A horse doing maths? Now that really would be genius
By the time he was nine years old, hans von Osten had mastered spelling and his times-tables. he could even do simple division and calculate fractions.
that’s allright, you might suppose. the lad’s making progress, and we can’t all be einsteins.
But hans was not a human lad. he was a horse, a thoroughbred Russian stallion who at the beginning of the last century was trained by a retired teacher in Germany to do mental arithmetic and signal his answers by tapping his hooves on the ground.
Asked, for instance, to work out ‘seven divided by three’, hans would rap twice with his left foreleg and once with his right, to indicate ‘two and a third’. then he waited for his reward: a sugar lump or a piece of carrot.
the horse provoked a worldwide sensation. the German education minister, Dr Studt, demanded to meet this equine prodigy. the New york times sent a special correspondent to interview hans.
Obviously, there would have been no such fuss over an ordinary schoolboy. What shocked the world was seeing a horse perform these feats. hans would never win a Nobel Prize, but he’d top the bill in any circus.
And that is what makes Child Genius ( C4) so distasteful. the contestants, girls and boys aged from eight to 12, are paraded like freak-show animals as they demonstrate their prodigious memories and lightning calculation skills.
As the competition reached the semi-finals, we got a good look at the questions. they were standard brainteasers from IQ tests: what number comes next in the sequence, which shape is the odd one out?
then the children were asked to memorise the names of all the bones in the human skeleton. there’s nothing so hard for an adult about that: in a few years, some of these youngsters might go to medical school, where indexing bones is a basic requirement.
the show pretends we are being invited t o admire prodigious intellects, but actually i t’s the contestants’ freakish youth, not their brains, that stand out. the producers ought to get a horse to take part — then we’d really gawp.
What is truly fascinating about the brain is how it repairs itself. Our grey cells cannot regrow: unlike skin or muscle, they do not simply patch themselves up after injury. A hole or lesion will be there for ever.
But our t hought processes compensate, flowing around the damaged area like water around a rock. Snowboarder Charlie elmore, recovering from a head injury that left her in a coma four years ago, described it as ‘ finding a different route down the mountain’, in Me And My New Brain (BBC3).
Charlie, now back on the piste and studying to be an instructor for disabled snowboarders, returned to the hospital in Switzerland that saved her life to learn more about brain surgery.
She called it a trip down No Memory Lane: after she fell awkwardly on a snowboard jump in 2011, her recall of the following months were splintered and confused.
her physical recovery was remarkably quick — she was walking again within weeks. But the emotional and cognitive damage was much worse.
It was the unexpected sidelights on life that made this documentary stand out. Charlie kept a scrapbook of all the Facebook messages that had poured in from 200 friends in the days after her accident. Barely ten of them have stayed in touch. the Facebook ‘friend’ is a fickle thing.
For such a complex organ, the brain can be protected by the simplest precautions.
Charlie’s ski helmet saved her from fatal injuries. And if young carcrash survivor Callum had been wearing a seatbelt, he would not have been thrown through his windscreen and might have dodged brain trauma.
It’s hard to think what could have protected fashion buyer hannah, who slipped on a London street while shopping and was l eft partially paralysed.
She also developed an endearing verbal tic that made her say, ‘thank you, you’re very kind,’ over and over.
It seems that even typical english politeness is hard-wired in our heads. turns out there’s nothing special about geniuses: everybody’s brain is extraordinary.