Another article on savant abilities, this time about a kid with musical and logistical talents:
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.
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 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.
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.
This oddly adhesive memory is what binds together every domain of savant skill. In the brains of savants, Treffert believes, associative memory systems located in the higher regions of the cortex fail, and older parts of the brain – the ancient pathways in the basal ganglia known as habit memory – take over.
Habit memory is Pavlovian, an archive of involuntary stimulus/response loops – the memory that never forgets how to ride a bike. To reproduce a Bach sonata with slavish accuracy requires an inner tape recorder and a book of rules. But to play Bach with fire and originality requires Proustian memory, with its nuanced webs of association and metaphor. This higher-order memory, like a living text, is constantly under revision. It’s not just that savants remember everything, says Treffert, it’s that they are unable to forget anything, like the protagonist in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “Funes the Memorious.”
The drawing abilities of most savant artists, for example, burst forth with no preparation, no training, and no practice – as if their skills were already there, fully fledged, needing only access to a pencil or a brush.
Children who seem to come into the world with profound artistic gifts have been objects of fascination for centuries, but recent discoveries suggest we may all carry a savant inside us waiting to be born.
Miller formulated a provocative hypothesis to explain the fact that as some FTD patients get worse, they also get better. He posited that the dementia does not create artistic powers in these patients, it uncovers them. The disorder switches off inhibitory signals from the left temporal lobes, enabling suppressed talents in the right hemisphere to flourish. (emphasis mine)
“It looks as though there’s a critical period when every infant has the opportunity to learn absolute pitch, if they grow up in a culture where pitch is associated with meaning,” Deutsch explains. By starting music training early, every child might be able to preserve this inborn ability.
“Our knowledge and expertise blind us,” Snyder told me last spring. “If we could switch off our conceptual mind, we could have a momentary literal viewing of the world.”
Along the same lines – savant art
books to read: “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, “Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome”, (Oliver Sacks).