Free The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens Page B

Project, the aim of which was to integrate food with other forms of art, with a ten-course meal; celebrated the end of the Food Network’s banishment from Cablevision; and attended a competition at the Culinary Institute of America. It never occurred to Greg to take a break.
    This constant call to create followed Greg when he traveled to Ohio for the Veggie U Food and Wine Celebration. It was a behemoth of an event. More than thirty chefs, together with their teams, participated.Greg and his team prepared thirty pounds of beef tongue as part of a dish that also included chickpeas, caramelized fennel, and a sugar snap pea broth. When the event ended, Greg got dropped off at Joanne’s house. Like a moth to a flame, he went straight to Joanne’s kitchen. He got a knife in his hand and vegetables on the table. Within moments, he was chopping.

    Another piece of the prodigy puzzle fell into place as soon as Greg completed the Stanford-Binet IQ test.
    He did well across the board, never dipping below the ninetiethpercentile in any subtest and often hovering far above it. But it was the working memory result that again caught Joanne’s attention.It’s a score meant to reflect an individual’s ability to manipulate (rather than merely recall) information stored in short-term memory. Repeating a series of numbers back to the examiner would measure recall, for example, while adding together the first three numbers in the list would measure working memory. On this subtest, Greg reached the tip-top of the scale, registering a score at the 99.9th percentile—just as Garrett James had before him.
    And just like Garrett James,Greg had plenty of amazing-memory anecdotes. As a small child, he could listen to a complicated musical piece and then reproduce it from memory. For school plays, he memorized not just his own part but the entire dialogue; he could always be counted on to help classmates struggling with their lines.
    When it came to food, he almost never forgot.His mind was awash with all he had learned about restaurants, chefs, and supplies, techniques he picked up on TV, and knowledge gleaned from food Web sites. His memory for cooking formulas, ratios, and recipes was sharp. When Joanne asked him to write down the recipe for one of the dishes he prepared at her house, Greg seemed surprised by the request: you’ll remember it, he said.
    It’s well documented that experts have exceptional memories for information relevant to their specialty.In a groundbreaking 1946 doctoral dissertation, the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot reported that expert chess players could recall the configuration of pieces on a chessboard with much greater accuracy than less skilled players.Since then, dozens of studies have examined the power of expert memory, and the same supremacy of experts for recalling facts relevant to their domain has been found in fields as varied as engineering and figure skating. The pattern holds for food and music, Greg’s and Garrett’s specialties:waiters demonstrate better memories for food and drink than nonwaiters, andmusicians demonstrate better memories formusic notation than nonmusicians. It was fairly predictable, then, that Greg would have a great memory where food was concerned and that the same would be true for Garrett with respect to music.
    But it’s equally well established that the memories of these experts tend to be notable
only
for facts relevant to their domain. Master chess players demonstrate superior recall for configurations of pieces that could emerge in real games.But when chess pieces are positioned randomly across the board, their recall is no better than that of weaker players.Psychologists have thus theorized that the memory advantage is due to the experts’ greater experience and familiarity with their subject matter,
not
superior overall memory capacity.
    What was interesting about Garrett and Greg, though, was that they weren’t following