The Key to Genius
wired.com
Autistic savants are born with miswired neurons - and extraordinary gifts. The breakthrough science behind our new understanding of the brain.
Written By : Steve Silberman
Matt Savage launched his jazz career by attempting to improve a Schubert sonata. His piano teacher told him that the G-sharp he just played was supposed to be a G-natural. "It sounds better my way," he protested. She replied that only when he wrote his own music could he take liberties with a score. Keen on taking liberties, he became a jazz composer. He released his fifth album this year, making guest appearances on the Today show, 20/20, and NPR. Recently, his trio booked two shows at the Blue Note in New York City.
In May, he will celebrate his 12th birthday.
Matt is a musical savant. The term savant dates from the late 19th century, when a small number of people in European asylums classified as feebleminded "idiots" were discovered to have extraordinary, even uncanny skills. One had memorized The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire after reading it a single time. Others were able to multiply long columns of numbers instantly and factor cube roots in seconds, though they could barely speak.
When Matt was 3, he was diagnosed with a form of autism called pervasive developmental disorder. Autism and savant syndrome overlap, but they are not the same thing. Nine out of ten autistic people have no savant abilities, and many savants suffer from some form of neurological impairment other than autism. Savant syndrome itself is rare. The rarest of the rare is the prodigious savant, like Rain Man's Raymond Babbitt, who could memorize phone books, count 246 toothpicks at a glance, and trump the house in Vegas. Darold Treffert, the leading researcher in the study of savant syndrome, estimates that Matt is one of fewer than 50 prodigious savants alive today.
But Matt is even rarer than that. While the IQs of most savants are below 70, he is highly intelligent. And while the musical prowess of savants is often confined to playing thousands of songs from memory in a stiff and mechanical way, Matt is a prolific composer and skilled improviser. With the precocious abilities of a savant and the melodic imagination of a seasoned musician, he has dual citizenship in two countries of the mind.
Until recently, much of what we knew about savants came from the observations of clinicians like Treffert and neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Now researchers are probing the savant mind from the inside, using tools like gene mapping and PET scans. As these two paths of investigation converge, many of our long-held notions about the limits of human potential are being overturned.
By studying the minds of people like Matt, neuroscientists are discovering that savants are more like the rest of us than the medical world once believed. We're learning that the extraordinary skills of savants tap into areas of the mind that function like supercomputers, compiling massive amounts of data from the senses to create a working model of the world. The traditional conception of the brain - two hemispheres that are hardwired from birth - is yielding to an understanding of the ways the regions of the cortex learn to function together as a network.
"We used to have this idea that we were born with a magnificent piece of hardware in our heads and a blank disk called memory," says Treffert. "Now we have to acknowledge that the disk comes with software, that we were wrong in many of our assumptions about intelligence, and that the brain is much more capable of healing itself than we thought. By finding out how savants work, we learn how we work."
I meet Matt and his mother, Diane, both fresh from a TV appearance, for lunch at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Four and a half feet tall, with huge brown eyes that seem to devour whatever he focuses on, Matt is as restless physically as he is mentally. He doesn't so much sit in a chair as climb around it.
The unusual timbre of his mind is immediately apparent. Scanning the menu, he exclaims, "Soy sauce on salmon, that's triple s!" After the salmon arrives, he asks me my birthday - December 23, 1957.
"Monday's child," he says, "fair of face."
For savants, asking for a birth date is a common way of introducing themselves. In every culture, the enhanced skills of savants cluster in the same narrow domains: numerical and calendar calculation, artistic and musical proficiency, mechanical aptitude, and feats of memorization. These tasks draw primarily on the strengths of the brain's right hemisphere, indicating that, in many savants, a healthy right hemisphere is overcompensating for damage to the left. Many savants are left-handed, and most have deficits in language - additional clues that something is amiss in the left hemisphere.
In autistic savants, like Matt, the problems are more pervasive. Autism rewires the brain's entire network, from the limbic system to the executive functions in the frontal lobes that enable us to absorb new experiences, prioritize tasks, set goals, and imagine the future. When these are damaged, we're at the mercy of a flood of incoming sensory impressions and conflicting impulses.
I can see this in Matt as his eyes dart around the restaurant. He's intensely awake to the world but perpetually distractible. Being with him is exhilarating and exhausting. While I scribble in my notebook, he slaps his hand on the table. "This is not lunch, this is questions," he groans. "Let's do something interesting like proportions at work!" Then a torrent bursts out of him: Did you know that if you had the metabolism of a shrew you would have to eat 600 hamburgers a day? Or that if you grew as fast as a snake you would be taller than mountaintops and heavier than two and a half million elephants in a month? And if you could jump like a flea, you could leap over Lady Liberty's torch!
There's a mechanical quality to Matt's relentless enumerations, as if his brain copes with information overload by siphoning the river of his experience into streams of quantities and ratios.
For Matt, the constraints of harmony and rhythm must be comforting, while the freedom of improvisation offers him a kind of measured release. Savants are drawn in particular to the piano, which neatly subdivides the universe of sound into a linear map with 88 keys. Like the calendar, the piano orders the chaos of experience into a system of "proportions at work."
One night in 1991 when Diane was pregnant with Matt, she went to a blues club in SoHo. The moment the band stopped playing, she felt the baby inside her "kicking for more," she says. "I felt happy that he was so responsive to what was happening outside of his little world."
But soon after Matt was born, it became obvious that his acute sense of hearing was overwhelming him. He would stop nursing if Diane spoke even a word while he was at her breast. The din of windshield wipers, blenders, and vacuum cleaners was excruciating to him. He seemed unusually bright - he started reading street signs and counting his Cheerios out loud before his first birthday. But his speech was decidedly odd. If Matt was thirsty, he would hold up a cup and say, "Do you want juice?"
When Diane and her husband, Larry, tried to socialize with other parents, Matt would run out of the house. His preschool expelled him after two days for refusing to stay in his chair. Diane loved to play piano, but once her son's hypersensitivities became the prevailing weather in the household, the upright in the family room sat silent. If she settled down to play, Matt would yell, "No!" and snatch her hands off the keys.
Clearly, something was wrong. Diane brought her son to Children's Hospital in Boston for a thorough neurological workup. The doctor had to lie on the floor beside Matt to get him to focus on their conversation.
He looked at Diane gravely and said, "Your son has pervasive developmental disorder with hyperlexia. He's perseverative and echolalic and speaks in a Gestalt manner." Diane diligently took notes. Finally she asked him, "What does this all mean?"
"It means," he replied, "it's something that will never go away."
After giving themselves a crash course in raising an autistic child, Larry and Diane put Matt through Auditory Integration Training, a form of music therapy that reduces the distress caused by ordinary sounds. At the same time, the positive aspects of Matt's quirky brain began to emerge. Unlike many autistic kids, he can read other people's feelings. And his habit of counting Cheerios had ripened into a passion for numbers.
When Matt was 6, he confided to his mother, "My mind is made of math problems." Diane started buying him math workbooks for kids twice his age. He zipped through them so quickly, she learned to hide a few in a drawer so he'd have something to work on the following day.
Then one night, Diane and Larry heard a melody coming from downstairs. It was their son, playing "London Bridge" on a toy keyboard. Diane brought Matt into the family room and introduced him to the middle C on the piano. Within a day, he was devouring music books as hungrily as he had math books.
Matt took classical lessons for a year, then Diane enrolled him in the jazz program at the New England Conservatory of Music. Upon meeting his first jazz instructor there, a bearish Israeli whose last name is Katsenelenbogen, Matt cried out, "Six syllables!"
Teaching Matt was a challenge - at first, he would strike a single note on the piano and run to the back of the room to stand on his head. But Eyran Katsenelenbogen was an empathetic teacher. "I have always performed and recorded solo," he says. "There's something slightly autistic about that."
Matt progressed quickly. Other students would learn two or three pieces in a lesson, while Matt would tear through a dozen. Katsenelenbogen came to see a connection between Matt's hyperspeed number-crunching and his jazz mind: "Matt has an amazing ability to calculate relationships between chords and lines, which can all be expressed in numbers."
As we finish lunch, Matt asks me in his distinctively high-pitched voice, "Did you know that numbers can be friendly and amicable?" He means friendly and amicable in the math-geek sense - numbers that can be factored into one another - but I also felt he was using those words in their ordinary sense. Matt is intimate with numbers. They come to him in dreams and inspire him to write songs. One of his tunes on the album Groovin' on Mount Everest is called "Forty-Seven" - a number he feels is "lonely" because when he asks people to think up a random number, no one ever chooses it.
The philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz called music unconscious counting. The music of Matt's consciousness is mathematics.
Geneticists are starting to pinpoint the DNA anomalies found in kids like Matt who are savants from birth. Still, a single savant gene will probably never be found. More than a dozen genes may contribute to autism. Several other forms of mental impairment also produce islands of startling ability - known as splinter skills - as if fragments of savant code are scattered throughout the genetic database.
Last year, researchers at Vanderbilt University discovered a cluster of abnormalities on chromosome 15 in the families of autistic savants. Another set of irregularities on the same chromosome produces learning-disabled kids who can solve jigsaw puzzles twice as fast as other children and have an insatiable desire to overeat - Prader-Willi syndrome. A third chromosomal disorder, called Williams syndrome, results in mental retardation, poor coordination, and a different set of splinter skills. Williams kids, who have distinctively elfin facial features, are naturally outgoing, love to schmooze, and have a propensity for florid verbal constructions (hyperlexia), similar to Matt's discourse on proportions.
Like savants, people with Williams syndrome have an unusual relationship with the audible world. Some are terrified as children by the hum of household appliances, but others become connoisseurs of the rich drones of machines, like a boy described in the clinical literature who had a collection of 18 different vacuum cleaners. Many people with Williams also excel at picking out the notes in a chord. Some are so sensitive that they can identify the make and model of a car from the sound of its engine.
In tests conducted at a music camp in Massachusetts, psychologists found that the errors made by Williams kids were more musical than those made by a control group. On a clapping test, those in the control group sometimes just dropped the beat, but the Williams kids made mistakes that elaborated on the rhythms. They were jamming.
In the same way that Matt's mind is made of math problems, the minds of Williams syndrome kids are made of sound. As one girl told a researcher, "Music is my favorite way of thinking."
In the 1980s, the search for a single cause underlying the various forms of savant syndrome led neurologists Norman Geschwind and Albert Galaburda to propose a bold theory that would account for autism, dyslexia, stuttering, and a number of other disorders that seem to have a basis in left-hemisphere dysfunction.
Male savants outnumber females 5 to 1. The problem, hypothesized Geschwind and Galaburda, is testosterone.
The nerve cells in a fetal brain proliferate at an astonishing rate, with 250,000 neurons born every minute. These cells are engaged in a fierce Darwinian contest. The goal: interconnectedness.
In a fetus that is developing normally, those neurons that do not form synaptic links with the other cells are killed off before birth. After eight weeks of gestation, the testes in a male fetus start pumping out nearly as much hormone as they will at puberty, and Geschwind and Galaburda theorized that in some brains, this flood of testosterone interferes with the assembly of the neural network, resulting in a tangle of miswired connections.
A breakthrough study published in July supports the notion that in autistic savants, something goes wrong in this cycle of growth and pruning. Eric Courchesne at UC San Diego found that most autistic children are born with brains that are smaller than normal. In the first year, however, their brains grow dramatically until they're larger than normal, reaching maximum size at age 4 or 5 - eight years earlier than the brains of most people.
The brains of typical children grow in response to lessons learned from the environment - that was one of the significant upgrades in the evolution of Homo sapiens. As new stimuli are absorbed, the neurons in the cortex adapt gradually, and synaptic connections are forged or eliminated. Our brains are cast in the image of our experience.
The overgrowth of the brain tissue of autistic kids, however, is random and automatic, a reaction to an unknown stimulus - perhaps testosterone or some toxic agent in the environment. The result, says Courchesne, is an onslaught of neural noise that makes the infant lose the ability to make sense of its world.
The director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, Simon Baron-Cohen, makes the case in his new book The Essential Difference that autism represents an extreme manifestation of the "male brain." In his view, male brains are hardwired for "extracting the underlying rules that govern a system." (He carefully adds, "Your sex does not determine your brain type.") While the jury is still out on testosterone, a set of clinical studies in the UK confirm that both male and female savants are better at extracting the rules that govern systems than normal people.
Psychologists Beate Hermelin, Neil O'Connor, and John Sloboda hosted a neuromusical battle of the bands between a 19-year-old musical savant and a professional pianist. The researchers played Edvard Grieg's "Melody" and a selection from Béla Bartók's "Mikrokosmos" for both and asked them to reproduce the pieces from memory.
The savant recalled all 64 bars of "Melody," striking wrong notes only 8 percent of the time. (He played the piece equally well, without hearing it again, the following day.) The professional pianist, however, remembered less than half the piece and hit 10 times as many wrong notes. The professional pianist fared better on "Mikrokosmos," making not nearly as many mistakes, though he still recalled far fewer notes than the savant.
By analyzing all of the performances, the researchers concluded that the savant memorized Grieg's piece more easily than Bartók's because "Melody" obeys the rules of classical diatonic form - rules that he had already extracted in the normal course of listening to music. But Bartók's music intentionally breaks those rules. The professional pianist simply played back whatever notes he heard. For the savant, trying to reconstruct "Mikrokosmos" was like trying to recall syntactic structures in a language he didn't speak.
Hermelin and her colleagues found that savants also use rule-based strategies for calendar calculating. For a long time, the assumption was that they memorized tens of thousands of day-date pairings during months of obsessive practice. But as in music, the researchers discovered that when figuring dates in the distant past or future, savants supplement their prodigious memories with algorithms they derive from the cycles of the calendar.
In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks wrote memorably about the calculating twins, George and Charles, who amused themselves for hours trading six-digit prime numbers with what Sacks described as "holy intensity." The twins were incapable of performing even simple multiplication. They told Sacks that they saw prime numbers just appear in their minds.
In most savants, these processes are as invisible to them as our own cognitive strategies are to us. Matt Savage, however, is able to watch his own autistic brain at work. When I ask him to explain how he determined that I was born on a Monday, he patiently draws a grid in my notebook illustrating the algorithm he applied.
To understand how even profoundly retarded savants can do such complex calculations subconsciously, Darold Treffert says, requires an examination of one of the oldest, least-evolved regions of the brain: the primitive storehouse of memory. |
