In the above illustrations the image on the left shows the letter ‘A’ composed of smaller ‘H’s. The right image shows the letter ‘H’ composed of smaller ‘A’s.
In Australia, Professor Allan Snyder – director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney – has attracted considerable interest for his claims that he can reproduce savant-like abilities in subjects using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
TMS has been used as a medical tool in brain surgery, stimulating or suppressing particular areas of the brain to allow doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. It is non-invasive and seemingly free of serious side effects.
Professor Snyder believes that autistic thought is not wholly different to ordinary thought, but an extreme form of it. By temporarily inhibiting some brain activity – the ability to think contextually and conceptually, for example – TMS, Professor Snyder argues, can be used to induce heightened access to parts of the brain responsible for collecting raw, unfiltered information. By doing this, he hopes to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it, changing the way the subject perceives different things.
The professor uses a cap attached by electrodes to a TMS machine. The machine sends varying pulses of magnetic energy to the temporal lobes. Some of the subjects who have undergone the procedure claim temporarily enhanced drawing and proofreading skills; drawings of animals became more life-like and detailed, and reading became more precise.
Most people read by recognising familiar groupings of words. For this reason, many miss small errors of spelling or word repetition. Take the following example:
A bird in the hand
is worth two in the
the bush
Read quickly, most people don’t spot the second, superfluous ‘the’ in the sentence above.
A side benefit of processing information in parts instead of holistically is that having a good eye for detail, I proofread very well. On Sunday mornings, reading pages of the day’s newspaper at the table, I would annoy my parents no end by pointing out every grammatical and spelling error I found. ‘Why can’t you just read the paper like everyone else?’ my exasperated mother would ask, having listened to me point out the twelfth error in the paper.
Professor Snyder argues that savant abilities may be in everyone, only most are unable to unlock them. He believes my epileptic seizures may have played a role, similar to that of the magnetic energy pulses of his TMS machine, in affecting certain areas of my brain, paving the way for my abilities with numbers and different perceptual processing.
There are examples of those who have acquired savant skills following illness or injury to the brain. One is Orlando Serrell who was hit on the head by a baseball at the age of ten. Several months later he started recalling huge amounts of information, including licence-plate numbers, song lyrics and weather reports.
Similar transformations have been reported in cases of patients suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a degenerative brain disease affecting the frontal and temporal lobes. As the disease progresses, personality, behaviour and memory are affected. FTD mostly occurs in adults in their forties, fifties and sixties.
Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California in San Francisco, says some of his patients with FTD spontaneously develop interest and skill in art and music. Studies using brain imaging show that for those patients who develop skills, blood flow or metabolic activity is much reduced to the left temporal lobe. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere of the brain, where visual and spatial processing is located, is much better preserved.
It seems that my childhood seizures may well have played an important role in making me the person I am today. Many others have felt similarly about their experience of epilepsy, among them Fyodor Dostoevsky. The nineteenth-century Russian writer – author of such literary classics as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov – had a rare form of temporal lobe epilepsy called ‘Ecstatic Epilepsy’. Dostoevsky’s seizures mostly occured at night and were generalised, affecting his entire body. His experience of epilepsy led him to create characters with epilepsy in four of his novels: Kirilov in The Possessed, Smerdyakov in The Brothers Karamazov, Nellie in The Insulted and Injured and Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.
Dostoevsky described his experience of epilepsy in this way:
For several instants I experience a happiness that is impossible in an ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception. I feel full harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life.
I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me. I really attained god and was imbued with him. All of you healthy people don’t even suspect what happiness is, that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before an attack.
The writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll is also thought to have had temporal lobe seizures, which may have inspired the writing of his most famous work, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The following passage describes an experience of falling involuntarily, which is very similar to that of an epileptic seizure:
Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well … ‘Well!’ thought Alice to herself, ‘after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs!’ … down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?
Some researchers even believe there may be a link between epilepsy and creativity. Writer Eve LaPlante makes this case in her book Seized: Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as a Medical, Historical and Artistic Phenomenon. In it, she cites the famous case of the painter Vincent Van Gogh, who suffered from severe seizures that left him depressed, confused and agitated. In spite of his illness, Van Gogh produced hundreds of water-colours, oil paintings and drawings.
For several months around the age of eight I wrote compulsively across long reams of computer paper, often writing for hours at a time, covering sheet after sheet of paper with tightly knit words. My parents had to buy huge rolls of paper for me because I kept running out. My handwriting was tiny – one teacher complained that she had had to change the prescription of her glasses to read my work – as a result of my fear of running out of paper on which to write down the words.
The stories I wrote, from what I can remember of them, were descriptively dense – a whole page might be taken up in describing the various details of a single place or location, its colours, shapes and textures. There was no dialogue, no emotions. Instead I wrote of long, weaving tunnels far underneath vast, shimmering oceans, of cragged rock caves and towers climbing high into the sky.
I didn’t have to think about what I was writing; the words just seemed to flow out of my head. Even without any conscious planning, the stories were always comprehensible. When I showed one to my teacher, she liked it enough to read parts of it out loud to the rest of the class. My compulsion to write soon disappeared as suddenly as it had first visited me. However, it left me with a permanent fascination for words and language – something which has since been greatly beneficial to me.
More and more people today living with epilepsy are able to lead seizure-free lives, thanks to the ongoing advances in medicine and technology. The stigma that was once attached to those diagnosed with conditions such as epilepsy (and autism) is rapidly disappearing. In spite of this, disorders affecting the brain are still misunderstood by many people. I would tell parents with children who have been diagnosed with epilepsy to educate themselves as much as possible about the condition. Most important of all, give your children the self-belief to hold on to their dreams, because they are the things that shape each person’s future.
4
Schooldays
School began for me in September 1984, just as my brother Lee was starting nursery. My father walked me to class in the mornings – sometimes impatiently because I walked so slowly and kept stopping to pick up stones to hold
between my fingers. My teacher, Mrs Lemon, was a tall, thin lady with short dark hair. I liked her name because whenever I heard it I would immediately picture the shape and colour of the fruit. ‘Lemon’ was one of the first words I ever learnt to write.
Next to the school entrance gates there was a cloakroom for the children to put their coats in before going into class. I didn’t very much like using it because there was only one small window high up in the wall and the room was always gloomy. I was so terrified of losing my coat among all the others, or of picking up a similar looking one and taking it home with me, that I took to counting the pegs to work out which one was mine. If ever I came in and found my peg already occupied I would get upset and panic. I remember once walking straight into class with my coat still on because my peg had another child’s coat on it, even though there were lots of other free pegs to hang my coat on.
The classroom was rectangular and was entered from the right side. Inside there were rows upon rows of drawers for the children to put their pencils and paper into, each labelled with the child’s full name. We were each given a plastic folder that also had a name label, stuck onto the top left hand corner. The folder had a coloured zip at the top to open and close it and we were told to keep our reading books and work inside it. I used mine with fastidious care – always remembering to return my books to it once I had finished with them.
My desk was near the back of the classroom next to the window, which was plastered in coloured paper and pupils’ drawings, from where I could look over the other children in the class and not have to make eye contact with any of them. I don’t recall the names or faces of any of the children from my first years at school – I always felt them to be something to cope and contend with, to navigate around, rather than as individuals to get to know and to play with.
I often held my hands together at chest height when I was standing or walking in class. Sometimes I’d fold my fingers over, then uncurl one or another and just stand there with one or more of my fingers pointing up towards the class ceiling. One time I pointed my middle finger and was surprised when a boy came up to me and said I was swearing. ‘How can a finger swear?’ I asked, but instead of replying the boy called loudly for the teacher who promptly told me off for rude behaviour.
Assemblies in the morning were something I grew to really enjoy. For one thing they were predictable, occurring at the same time each morning. The teacher would ask us to stand in alphabetical order outside the classroom, then walk in line to the assembly hall. Inside, children from the other classes sat quietly in straight lines as we walked past, before being told to sit ourselves down behind the others. The strong sense of order and routine calmed me and I often sat on the hall floor with my eyes closed, gently rocking while humming to myself – something I frequently did when I was feeling relaxed and content.
The best part of each assembly came with the singing of hymns: ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ and ‘Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow’ were among my favourites. I closed my eyes and listened intently to the other children singing together, the notes melting together into a reassuringly steady, flowing rhythm. The music always made me feel at peace and happy inside. Assembly time was the highlight of my school day.
With my first Christmas at school came the traditional Nativity play. I was given the role of one of the shepherds. I was petrified at the thought of having to stand up in front of the whole school – all the children and teachers and parents – and became very distressed, refusing to try on the shepherd’s costume or to talk things over with the teacher. In the end, my mother intervened by bribing me with sweets in return for my participation. I looked down at the floor the whole time I was on stage, but it didn’t stop my parents from telling me afterwards how proud of me they were. After the play I didn’t want to get out of the costume, so my parents persuaded my teacher to lend it to them over the Christmas break. That night, and every one after until New Year, I slept in my shepherd’s robes and hat.
Learning in class did not come easily to me – I found it difficult to concentrate when the other children were talking among themselves or when there were people walking or running in the corridors outside. I find it very hard to filter out external noise and regularly put my fingers in my ears to help me concentrate. My brother Steven has the same problem and uses earplugs whenever he wants to read or think.
Whenever I wrote, I pored over every letter and word and full stop. If I noticed a smudge or error I would rub everything out and start over. This streak of perfectionism meant that I sometimes worked at a snail’s pace, finishing a lesson in a state of near exhaustion, yet with little to show for it. Even so, I never worried that the teacher would consider me lazy or incapable and I never thought to care what any of the other children might think. I didn’t then understand the concept of learning from your mistakes.
Writing was always a chore. Certain letters, ‘g’ and ‘k’ in particular, were tiresome to write down because I just couldn’t remember how to write them. I practised writing out whole lines of ‘g’s and ‘k’s on sheet after sheet of paper to help me, but their loops and ‘arms’ seemed unintuitive to me and it was a long time before I was able to write them with confidence. I lagged behind in handwriting, unable to write words with the letters all connected together. If single letters were difficult enough, combinations such as ‘gh’ and ‘th’ were impossible for me to write in a single stroke. Even today I write most of the letters in a word individually one after the other.
One of the items everyone in class was given to take home regularly with them was an old tin filled with strips of paper. On each strip was a different word to be practised, and there were tests each week to see how well the words had been learned. I always scored very well in these tests because I was able to visualise each word in my head, based on the shape its letters formed. The word ‘dog’, for example, is made up of three circles with an upward line on the first letter and a downward loop on the last. The word actually looks quite a lot like a dog if you imagine the upward line as the dog’s ear and the downward loop as the tail. Similarly, the two ‘o’s in ‘look’ reminded me of a pair of eyes. Palindromes – words spelt the same backwards as well as forwards – such as ‘mum’ and ‘noon’ felt especially beautiful to me and they were among my favourite words.
From about the time I first started school I developed a great love for and fascination with fairy tales – the stories and intricately detailed illustrations filled my head with vivid mental pictures of towns overflowing with porridge and of princesses sleeping on a bed a hundred mattresses high (with a single pea underneath). One of my favourite tales was the famous ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ by the Brothers Grimm. At bedtime I loved hearing my parents read out the exotic-sounding names guessed by the Queen as the name of the gold-spinning little man: Kasper, Melchior, Belshazzar, Sheepshanks, Cruickshanks, Spindleshanks …
Another story that really affected me was ‘Stone Soup’. In it, a wandering soldier arrives in a village asking for food and shelter. The villagers, greedy and fearful, provide none, so the soldier declares that he will make them stone soup with nothing required but a cauldron, water and a stone. The villagers huddle round as the soldier begins to cook his dish, licking his lips in anticipation. ‘Of course, stone soup with cabbage is hard to beat,’ says the soldier to himself in a loud voice. One of the villagers approaches and puts one of his cabbages into the pot. Then the soldier says: ‘Once I had stone soup with cabbage and a bit of salt beef and it was fit for a king!’ Sure enough, the village butcher brings some salt beef and one by one the other villagers provide potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on until a delicious meal is ready for the entire village. I found the story very puzzling at the time because I had no concept of deception and did not understand that the soldier was pretending to make a soup from a stone in order to trick the villagers into contributing to it. Only many years later did I finally understand what the story was about.
But some fan
tasy was just too frightening for me. Once a week a television was wheeled into the classroom and an educational programme played. Look and Read was a popular BBC children’s television series and one of its most watched programmes was Dark Towers involving a young girl who, alongside her dog, race to find the hidden treasure of a strange, old house called Dark Towers. The series was played over ten weeks.
In its first episode, the young girl – Tracy – discovers Dark Towers and learns that it is supposed to be haunted. At the end of the episode a family portrait begins to shake and the room goes very cold. Tracy hears a voice telling her that the house is in danger and she will help to save it. I remember watching the programme with the rest of the class in silence, my legs together rocking quietly under the chair. I felt no emotion at all until the end, then all of a sudden it was like a switch was flicked in my head and I suddenly realised I was frightened. Feeling agitated I ran from the class – refusing to return until the television was removed. Thinking back, I can understand why the other children teased me and called me ‘cry baby’. I was nearly seven and none of the other children in the class were the slightest bit upset or frightened by the programme. Even so, each week I was taken to the headmaster’s office and allowed to sit and wait while the rest of the class watched the next instalment of the series. The headmaster had a small television in his office and I remember watching motor racing on it – the cars were going very fast round and round and round the circuit; this, at least, was a programme I could watch.
Another Look and Read series that I remember affected me very much was called Through the Dragon’s Eye. In it, three children walk through a mural they have painted on the playground wall and into a strange land called Pelamar. The land is dying and the children seek to mend its life force, a glowing, hexagonal structure that has been thrown apart in an explosion. With the help of a friendly dragon called Gorwen, the children search the land for the missing parts.
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant Page 5