Sunday Surkhi--AG Student in NC

There is along discussion in today's paper about NC school students who are below the 'grade level' and those who are 'Academically Gifted'. There is increased state funding specially provided for those children who need extra help to bring them up to grade level. That raised concerns about the Academically Gifted (AG) students who, in many counties of NC are not being provided enough to run the state mandated programs for them (AG ones).
Over 11% of the enrolled students staewide are tested to be AG, the most concentrated AG students are in the Chapel Hill area (29% of the enrolled). This is all very encouraging and quite a difference from the times when my children were in school.
Not because of the gifted children we had, but more because of us (Both parents professionally interested in the Human Brain and its functions), the question of AG students was frequently under discussion in our home. How to recognize and how to help them. Where the schools did not provide enough challenge we did and kept our kids occupied even during summer holidays with exciting travels and challanges, giving them less 'break' time than most other kids. The kids did enjoy most of it and went along with our ways. Some of the teachers felt, however, we did too much and our kids were getting 'less childhood' than what they deserved. We were however wondering what is "too much". We had continued to expose our kids to challanges academic as well as non academic with "their consent" (we would restrict only when they would say they dont enjoy or they dont want it).
We had started when we observed somewhat keen eyes of our first-born(at a younger age than usual) and his visuo-spatial orientations and visuo-auditory associations and his excitement and keen-ness (which, by the way each child shows on learning first things be they visual, linguistic , auditory or whatever-- watch the gleeful face of your youngone when he/she learns to say his first word for example). Be that as it may we enjoyed our children's childhood and teaching them everything what they wanted to learn and have no regrets.
A lot of brain matter (in the frontal regions for example) remains "redundant" (so to say) and does not have a 'function' attached to it. So the question is could we draw upon this matter for extra functioning in some way, so as to enhance the "intelligence" or capacity for performance? Is it "going waste" and could we by some means try to engage it for extra function? I had a long discussion with a non-neurologist colleague of mine some times ago. I am still not aware of any study where such a question has been tried for testing starting fron birth of a child.
The opposite of that has recently come to my attention. A tragic case of a child unexposed to language for almost 14 years has been described in neurologic literature and I am looking for further reports on that case (last report 1974). I am not good in looking at the specific questions on the internet (Computer jahil as I am). May be some others like you can update me or refer me to more recent articles.
Suffice it to say that human intelligence is dependent on language of some sort for its expression or measurement. So I wish to see how this tool (language) is used for these purposes.