An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (30 page)

Although Tom was usually called an idiot or imbecile, such posturing and stereotypes are more characteristic of autism—but autism was only identified in the 1940
s
and was not a term, or even a concept, in the 1860
s
.

Autism, clearly, is a condition that has always existed, affecting occasional individuals in every period and culture. It has always attracted in the popular mind an amazed, fearful, or bewildered attention (and perhaps engendered mythical or archetypal figures—the alien, the changeling, the child bewitched). It was medically described, almost simultaneously, in the 1940
s
, by Leo Kanner in Baltimore and Hans Asperger in Vienna. Both of them, independently, named it “autism.”

Kanner’s and Asperger’s accounts were in many ways strikingly (at times uncannily) similar—a nice example of historical synchronicity. Both emphasized “aloneness”, mental aloneness, as the cardinal feature of autism; this, indeed, was why they called it autism. In Kanner’s words, this aloneness “whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside.” This lack of contact, he felt, was only in regard to people; objects, by contrast, might be normally enjoyed. The other defining feature of autism, for Kanner, was “an obsessive insistence on sameness”, in the form of repetitive, stereotyped movements and noises, or stereotypes, most simply; then in the adoption of elaborate rituals and routines; finally, in the appearance of strange, narrow preoccupations—highly focused, intense fascinations and fixations. The appearance of such fascinations, and the adoption of such rituals, often before the age of five, were not to be seen, Kanner and Asperger thought, in any other condition. Asperger brought out other striking features, stressing:

…they do not make eye contact—they seem to take in things with short, peripheral glances—[there is] a poverty of facial expressions and gestures—the use of language appears abnormal, unnatural—the children follow their own impulses, regardless of the demands of the environment.

Singular talents, usually emerging at a very early age and developing with startling speed, appear in about 10 percent of the autistic (and in a smaller number of the retarded—though many savants are both autistic and retarded). A century before Blind Tom there was Gottfried Mind, a “cretinous imbecile”, born in Berne in 1768, who showed from an early age a striking talent for drawing. He had, according to A.F. Tredgold’s classic 1908 Text-Book of Mental Deficiency, “such a marvellous faculty for drawing pictures of cats that he was known as ‘The Cats’ Raphael” but he also made drawings and water-color sketches of deer, rabbits, bears, and groups of children. He soon acquired fame throughout Europe, and one of his pictures was purchased by George IV.

Prodigious calculators attracted attention in the eighteenth century—Jedediah Buxton, a simpleminded laborer, had perhaps the most tenacious memory of these. When asked what would be the cost of shoeing a horse with a hundred and forty nails if the price was one farthing for the first nail, then doubled for each remaining nail, he arrived at the (nearly correct) figure of 725,958,096,074,907,868,531,656,993,638,851,106 pounds, 2 shillings, and 8 pence. When he was then asked to square this number (that is, 2139 squared), he came up with (after two and a half months) a seventy-eight digit answer. Though some of Buxton’s calculations took weeks or months, he was able to work, to hold conversations, to live his life normally, while doing them. The prodigious calculations proceeded almost automatically, only throwing their results into consciousness when completed.

Child prodigies, of course, are not necessarily retarded or autistic—there have been itinerant calculators of normal intelligence as well. One such was George Parker Bidder, who as a child and youth gave exhibitions in England and Scotland. He could mentally determine the logarithm of any number to seven or eight places and, apparently intuitively, could divine the factors for any large number. Bidder retained his powers throughout life (and indeed made great use of them in his profession as an engineer) and often tried to delineate the procedures by which he calculated. In this, however, he was unsuccessful; he could only say of his results that “they seem to rise with the rapidity of lightning” in his mind, but that their actual operations were largely inaccessible to him.
92

92. Later, Bidder described some of the techniques and algorithms which he found himself using; though their discovery in the first place, as well as their use, seemed to be unconscious. In our own time, A.C. Aitken, a great mathematician and calculator, observes:

I have noticed at times that the mind has anticipated the will; I have had an answer before I even wished to do the calculation; I have checked it, and am always surprised that it is correct. This, I suppose (but the terminology may not be right), is the subconscious in action; I think it can be in action at several levels; and I believe that each of these levels has its own velocity, different from that of our ordinary waking time, in which our processes of thought are rather tardy. (This is cited by Steven B. Smith in “Calculating Prodigies.”
)

His son, also intellectually gifted, was a natural calculator as well, though not as prodigious.

Besides these major domains of savant expertise, some savants have astonishing verbal powers—the last thing one might expect in intellectually defective individuals. Thus there are savants who are able, by the age of two, to read books and newspapers with the utmost facility but without the least comprehension (their expertise, their decoding, is wholly phonological and syntactic, without any sense of meaning).

Almost all savants have prodigious powers of memory. Dr. J. Langdon Down, one of the greatest observers in this realm, who coined the term “idiot savant” in 1887, remarked that “extraordinary memory was often associated with very great defect of reasoning power.” He describes giving one of his patients Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The patient had read the entire book and in a single reading imprinted it in memory. But he had skipped a line on one page, an error at once detected and corrected. “Ever after”, Down tells us, “when reciting from memory the stately periods of Gibbon, he would, on coming to the third page, skip the line and go back and correct the error with as much regularity as if it had been part of the regular text.” Martin A., a savant I wrote about in “A Walking Grove”, could recall the entire nine volumes of Grove’s 1954 Dictionary of Music and Musicians. This had been read to him by his father, and the text would be “replayed” in his father’s voice.

There is a large variety of minor savant skills, frequently described by physicians like Down and Tredgold, who consulted at institutions for the “mentally defective.” Tredgold describes J.H. Pullen, “the Genius of Earlswood Asylum”, who for more than fifty years made extremely intricate models of ships and machines, as well as a very real guillotine, which almost killed one of his attendants. Tredgold writes of an otherwise retarded savant who could “get” a complex mechanism like a watch and disassemble and reassemble it swiftly, with no prior instruction. More recently, physicians have described idiot savants with extraordinary bodily skills, able to perform acrobatic maneuvers and athletic feats with the greatest facility—again, with no formal training. (In the 1960
s
, I saw, on a back ward, such a savant myself—he had been described to me as “an idiot Nijinsky.”)
93

93. Tredgold writes of savants with various sensory powers and skills, of olfactory savants—and of a tactile savant, too:

Dr. J. Langdon Down told me of a boy at Normansfleld whose sense of touch was so delicate and his Angers so deft that he could take a sheet of the Graphic and gradually split it into two perfect sheets, as one would peel a postage stamp off an envelope
.

While early medical observers sometimes conceived of savant skills as the hypertrophy of a single mental faculty, there was little sense that savant talents were of much more than anecdotal interest. An exception here was the eccentric psychologist F.W. H. Myers, who, in his great turn-of-the-century book, Human Personality, tried to analyze the processes by which prodigious calculators arrived at their results. He was unable to do so, any more than could the calculators themselves, but he believed that a process of “subliminal” mentation or computation was involved, which threw its results into consciousness when complete. Their methods of calculation seemed to be—unlike the formal or formulary methods taught in primers and schools—idiosyncratic and personal, achieved by each calculator through an individual path. Myers was one of the first to write about unconscious or preconscious cognitive processes and foresaw that an understanding of idiots savants and their gifts could open not only into a general understanding of the nature of intelligence and talent but into that vast realm that we now call the cognitive unconscious.

In the 1940
s
, when autism was first delineated, it became evident that the majority of idiot savants were in fact autistic and that the incidence of savantism in the autistic—nearly 10 percent—was almost two hundred times its incidence in the retarded population, and thousands of times that of the population at large. Furthermore, it became clear that many autistic savants had multiple talents—musical, mnemonic, visual-graphic, computational, and so on.

In 1977, the psychologist Lorna Seife published Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an Autistic Child. Nadia suddenly started drawing at the age of three and a half, rendering horses, and later a variety of other subjects, in a way that psychologists considered “not possible.” Her drawings, they felt, were qualitatively different from those of other children: she had a sense of space, an ability to depict appearances and shadows, a sense of perspective such as the most gifted normal child might only develop at three times her age. She constantly experimented with different angles and perspectives. Whereas normal children go through a developmental sequence from random scribbling to schematic and geometric figures to “tadpole” figures, Nadia seemed to bypass these and to move at once into highly recognizable, detailed representational drawings. The development of drawing in children, it was felt at the time, paralleled the development of conceptual powers and language skills; but Nadia, it seemed, just drew what she saw, without the usual need to “understand” or “interpret” it. She not only showed enormous graphic gifts, an unprecedented precocity, but drew in a way that attested to a wholly different mode of perception and mind.
94

94. Though prodigious musical abilities tend to show themselves extremely early—almost all the great composers exemplify this—“there are no prodigies in art”, as Picasso said. (Picasso himself was a remarkable draftsman at ten, but could not draw horses at three, like Nadia, or cathedrals at seven.) There must be fundamental neurodevelopmental and cognitive reasons for this. Though Yani, a non-autistic Chinese girl, showed her artistic powers very early—she had done thousands of paintings by the age of six—her paintings are those of a very gifted, sensitive (and highly trained) child, arising from a normal, albeit accelerated, perceptual development, which was undoubtedly encouraged by her artist father. Her paintings are quite unlike the suddenly appearing, full-blown, “unchildlike” drawings characteristic of prodigious graphic savants like Stephen Wiltshire. There may, of course, exist in some non-autistic people a mixture of savant and normal talents (see footnote 100).

The case of Nadia—set out at monographic length and minutely documented—aroused great excitement in the neurological and psychological communities and suddenly focused a belated attention on savant talents and on the nature of talents and special abilities in general. Where, for a century or more, neurologists had confined their attention to failures and breakdowns of neural function, there was now a move in the other direction, to exploring the structure of heightened powers, of talents, and their biological basis in the brain. Here idiot savants provided unique opportunities, for they seemed to exhibit a large range of inborn talents—raw, pure expressions of the biological: much less dependent upon, or influenced by, environmental and cultural factors than the talents of “normal” people.

In June of 1987, I received a large packet from a publisher in England. It was full of drawings, drawings that delighted me greatly because they portrayed many of the landmarks I had grown up with in London: monumental buildings like St. Paul’s, St. Paneras Station, the Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum; and others, odd, sometimes out of the way, but dear and familiar places, like the Pagoda in Kew Gardens. They were very accurate, but not in the least mechanical—on the contrary, they were full of energy, spontaneity, oddity, life.

In the packet, I discovered a letter from the publisher: the artist, Stephen Wiltshire, was autistic and had shown savant abilities from an early age. His London Alphabet, a sequence of twenty-six drawings, had been done when he was ten; an amazing elevator shaft, with a vertiginous perspective, when he was eight. One drawing was an imagined scene, of St. Paul’s surrounded by flames in the Great Fire of London. Stephen was not merely a savant but a prodigy. Sixty of his drawings, a mere fraction of what he had done, were to be published, the letter informed me; the author was just thirteen.

Stephen’s drawings reminded me, in many ways, of drawings by my patient José—“The Autist Artist” whom I had known and written about, years before—with an extraordinary eye and gift for drawing. Though José and Stephen came from such different backgrounds, the similarity of their drawings was so uncanny as to make me wonder whether there might not be a distinctive “autistic” form of perception and art. But José, despite his fine gifts (not, perhaps, as great as Stephen’s, but quite remarkable nonetheless), was wasting away in a state psychiatric hospital; Stephen had somehow been luckier.