Ainan's favourite colours.

As anyone who is a regular reader of my blog will know, Ainan has a particularly acute memory for detail – for anything really that captures his interest. Sometimes, this amuses me.

A few days ago, Ainan approached me in the kitchen, as I contemplated matters inaccessible to others, in one of my reveries.

“Daddy,” he began.

I fell out of my reverie and focussed my eyes on my curiously alert son.

“I have found my favourite colours...the perfect colours!”, he announced, in the manner of an explorer returning from a long voyage.

I waited for him to describe them to me. This he then did, in his own inimitable way.

“Blue: 0, 135, 189; Pale blue: 0, 189, 255; Yellow: 255, 211, 0 and Red: 196, 2, 51”.

He said this strangely uninformative string of information in a very rapid patter – it came out almost as one long number, with the names of the colours as a kind of punctuation.

I looked at him intently for a second before speaking.

“Are those RGB numbers?”, I asked, fairly certain of it.

“Yes.”

“Can you show me what they look like?”

He did.

Now for those who don’t know, RGB is a colour coding system used on computers. So Ainan’s numbers were the colour codes for a particular colour displayed on a computer. What struck me about his utterance, was the speed with which he spoke, combined with the certainty with which he recalled the number codes. They seemed to be, to him, distinct objects in his mind, so tangible he could touch them with an inner thought. This was not a difficult task for him. He did it without even realizing that many people would not be able to do the same.

If you want to see his colours, go to a paint programme and check them in its colour palette. These are regarded by Ainan as ideal colours – all for reasons of his own, of course.

The other question this poses is: how long did it take him to find these “perfect colours”...out of all the millions of possibilities...and what made him remember them, when he did out of all the other number combinations he had tried?

It was very like Ainan not to try to describe the colours to me with words. He actually defined them as a computer would, or a scientist might, by giving them a precise definition and reference point. What he gave me was the actual colour – not a description of it. Yet, there was something missing in his description – any sense in me, of what the colour might be, without actually seeing it. However, Ainan achieved his aim, in communication: a precise definition of his thought – even if no-one else would be able to decode it without a computer to hand.

Not for the first time, I am led to wonder what Ainan will become, as he grows up. I hope I am around to see it – because that is something I would not miss. He still surprises me, and shows me new things about himself, even after all this time. In a way, I think he is a person that no-one will fully know – because there is so much to know about him. I have known him all his life – and yet it is still not enough to fully quantify and qualify, what is going on in his head. Yet, I shall try to know him as fully as I can and understand the curious person he is.

At least, now, I know what his favourite colours are – quite precisely!

Posted by Valentine Cawley

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The best colour in the world.

Fintan has a favourite colour: you'll never guess which it is.

The day before yesterday, Fintan came to me holding a blue bicycle helmet in his hand. I had already examined it, with Tiarnan earlier and knew that it had a missing fastener. It needed replacing - either the fastener or the helmet.

"Daddy...", he began, his eyes searching mine, his tongue searching for the right words to approach the issue, delicately, "Can you buy me an orange helmet?"

"OK...we will do it this weekend."

Unusually, though gratified by that, he didn't seem content.

"Daddy...", he began again, measuring the size of my indulgence, inwardly, "Can you buy me a new bike?"

Now, a bicycle helmet, I could handle, but I wasn't prepared for a new bike: the old one still had the mandatory two wheels and that was good enough for me.

"Why?", I probed, realizing I couldn't see why he would need a NEW bike, when the old one was not broken down.

"Because it is not orange."

Ah. I see. I dwelt on his words for a moment or two, in silence.

"Can I have an orange helmet and an orange bike, Daddy?" He repeated, no longer prepared to wait for an answer.

"You can have an orange helmet. But not an orange bike - they are very expensive."

He was silent for only a moment.

Then he came back with a very reasonable tone: "Okaaay. I will have an orange helmet...but use the old bike."

I was warmed by the reasonableness of his reply. He understood and accepted the situation and my imposed limitation on his desires. He is good like that. Fintan is very accommodating. He never fails to understand the reality of a situation when it is presented to him. This makes it a whole lot easier communicating to my newly-minted five year old. (Newly minted because he has just turned five, a matter of days ago.)

This whole exchange is characteristic of Fintan. He has a particular aesthetic outlook, with a strong point of view on aesthetic matters - one which is very much his own, uninfluenced, it seems, by our own choices. He makes decisions based on aesthetic priorities over other considerations. It is interesting to watch a young child so certain of his views of what is beautiful, of what is acceptable, of what is desirable. He never fails to have an opinion on such matters. It seems that there is a nascent artist in him waiting to come out - for the first gift of an artist is a point of view: without that the art would have no personality or individuality. Fintan, at least, has an aesthetic point of view.

This is not our only brush with the colour orange recently. It looks like we will be living in an orange world for some time to come.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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