

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And what we did with her initially was just give her visual, auditory and tactile stimulation.

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At a very low level, we've shown lights in her eyes. We showed her very large, outline pictures.

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We did lots of talking, lots of music, lots of auditory, lots of good touching.

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And we've done program with Tagan pretty much every day of her life.

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For tiny children, learning is a survival skill.

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And they believe that, well, they'd rather learn, eat, they'd rather learn than play games, they'd rather learn than do anything.

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They think it's a great joy. And in the first six years of life, when tiny children can take in any kind of information

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to read, to speak three languages, to have perfect pitch, to play the violin,

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in those years of life, we're treating children as if they were little nitwits, making little toys out of them.

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And such a shame. Nature builds in every newborn baby an absolute rage to learn.

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They want to learn about everything in the world and right now at this instant.

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And the brain grows by use. Therefore, we simply feed that famine for information.

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Here's Edgar Degas at the Milner's. The starry night, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, painter and model.

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This information, in the beginning, we call bits of intelligence.

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Let's say photographs of the presidents of the United States.

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And there has to be three requirements. Each of these pieces of intelligence.

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It has to be discreet, it has to be precise and non-ambiguous.

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And they simply say this is Zachary Taylor.

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Here we have Abraham Lincoln. And with some paintings, here's the breakfast room by Pierre Bonard.

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And here we have some frogs. We've got a bull frog and a pickerel frog.

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Tegan's seen approximately 10,000 bits now, including her language bits,

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her different languages that she knows, the music bits that we're doing, art bits, bits in every category,

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from science to art.

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Okay.

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Hey, Tegan, I've got a bull frog. Where's the bull frog?

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Come here darling. Come get it. That's right.

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Bull frog.

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Right. Good girl.

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That's it. Very good. Okay, that's the bull frog.

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Wonderful. Okay, put that in your pile. That's excellent.

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And you know what we've got here?

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I've got a Vincent van Gogh. Where's Vincent van Gogh this starry night?

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While Tegan at times seems disinterested in her lessons,

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she has a 70% success rate when identifying her flashcards.

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Put it in your pile over here. Put it in your pile to do some more presidents, okay?

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Good girl. Okay.

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Look what I've got. Tegan. That's good.

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Okay, I've got Abraham Lincoln, Tegan.

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Can you find Abraham Lincoln? Which one is Abe?

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Honest Abe?

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How is it that Tegan has such advanced visual recognition skills,

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and yet is still in early stages of baby talk?

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Where is he? That's right.

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Want to touch Abraham for mommy?

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No.

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Okay, go ahead. Thank you.

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That's a good girl. Very good. Okay, excellent.

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Put him in your pile. Okay, you want to see one more?

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Okay, okay, let's see.

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How about another frog? Another frog for you?

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Oh, I've got an Eastern Grey Tree Frog.

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Which one is the Eastern Grey Tree Frog?

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Eastern Grey Tree Frog. Right.

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Good girl. Very good. Okay, put it in your pile, please.

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Put it in your pile. That's a good girl. That's wonderful.

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It is easier to teach a one-year-old to read than to teach a seven-year-old.

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That's why the schools all flop.

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It's easier to teach a one-year-old mathematics than to teach a seven-year-old.

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It's easier to teach a one-year-old absolutely anything that you can present in an honest and factual way than to teach a seven-year-old.

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So parents simply give them accurate information with love and respect.

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While Tegan is obviously successful, years of study have even more outstanding results.

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I'll see the type of fun, fun, fun.

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Sean, age seven, Fumio, age five, and Brandy, age five,

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can not only recite Japanese songs or rhymes, but can fluently communicate in Japanese with one another.

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This feat alone may seem outstanding.

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Each equally excels at reading and explaining Shakespeare,

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and all are learning to be expert gymnasts.

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For Dr. Domen, there is no question that his program works.

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It remains for the rest of the educational community, however,

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to judge whether his techniques can create geniuses out of old children.

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It now seems highly possible we can develop geniuses from normal children.

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The question is, however, do we want to?

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I believe, with good reason, that every child born has the potential for genius.

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And I think the world needs more, not fewer, geniuses.

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I think it's good, not bad, to be a genius.

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And I wish we had dozens and dozens and dozens of them.

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And I think we're wasting our children's brains at a prodigious rate,

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and the world would be infinitely better off and I'd feel a lot safer

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if there were more geniuses and every child has that potential, if parents wish it.

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Coming up next on FBI The Untold Stories,

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a woman kills the state prosecutor who player her husband behind bars,

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but was something more than love involved.

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Then histories, crimes and trials tracks the fate of Gary Gilmore,

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the first man to be executed in the U.S. after the reinstatement of the death penalty.

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And later tonight, test your knowledge of inventions and engineering

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as Chevy Chase hosts the celebrity-studded Great American History Quiz

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at 8 Eastern 9 Pacific, here on the History Channel, where the past comes alive.