Prodigies are Exception - Turing was my cousin.

Prodigies are exceptions! Also, history, beholds that most of the notable thinker, philosophers and others who have beneficently affected the cause of knowledge were not identified as prodigies. What goes to say is, almost all people are equally gifted when they enter this world. One of the gifts is our brain, the precious thing that makes us think, analyze and helps us be productive. The brain characterizes us "Humans: The thinking beings". Only a few things that humans know are limitless. So is our faculty of our cognitive services ( the brain).

With an equal start what makes a person more astute/wise than the others? It's his judicious decisions about what to retain and what to let go off, in the course of his life. Yes right, with an endless life and an endlessly extreme mental ability we can comprehend every single piece of knowledge ever published. Sadly, neither do we live an endless life nor are our mental powers so infinitely acute.

With the limited time and mental power supply, we need to carefully select what we study, even if this means that leaving out a vast variety of other interesting things. We need to do focused research, so that till the time we retire we make some remarkable contributions to the understandings of our posterity. I don’t want to diminish the importance of pure research, which is done only for the sake of learning(no application), it is equally important, but better left for privileged few who have all the monetary and other resources to do an open ended research.

Carefully selecting what to overlook, frees up more of our finite thinking powers to be concentrated on what (important information) that is needed to be saved and processed. This selection is all the more important in today’s competing world where research is no longer a single man's privilege. Many people are now doing research, so there is never ending demand for research funds. One of the ways to stay alive in this competition is to focus on only specific topics, and develop an expertise in that area.

As an general observation, i would like to quote that "The world is full of people trying to optimize/research the wrong thing at the wrong time". Man has taken the famous quote for Star trek "Space the new frontiers" a bit to seriously leading to following anachronism. At one place we are taking giant leaps into exploring the universe, but at the same time we are still not able to answer questions about our own brain, how do we think, no wonder artificial intelligence took so many years to develop. We should have focused more on understanding ourselves, than trying to answer all the needless unanswered questions in the world.

I would like to conclude with a metaphor that aptly compliments my stand. The computer's processor works at a faster rate than its memory, for this reason the processor caches the information that it’s currently dealing with for faster access. A good caching algorithm is the one that selects to cache the most relevant data and not any blindly selected data. Of course we are not machines like computers but the processor is the closest inanimate cousin of our brain.