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Lilly’s eight-minute home video has been watched more than five million times since it was posted on YouTube in 2007. She’s the pigtailed cutie with big brown eyes who bounces on a crib mattress while stabbing her index finger confidently at forty-eight different countries named by her offscreen parents, taking occasional breaks to dance and clap for herself.

“Where’s Mexico?” her mom asks.

“May-hee-coh!” she squeaks happily en español, toddling over to the left side of the map to find it.

She’s adorable—cuter than the concentrated extract of a thousand baby koalas, so cute that Ziggy and Family Circus cartoons spontaneously burst into flame at her mere presence. The wildfire spread of Lilly’s Internet video led to appearances on 20/20, Rachael Ray, and Oprah. She was a star before even graduating from diapers to pull-ups.

The more suspicious-minded will be asking two questions after seeing Lilly in action. First, what’s the trick? And second, what kind of horrific stage parents do this to their little girl?

“We had nothing to do with maps before Lilly did,” insists James Gaskin. I’ve tracked Lilly’s family down to Cleveland, Ohio, where her dad is currently working on his PhD in management and information science. Via Skype, I can see the whole family in their living room. Lilly is now four, and she’s clambering on the back and arms of the sofa with one of her younger sisters. James and Nikki, their parents, are a young, freshly scrubbed couple straight out of a Clearasil ad or a megachurch youth ministry.

“Once we discovered she could do the things with the maps, she wanted to do it,” Nikki adds. “It was a game. We would get tired of it way before she would get tired of it.” In the YouTube video, in fact, you can hear Lilly’s parents try to end the game three separate times. “More!” Lilly always insists.

She’s always been a prodigious memorizer, say her mom and dad. She’s not reading yet, but she knows every word of a hundred or so of her favorite books. But discovering her map ability was an accident. When her beloved uncle Brady headed to Taiwan for two years to serve as a Mormon missionary, Lilly wanted to know where he was. Her parents pointed out Taiwan on a map—and were surprised to find, the next time Lilly saw the map, that she still remembered where Uncle Brady was.

Confirming my intuition that mapheads tend to be gifted spatially, Lilly needs no shortcuts to correctly identify places on the map. “Even when she was just barely two, she could do it on a topographical map, no borders or colors,” says James. “She could do it on a tiny globe the size of a golf ball. It’s not even the shapes, because she could do land-locked countries like Mongolia.”

Lilly’s remarkable knack is a powerful argument that geography geeks are born, not made—that some of us come into the world with, in effect, a graticule of latitude and longitude predrawn on the otherwise blank slates of our minds. Her parents have tried the “map game” out on her younger sister, Maggie, as well, but to no avail; their first child was just wired differently. James and Nikki can see why the map game might appeal to Lilly in particular: she’s always been a detail-oriented child, prone to noticing—and freaking out—if the power light on the DVD player is left on or the toy cupcakes in her plastic tray are put back in the wrong order. “A little OCD there,” admits her dad. “And initially, it was the attention,” adds Mom. “She loves the clapping. That really helps her turn on her stuff.” Accustomed to just a few pairs of hands clapping for her at home, Lilly seems awestruck in her Oprah appearance to have an entire studio full of fans cheering her map skills. Eyes wide, she can barely believe her good fortune.

Lilly will probably grow up to discover, as I did, that such moments of acclaim will be few and far between. As useful and rewarding as map geekery can be, it’s rarely honored, or even noticed, by the outside world. But there’s one glittering exception that provides a national