The man who mistook his wife for a hat

by Oliver Sacks

  Eidetics apart, what of his world generally? It was, in many respects, small, petty, nasty, and dark-the world of a retardate

  who had been teased and left out as a child, and then hired and fired, contemptuously, from menial jobs, as a man: the world of someone who had rarely felt himself, or felt regarded as, a proper child or man.

  He was often childish, sometimes spiteful, and prone to sudden tantrums-and the language he then used was that of a child. 'I'll throw a mudpie in your face!' I once heard him scream, and, occasionally, he spat or struck out. He sniffed, he was dirty, he blew snot on his sleeve-he had the look (and doubtless the feelings) at such times of a small, snotty child. These childish characteristics, topped off by his irritating, eidetic showing off, endeared him to nobody. He soon became unpopular in the Home, and found himself shunned by many of the residents. A crisis was developing, with Martin regressing weekly and daily, and nobody was quite sure, at first, what to do. It was at first put down to 'adjustment difficulties', such as all patients may experience on giving up independent living outside, and coming into a 'Home'. But Sister felt there was something more specific at work-'something gnawing him, a sort of hunger, a gnawing hunger we can't assuage. It's destroying him,' she continued. 'We have to do something.'

  So, in January, for the second time, I went to see Martin-and found a very different man: no longer cocky, showing off, as before, but obviously pining, in spiritual and a sort of physical pain.

  'What is it?' I said. 'What is the matter?'

  'I've got to sing,' he said hoarsely. 'I can't live without it. And it's not just music-I can't pray without it.' And then, suddenly, with a flash of his old memory: ' "Music, to Bach, was the apparatus of worship", Grove article on Bach, page 304 . . . I've never spent a Sunday,' he continued, more gently, reflectively, 'without going to church, without singing in the choir. I first went there, with my father, when I was old enough to walk, and I continued going after his death in 1955. I've got to go,' he said fiercely. 'It'll kill me if I don't.'

  'And go you shall,' I said. 'We didn't know what you were missing.'

  The church was not far from the Home, and Martin was welcomed back-not only as a faithful member of the congregation and the choir, but as the brains and adviser of the choir that his father had been before him.

  With this, life suddenly and dramatically changed. Martin had resumed his proper place, as he felt it. He could sing, he could worship, in Bach's music, every Sunday, and also enjoy the quiet authority that was accorded him.

  'You see,' he told me, on my next visit, without cockiness, but as a simple matter of fact, 'they know I know all Bach's liturgical and choral music. I know all the church cantatas-all 202 that Grove lists-and which Sundays and Holy Days they should be sung on. We are the only church in the diocese with a real orchestra and choir, the only one where all of Bach's vocal works are regularly sung. We do a cantata every Sunday-and we are going to do the Matthew Passion this Easter!'

  I thought it curious and moving that Martin, a retardate, should have this great passion for Bach. Bach seemed so intellectual- and Martin was a simpleton. What I did not realise, until I started bringing in cassettes of the cantatas, and once of the Magnificat, when I visited, was that for all his intellectual limitations Martin's musical intelligence was fully up to appreciating much of the technical complexity of Bach; but, more than this-that it wasn't a question of intelligence at all. Bach lived for him, and he lived in Bach.

  Martin did, indeed, have 'freak' musical abilities-but they were only freak-like if removed from their right and natural context.

  What was central to Martin, as it had been central for his father, and what had been intimately shared between them, was always the spirit of music, especially religious music, and of the voice as the divine instrument made and ordained to sing, to raise itself in jubilation and praise.

  Martin became a different man, then, when he returned to song and church-recovered himself, recollected himself, became real again. The pseudo-persons-the stigmatised retardate, the snotty, spitting boy-disappeared; as did the irritating, emotionless, im-

  personal eidetic. The real person reappeared, a dignified, decent man, respected and valued now by the other residents.

  But the marvel, the real marvel, was to see Martin when he was actually singing, or in communion with music-listening with an intentness which verged on rapture-'a man in his wholeness wholly attending'. At such times-it was the same with Rebecca when she acted, or Jose when he drew, or the Twins in their strange numerical communion-Martin was, in a word, transformed. All that was defective or pathological fell away, and one saw only absorption and animation, wholeness and health.

  Postscript

  When I wrote this piece, and the two succeeding ones, I wrote solely out of my own experience, with almost no knowledge of the literature on the subject, indeed with no knowledge that there was a large literature (see, for example, the fifty-two references in Lewis Hill, 1974). I only got an inkling of it, often baffling and intriguing, after 'The Twins' was first published, when I found myself inundated with letters and offprints.

  In particular, my attention was drawn to a beautiful and detailed case-study by David Viscott (1970). There are many similarities between Martin and his patient Harriet G. In both cases there were extraordinary powers-which were sometimes used in an 'a-centric' or life-denying way, sometimes in a life-affirming and creative way: thus, after her father had read it to her, Harriet retained the first three pages of the Boston Telephone Directory ('and for several years could give any number on these pages on request'); but, in a wholly different, and strikingly creative, mode she could compose, and improvise, in the style of any composer.

  It is clear that both-like the Twins (see the next chapter)- could be pushed, or drawn, into the sort of mechanical feats considered typical of 'idiot savants'-feats at once prodigious and meaningless; but that both also (like the Twins), when not pushed or drawn in this fashion, showed a consistent seeking after beauty and order. Though Martin has an amazing memory for random, meaningless facts, his real pleasure comes from order and coher-

  ence, whether it be the musical and spiritual order of a cantata, or the encyclopedic order of Grove. Both Bach and Grove communicate a world. Martin, indeed, has no world but music-as is the case with Viscott's patient-but this world is a real world), makes him real, can transform him. This is marvellous to see with Martin-and it was evidently no less so with Harriet G:

  This ungainly, awkward, inelegant lady, this overgrown five-year-old, became absolutely transformed when I asked her to perform for a seminar at Boston State Hospital. She sat down demurely, stared quietly at the keyboard until we all grew silent, and brought her hands slowly to the keyboard and let them rest a moment. Then she nodded her head and began to play with all the feeling and movement of a concert performer. From that moment she was another person.

  One speaks of 'idiot savants' as if they had an odd 'knack' or talent of a mechanical sort, with no real intelligence or understanding. This, indeed, was what I first thought with Martin-and continued to think until I brought in the Magnificat. Only then did it finally become clear to me that Martin could grasp the full complexity of such a work, and that it was not just a knack, or a remarkable rote memory at work, but a genuine and powerful musical intelligence. I was particularly interested, therefore, after this book was first published, to receive a fascinating article by L. K. Miller of Chicago entitled "Sensitivity to Tonal Structure in a Developmentally Disabled Musical Savant" (presented at the Psychonomics Society, Boston, November 1985; currently in press). Meticulous study of this five-year-old prodigy, with severe mental and other handicaps due to maternal rubella, showed not rote memory of a mechanical sort, but '. . . impressive sensitivity to the rules governing composition, particularly the role of different notes in determining (diatonic) key-structure . . . (implying) implicit knowledge of structural rules in a generative sense: that i
s, rules not limited to the specific examples provided by one's experience.' This, I am convinced, is the case with Martin, too- and one must wonder whether it may not be true of all 'idiot

  savants': that they may be truly and creatively intelligent, and not just have a mechanical 'knack', in the specific realms-musical, numerical, visual, whatever-in which they excel. It is the intelligence of a Martin, a Jose, the Twins, albeit in a special and narrow area, that finally forces itself on one; and it is this intelligence that must be recognised and nurtured.

  23

  The Twins

  When I first met the twins, John and Michael, in 1966 in a state hospital, they were already well known. They had been on radio and television, and made the subject of detailed scientific and popular reports. * They had even, I suspected, found their way into science fiction, a little 'fictionalised', but essentially as portrayed in the accounts that had been published. +

  The twins, who were then twenty-six years old, had been in institutions since the age of seven, variously diagnosed as autistic, psychotic or severely retarded. Most of the accounts concluded that, as idiots savants go, there was 'nothing much to them'- except for their remarkable 'documentary' memories of the tiniest visual details of their own experience, and their use of an unconscious, calendrical algorithm that enabled them to say at once on what day of the week a date far in the past or future would fall. This is the view taken by Steven Smith, in his comprehensive and imaginative book, The Great Mental Calculators (1983). There have been, to my knowledge, no further studies of the twins since the mid-Sixties, the brief interest they aroused being quenched by the apparent 'solution' of the problems they presented.

  But this, I believe, is a misapprehension, perhaps a natural enough one in view of the stereotyped approach, the fixed format of questions, the concentration on one 'task' or another, with which the original investigators approached the twins, and by which they

  *W.A. Horwitz, etal. (1965), Hamblin (1966).

  +See Robert Silverberg's novel Thorns (1967), notably pp. 11-17.

  reduced them-their psychology, their methods, their lives-almost to nothing.

  The reality is far stranger, far more complex, far less explicable, than any of these studies suggest, but it is not even to be glimpsed by aggressive formal 'testing', or the usual 60 Minutes-like interviewing of the twins.

  Not that any of these studies, or TV performances, is 'wrong'. They are quite reasonable, often informative, as far as they go, but they confine themselves to the obvious and testable 'surface,' and do not go to the depths-do not even hint, or perhaps guess, that there are depths below.

  One indeed gets no hint of any depths unless one ceases to test the twins, to regard them as 'subjects'. One must lay aside the urge to limit and test, and get to know the twins-observe them, openly, quietly, without presuppositions, but with a full and sympathetic phenomenological openness, as they live and think and interact quietly, pursuing their own lives, spontaneously, in their singular way. Then one finds there is something exceedingly mysterious at work, powers and depths of a perhaps fundamental sort, which I have not been able to 'solve' in the eighteen years that I have known them.

  They are, indeed, unprepossessing at first encounter-a sort of grotesque Tweedledum and Tweedledee, indistinguishable, mirror images, identical in face, in body movements, in personality, in mind, identical too in their stigmata of brain and tissue damage. They are undersized, with disturbing disproportions in head and hands, high-arched palates, high-arched feet, monotonous squeaky voices, a variety of peculiar tics and mannerisms, and a very high, degenerative myopia, requiring glasses so thick that their eyes seem distorted, giving them the appearance of absurd little professors, peering and pointing, with a misplaced, obsessed, and absurd concentration. And this impression is fortified as soon as one quizzes them-or allows them, as they are apt to do, like pantomime puppets, to start spontaneously on one of their 'routines'.

  This is the picture that has been presented in published articles, and on stage-they tend to be 'featured' in the annual show in the

  hospital I work in-and in their not infrequent, and rather embarrassing, appearances on TV.

  The 'facts', under these circumstances, are established to monotony. The twins say, 'Give us a date-any time in the last or next forty thousand years.' You give them a date, and, almost instantly, they tell you what day of the week it would be. 'Another date!' they cry, and the performance is repeated. They will also tell you the date of Easter during the same period of 80,000 years. One may observe, though this is not usually mentioned in the reports, that their eyes move and fix in a peculiar way as they do this-as if they were unrolling, or scrutinising, an inner landscape, a mental calendar. They have the look of 'seeing', of intense visualisation, although it has been concluded that what is involved is pure calculation.

  Their memory for digits is remarkable-and possibly unlimited. They will repeat a number of three digits, of thirty digits, of three hundred digits, with equal ease. This too has been attributed to a 'method'.

  But when one comes to test their ability to calculate-the typical forte of arithmetical prodigies and 'mental calculators'-they do astonishingly badly, as badly as their IQs of sixty might lead one to think. They cannot do simple addition or subtraction with any accuracy, and cannot even comprehend what multiplication or division means. What is this: 'calculators' who cannot calculate, and lack even the most rudimentary powers of arithmetic?

  And yet they are called 'calendar calculators'-and it has been inferred and accepted, on next to no grounds, that what is involved is not memory at all, but the use of an unconscious algorithm for calendar calculations. When one recollects how even Carl Fried-rich Gauss, at once one of the greatest of mathematicians, and of calculators too, had the utmost difficulty in working out an algorithm for the date of Easter, it is scarcely credible that these twins, incapable of even the simplest arithmetical methods, could have inferred, worked out, and be using such an algorithm. A great many calculators, it is true, do have a larger repertoire of methods and algorithms they have worked out for themselves, and perhaps this predisposed W.A. Horwitz et al. to conclude this was true of

  the twins too. Steven Smith, taking these early studies at face value, comments:

  Something mysterious, though commonplace, is operating here- the mysterious human ability to form unconscious algorithms on the basis of examples.

  If this were the beginning and end of it, they might indeed be seen as commonplace, and not mysterious at all-for the computing of algorithms, which can be done well by machine, is essentially mechanical, and comes into the spheres of 'problems', but not 'mysteries'.

  And yet, even in some of their performances, their 'tricks', there is a quality that takes one aback. They can tell one the weather, and the events, of any day in their lives-any day from about their fourth year on. Their way of talking-well conveyed by Robert Silverberg in his portrayal of the character Melangio-is at once childlike, detailed, without emotion. Give them a date, and their eyes roll for a moment, and then fixate, and in a flat, monotonous voice they tell you of the weather, the bare political events they would have heard of, and the events of their own lives-this last often including the painful or poignant anguish of childhood, the contempt, the jeers, the mortifications they endured, but all delivered in an even and unvarying tone, without the least hint of any personal inflection or emotion. Here, clearly, one is dealing with memories that seem of a 'documentary' kind, in which there is no personal reference, no personal relation, no living centre whatever.

  It might be said that personal involvement, emotion, has been edited out of these memories, in the sort of defensive way one may observe in obsessive or schizoid types (and the twins must certainly be considered obsessive and schizoid). But it could be said, equally, and indeed more plausibly, that memories of this kind never had any personal character, for this indeed is a cardinal characteristic of eidetic memor
y such as this.

  But what needs to be stressed-and this is insufficiently remarked on by their studiers, though perfectly obvious to a naive listener prepared to be amazed-is the magnitude of the twins'

  memory, its apparently limitless (if childish and commonplace) extent, and with this the way in which memories are retrieved. And if you ask them how they can hold so much in their minds- a three-hundred-figure digit, or the trillion events of four decades-they say, very simply, 'We see it.' And 'seeing'-'visualising'-of extraordinary intensity, limitless range, and perfect fidelity, seems to be the key to this. It seems a native physiological capacity of their minds, in a way which has some analogies to that by which A.R. Luria's famous patient, described in The Mind of a Mnemonist, 'saw', though perhaps the twins lack the rich synesthesia and conscious organisation of the Mnemonist's memories. But there is no doubt, in my mind at least, that there is available to the twins a prodigious panorama, a sort of landscape or physiognomy, of all they have ever heard, or seen, or thought, or done, and that in the blink of an eye, externally obvious as a brief rolling and fixation of the eyes, they are able (with the 'mind's eye') to retrieve and 'see' nearly anything that lies in this vast landscape.

  Such powers of memory are most uncommon, but they are hardly unique. We know little or nothing about why the twins or anyone else have them. Is there then anything in the twins that is of deeper interest, as I have been hinting? I believe there is.

  It is recorded of Sir Herbert Oakley, the nineteenth-century Edinburgh professor of music, that once, taken to a farm, he heard a pig squeak and instantly cried 'G sharp!' Someone ran to the piano, and G sharp it was. My own first sight of the 'natural' powers, and 'natural' mode, of the twins came in a similar, spontaneous, and (I could not help feeling) rather comic, manner.

  A box of matches on their table fell, and discharged its contents on the floor: '111,' they both cried simultaneously; and then, in a murmur, John said '37'. Michael repeated this, John said it a third time and stopped. I counted the matches-it took me some time-and there were 111.