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January 27, 2002
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Are you capable of multiplying 147,631,789 by 23,674 in
your head, instantly?
Physicist Allan Snyder says you probably can, based on his
new theory about
the origin of the extraordinary skills of autistic savants
[By Douglas S. Fox in Discover Vol. 23 No. 2 (February
2002). Thanks
to Bonnie Sayers on the FEATBack list.]
http://www.discover.com/feb_02/gthere.html?article=featsavant.html
Nadia appeared healthy at birth, but by the time she was
2, her parents knew something was amiss. She avoided eye contact and didn’t
respond when her mother smiled or cooed. She didn’t even seem to recognize her mother.
At 6 months she still had not spoken a word. She was unusually clumsy and spent
hours in repetitive play, such as tearing paper into strips.
But at 31/2, she picked up a pen and began to draw—not
scribble, draw. Without any training,
she created from memory sketches of galloping horses that only a trained adult could
equal. Unlike the way most people might draw a horse, beginning with its
outline, Nadia began with random details. First a hoof, then the horse’s mane,
then its harness. Only later did she lay down firm lines connecting these
floating features. And when she did connect them, they were always in the
correct position relative to one another. ¦ Nadia is an autistic savant, a rare
condition marked by severe mental and social deficits but also by a mysterious
talent that appears spontaneously—usually before age 6.
Sometimes the ability of a savant is so striking, it
eventually makes news. The most famous savant was a man called Joseph, the
individual Dustin Hoffman drew upon for his character in the 1988 movie Rain
Man. Joseph could immediately answer this question: “What number times what
number gives 1,234,567,890?” His answer was “Nine times 137,174,210.” Another
savant could double 8,388,628 up to 24 times within several seconds, yielding
the sum 140,737,488,355,328. A 6-year-old savant named Trevor listened to his older
brother play the piano one day, then climbed onto the piano stool himself and
played it better. A savant named Eric could find what he called the “sweet spot”
in a room full of speakers playing music, the spot where sound waves from the
different sources hit his ears at exactly the same time.
Most researchers have offered a simple explanation for
these extraordinary gifts: compulsive learning. But Allan Snyder, a vision researcher
and award-winning physicist who is director of the Center for the Mind at the
University of Sydney and the Australian National University, has advanced a new
explanation of such talents. “Each of us has the innate capacity for savantlike
skills,” says Snyder, “but that mental machinery is unconscious in most people.”
Savants, he believes, can tap into the human mind’s
remarkable processing abilities. Even something as simple as seeing, he
explains, requires phenomenally complex information processing. When a person
looks at an object, for example, the brain immediately estimates an object’s
distance by calculating the subtle differences between the two images on each
retina (computers programmed to do this require extreme memory and speed).
During the process of face recognition, the brain analyzes countless details,
such as the texture of skin and the shape of the eyes, jawbone, and lips. Most people
are not aware of these calculations. In savants, says Snyder, the top layer of
mental processing—conceptual thinking, making conclusions—is somehow stripped
away. Without it, savants can access a startling capacity for recalling endless
detail or for performing lightning-quick calculations. Snyder’s theory has a radical conclusion of
its own: He believes it may be possible someday to create technologies that
will allow any nonautistic person to exploit these abilities.
The origins of autism are thought to lie in early
brain development.
During the first three years of life, the brain grows at a
tremendous rate. In autistic children,
neurons seem to connect haphazardly, causing widespread abnormalities,
especially in the cerebellum, which integrates thinking and movement, and the
limbic region, which integrates experience with specific emotions.
Abnormalities in these regions seem to stunt interest in the environment and in
social interaction. Autistic children have narrowed fields of attention and a
poor ability to recognize faces. They
are more likely to view a face, for example, as individual components rather
than as a whole. Imaging studies have shown that when autistic children see a
familiar face, their pattern of brain activation is different from that of
normal children.
That narrowed focus may explain the autistic child’s
ability to concentrate endlessly on a single repetitive activity, such as
rocking in a chair or watching clothes tumble in a dryer. Only one out of 10
autistic children show special skills.
In a 1999 paper, Snyder and his colleague John Mitchell
challenged the compulsive-practice explanation for savant abilities, arguing
that the same skills are biologically latent in all of us. “Everyone in the
world was skeptical,” says Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for
Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego. “Snyder
deserves credit for making it clear that savant abilities might be extremely important
for understanding aspects of human nature and creativity.”
Snyder’s office at the University of Sydney is in a Gothic
building, complete with pointed towers and notched battlements. Inside, Nadia’s
drawings of horses adorn the walls; artwork by other savants hangs in nearby rooms.
Snyder’s interest in autism evolved from his studies of
light and vision. Trained as a physicist, he spent several years studying fiber
optics and how light beams can guide their own path. At one time he was
interested in studying the natural fiber optics in insects’ eyes. The question
that carried him from vision research to autism had to do with what happens
after light hits the human retina: How are the incoming signals transformed
into data that is ultimately processed as images in the brain? Snyder was fascinated
by the processing power required to accomplish such a feat.
During a sabbatical to Cambridge in 1987, Snyder devoured Ramachandran’s
careful studies of perception and optical illusions. One showed how the brain
derives an object’s three-dimensional shape: Falling light creates a shadow
pattern on the object, and by interpreting the shading, the brain grasps the
object’s shape. “You’re not aware how your mind comes to those conclusions,”
says Snyder. “When you look at a ball, you don’t know why you see it as a ball
and not a circle. The reason is your brain is extracting the shape from the
subtle shading around the ball’s surface.” Every brain possesses that innate
ability, yet only artists can do it backward, using shading to portray volume.
“Then,” says Snyder, speaking slowly for emphasis, “I asked
the question that put me on a 10-year quest”—how can we bypass the mind’s conceptual
thinking and gain conscious access to the raw, uninterpreted information of our
basic perceptions? Can we shed the assumptions built into our visual processing
system?
A few years later, he read about Nadia and other savant
artists in Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other
Clinical Tales. As he sat in his Sydney apartment one afternoon with the book
in hand, an idea surfaced. Perhaps someone like Nadia who lacked the ability to
organize sensory input into concepts might provide a window into the fundamental
features of perception.
Snyder’s theory began with art, but he came to believe
that all savant skills, whether in music, calculation, math, or spatial
relationships, derive from a lightning-fast processor in the brain that divides
things—time, space, or an object—into equal parts. Dividing time might allow a
savant child to know the exact time when he’s awakened, and it might help Eric
find the sweet spot by allowing him to sense millisecond differences in the
sounds hitting his right and left ears. Dividing space might allow Nadia to
place a disembodied hoof and mane on a page precisely where they belong. It might also allow two savant twins to
instantaneously count matches spilled on the floor (one said “111”; the other
said “37, 37, 37”). Meanwhile,
splitting numbers might allow math savants to factor 10-digit numbers or easily
identify large prime numbers—which are impossible to split.
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Compulsive practice might enhance these skills over time,
but Snyder contends that practice alone cannot explain the phenomenon. As
evidence, he cites rare cases of sudden-onset savantism. Orlando Serrell, for
example, was hit on the head by a baseball at the age of 10. A few months
later, he began recalling an endless barrage of license-plate numbers, song
lyrics, and weather reports.
If someone can become an instant savant, Snyder thought,
doesn’t that suggest we all have the potential locked away in our brains? “Snyder’s
ideas sound very New Age. This is why people are skeptical,” says Ramachandran. “But I have a more open mind than many of my
colleagues simply because I’ve seen [sudden-onset cases] happen.”
Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of
California at San Francisco, has seen similar transformations in patients with
frontotemporal dementia, a degenerative brain disease that strikes people in
their fifties and sixties. Some of these patients, he says, spontaneously
develop both interest and skill in art and music. Brain-imaging studies have
shown that most patients with frontotemporal dementia who develop skills have abnormally
low blood flow or low metabolic activity in their left temporal lobe. Because
language abilities are concentrated in the left side of the brain, these people
gradually lose the ability to speak, read, and write. They also lose face recognition. Meanwhile, the right side of the
brain, which supports visual and spatial processing, is better preserved.
“They really do lose the linguistic meaning of things,”
says Miller, who believes Snyder’s ideas about latent abilities complement his
own observations about frontotemporal dementia. “There’s a loss of higher-order
processing that goes on in the anterior temporal lobe.” In particular, frontotemporal
dementia damages the ventral stream, a brain region that is associated with
naming objects. Patients with damage in this area can’t name what they’re
looking at, but they can often paint it beautifully. Miller has also seen
physiological similarities in the brains of autistic savants and patients with
frontotemporal dementia. When he performed brain-imaging studies on an autistic
savant artist who started drawing horses at 18 months, he saw abnormalities
similar to those of artists with frontotemporal dementia: decreased blood flow
and slowed neuronal firing in the left temporal lobe.
One blustery, rainy morning I drove to Mansfield, a small
farm town 180 miles northeast of Melbourne. I was heading to a day clinic for
autistic adults, where I hoped to meet a savant. The three-hour drive pitched
and rolled through hills, occasionally cutting through dense eucalyptus forests
punctuated with yellow koala-crossing signs. From time to time, I saw large, white-crested
parrots; in one spot, a flock of a thousand or more in flight wheeled about
like a galaxy.
I finally spotted my destination: Acorn Outdoor Ornaments.
Within this one-story house, autistic adults learn how to live independently.
They also create inexpensive lawn decorations, like the cement dwarf I see on
the roof.
Joan Curtis, a physician who runs Acorn and a related
follow-up program, explained that while true savants are rare, many people with
autism have significant talents. Nurturing their gifts, she said, helps draw
them into social interaction. Guy was one of the participants I met at Acorn. Although he was uncomfortable shaking my
hand, all things electronic fascinated him, and he questioned me intently about
my tape recorder.
Every horizontal surface in Guy’s room was covered with
his creations. One was an electric fan
with a metal alligator mouth on the front that opened and closed as it rotated
from side to side. On another fan a metal fisherman raised and lowered his pole
with each revolution. And then I saw the sheep. Viewed from the left, it was
covered in wool. Viewed from the right, it was a skeleton, which I learned Guy
had assembled without any help. Guy didn’t say much about himself. He cannot
read nor do arithmetic, but he has built an electric dog that barks, pants,
wags its tail, and urinates.
During my visit, another Acorn participant, Tim, blew into
the room like a surprise guest on The Tonight Show. He was in a hurry to leave
again, but asked me my birthday—July 15, 1970.
“Born on a Wednesday, eh?” he responded nonchalantly—and
correctly.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“I did it well,” he replied.
“But how?” I asked.
“Very well,” he replied, with obvious pleasure. Then
he was out the
door and gone.
How do calendar savants do it? Several years ago Timothy
Rickard, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California at San Diego,
evaluated a 40-year-old man with a mental age of 5 who could assign a day of the
week to a date with 70 percent accuracy. Because the man was blind from birth,
he couldn’t study calendars or even imagine calendars. He couldn’t do simple
arithmetic either, so he couldn’t use a mathematical algorithm. But he could
only do dates falling within his lifetime, which suggests that he used memory.
He could, however, do some arithmetic, such as
answer this question:
If today is Wednesday, what day is two days from now?
Rickard suspects that memorizing 2,000 dates and using such arithmetic would
allow 70 percent accuracy. “That doesn’t reduce it to a trivial skill, but it’s
not inconceivable that someone could acquire this performance with a lot of effort,”
he says. It’s especially plausible given the single-minded drive with which
autistics pursue interests.
Yet Tim, the savant at Acorn, can calculate dates as far
back as 1900, as well as into the future. And there are reports of twins who
could calculate dates 40,000 years in the past or future. Still, practice may
be part of it. Robyn Young, an autism researcher at Flinders University in Adelaide,
Australia, says some calendar savants study perpetual calendars several days a
week (there are only 14 different calendar configurations; perpetual calendars
cross-reference them to years).
But even if savants practice, they may still tap into that
universal ability Snyder has proposed. Here it helps to consider art savants.
That Nadia began drawings with minor features rather than overall outlines suggests
that she tended to perceive individual details more prominently than she did
the whole—or the concept—of what she was drawing. Other savant artists draw the
same way.
Autistic children differ from nonautistic children in
another way. Normal kids find it
frustrating to copy a picture containing a visual illusion, such as M. C.
Escher’s drawing in which water flows uphill.
Autistic children don’t. That fits with Snyder’s idea that they’re
recording what they see without interpretation and reproducing it with ease in
their own drawings.
Even accomplished artists sometimes employ strategies to
shake up their preconceptions about what they’re seeing. Guy Diehl is not a
savant, but he is known for his series of crystal-clear still lifes of stacked books,
drafting implements, and fruit. When Diehl finds that he’s hit a sticking point
on a painting, for example, he may actually view it in a mirror or upside down.
“It reveals things you otherwise wouldn’t see, because you’re seeing it
differently,” he says. “You’re almost seeing it for the first time again.”
Diehl showed me how art students use this technique to
learn to draw. He put a pair of
scissors on a table and told me to draw the negative space around the scissors,
not the scissors themselves. The result: I felt I was drawing individual lines,
not an object, and my drawing wasn’t half bad, either.
Drawing exercises are one way of coaxing conceptual
machinery to take five, but Snyder is pursuing a more direct method. He has
suggested that a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which uses
magnetic fields to disrupt neuronal firing, could knock out a normal person’s conceptual
brain machinery, temporarily rendering him savantlike.
Young and her colleague Michael Ridding of the University
of Adelaide tried it. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation on 17 volunteers,
they inhibited neural activity in the frontotemporal area. This language and concept-supporting
brain region is affected in patients with frontotemporal dementia and in the
art savant whom Miller studied. In this altered state, the volunteers performed
savantlike tasks—horse drawing, calendar calculating, and multiplying.
Five of the 17 volunteers improved—not to savant levels,
but no one expected that, because savants practice. Furthermore, transcranial
magnetic stimulation isn’t a precise tool for targeting brain regions. But the
five volunteers who improved were those in whom separate neurological
assessments indicated that the frontotemporal area was successfully targeted. “Obviously
I don’t think the idea is so outlandish anymore,” says Young. “I think it is a
plausible hypothesis. It always was, but I didn’t expect we’d actually find the
things we did.”
Snyder himself is experimenting with grander ideas. “We
want to enhance conceptual abilities,” he says, “and on the other hand remove
them and enhance objectivity.” He imagines a combination of training and
hardware that might, for example, help an engineer get past a sticking point on
a design project by offering a fresh angle on the problem. One method would involve
learning to monitor one’s own brain waves. By watching one’s own brain waves
during drawing exercises, Snyder imagines it may be possible to learn to
control them in a way that shuts down their concept-making machinery—even the
left temporal lobe itself.
Even if further research never fully reveals why savants
have extraordinary skills, we may at least learn from their potential. Snyder
is optimistic. “I envisage the day,” he says, “when the way to get out of a [mental
rut] is you pick up this thing—those of us with jobs that demand a certain type
of creativity—and you stimulate your brain. I’m very serious about this.”
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