I've been trying to puzzle this out myself about ds8 and others.

1. There seems to have been a lot of studies on musical prodigies. As others have mentioned, it seems many musical prodigies have working memories in the 99% but not necessarily have a high IQ. These studies seem to always focus on classically trained musical prodigies - perhaps highly sequential, auditory, and highly structured-minded individuals. Lyrics are not usually involved with classical musicians so they might not need visual skills in the same way Picasso would have (also a prodigy).

Marvin Hamlisch (Chorus Line) was a musical child prodigy. He went to the Juillard School at 6.5/7 yrs old - youngest ever. Elton John is considered a musical child prodigy too. He spends about 20 minutes on composing a song, perhaps a little longer if it's a special or exceptional song like with Princess Diana's funeral - which is a rare gift.

Compare classically trained musical prodigies to some rather famous rock musicians and the discussion gets interesting. The Beatles, Clapton, and many others are considered geniuses (and it's hard to argue otherwise), yet they weren't prodigies. Even John Lennon wasn't a prodigy; he was 14/15 yrs old when he started to play the guitar - later for songwriting. Yet by all accounts, he was a creative, musical, songwriting genius.

2. STEM and other prodigies. Taylor Wilson, Terence Tao, and Jacob Barnett (who isn't on the wiki list - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies) are perhaps good examples of prodigies. They performed at an exceptional level before age 10/11. Tao and Barnett were attending college courses at 8/9 yrs old.

Wilson has been at Davidson Academy; Barnett has been at Indiana University.

Interestingly, neither Newton, Einstein, or Hawking were considered prodigies or identified as such. I knew someone who was the director of a high energy lab of a university and worked at the CERN (long before I briefly knew him) and he wasn't considered/identified as hg or a prodigy; I asked his widow about a month or so ago. Still trying to get my head around that one.

3. Ronan Farrow - Mia and Woody's (though it might be Sinatra's). He went to Simon's Bard College at 11 yrs old - youngest ever - before going to Yale Law. I'm curious to know/hear about his early years and before going to college sans Woody.