The Prodigy's Cousin

by Joanne Ruthsatz

  From reading the DSM-IV, you might think that exceptional memory was hardly worth mentioning (and even this brief description was struck from the DSM-5). But the idea that some individuals with autism might display extraordinary memory can be traced all the way back to Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, the two men credited with identifying the condition in the 1930s and 1940s. Kanner, for example, noted that many of the children he saw could recite “an inordinate number of nursery rhymes, prayers, lists of animals, the roster of presidents, the alphabet forward and backward, even foreign-language (French) lullabies.” Asperger similarly observed that one of his subjects had an excellent memory for digits and that, among autists, there were some who could name the saint for every day of the year, young children who knew all the Vienna tramlines, and some who demonstrated “other feats of rote memory.”

  Similar reports of autists with extraordinary memories appear in popular reports and academic papers—a boy who memorizes movie release dates, another who memorizes train schedules. But systematic studies have revealed that memory in autism is complicated: autists’ performances on memory tests vary across many dimensions, including the type of memory test, the nature of the stimuli presented, and the context in which those stimuli are presented. Extreme memory for at least some types of information seems to be a trait of some but not necessarily all autists. The memory of savants is an altogether different beast.

  Nadia was born in Nottingham, England, in 1967, the second child of two Ukrainian immigrants. She said a few words before she turned one but then stopped speaking. She was sluggish and clumsy; she struggled to feed herself. She was extremely particular about her clothes and arranged her dolls and stuffed animals in a precise order on her bed. She was prone to violent tantrums, some of which lasted for two to three hours. Eventually, she was diagnosed with autism.

  When Nadia was three and a half, her mother spent a few months in the hospital. Nadia was ecstatic upon her return. Without warning, she began drawing on the walls.

  After that, she drew often. She drew quickly, dashing off lines and often finishing her drawings within only a few minutes. She would rip through several sheets of paper during a sketching session. She never checked her drawings against any sort of reference material; she relied only on her memory. At the peak of her obsession, Nadia drew everywhere: blank paper, lined paper, newspaper, picture books, cereal packets, and the tablecloth.

  Her drawings didn’t look like those of other children. A typical drawing of a horse by a six-year-old portrays the animal from the side; the image is static and simplistic. The horse may be distorted, its body stretched out, or it might resemble a table, a square body with four legs popping out from it.

  But some of Nadia’s earliest sketches portray a horse head-on. Her lines, almost always drawn with pen, capture the wild complexity of the horse’s mane and depict some of the musculature of the leg. These pictures of horses—one of her favorite subjects—improved rapidly; she captured the animal at unusual angles and always depicted it with a sense of perspective. The frenzy of her lines captures the horses in motion: the animals appear arrested in mid-stride, ripped from the hunt, frozen while ambling along with a rider in tow.

  When Nadia’s mother first showed the child’s drawings to a team of psychologists, they thought it was a hoax. Such drawings could not possibly come from six-year-old hands—especially not the hands of a child who was mute, tantrum prone, and otherwise uncoordinated.

  Nadia was certainly unique in this way, but she was not alone. She was a savant, an individual with what Darold Treffert, a Wisconsin psychiatrist who has spent more than fifty years studying savant syndrome, has termed an “island of genius”—a spike in aptitude combined with a more general impairment. Sometimes this aptitude or talent is merely surprising in light of the individual’s disability. Sometimes the savant’s level of talent would be amazing even without the disability, as was the case with Nadia’s drawing. It’s the underlying disability, though, that technically distinguishes the savants from the prodigies; savants have one, while prodigies do not.

  Savants display a varied collection of talents. One common specialty is calendar calculating, the ability to quickly and accurately determine the day of the week on which a particular date will fall. A famous pair of twin savants could perform this calculation forty thousand years into the future or the past, easily able to determine the day of the week on which July 23, 12,213, will fall. Other savants are particularly gifted at music, art, performing complex calculations, or building models and working with machinery. Leslie Lemke, for example, can perfectly replicate complicated music pieces after hearing them only once, despite being blind and having an extremely low IQ. George Widener, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder in his thirties, creates intricate artwork into which he incorporates dates and historical facts.

  Over time, scientists realized that in many—perhaps most—cases, the savants’ underlying disorder is autism. Treffert estimated based on his most recent study that 70 to 75 percent of savants have autism. With figures like that, it’s not a strange coincidence that Nadia, a child with developmental abnormalities and extreme drawing ability, was autistic; it’s highly probable.

  Savants also seem to have nearly infallible memories. This ability is so predominant among savants that Treffert has declared “massive memory” present in every individual with savant skills. An early, large-scale study of savants included a child, Ilene, who knew “practically every song written—who wrote it, what show it is from (or film), who first recorded it, in what year it was popular, etc.” Another child in the study could recite the actor who played each part in the TV program Roots after once watching a quick display of the credits. John, the first savant Treffert ever encountered, memorized the Milwaukee bus system; if you told him the time of day and a bus number, he could tell you the precise location of that bus.

  But those turned out to be almost run-of-the-mill memory exploits. As Treffert recounts in his book Islands of Genius, during his decades of working with savants, he encountered savants with skills—and memories—so notable they had the press running three-ring circuses around them. Daniel Tammet, a man with Asperger’s disorder, memorized pi to the 22,514th decimal; he recited the figure without error in just over five hours. A pair of identical twin autistic savants memorized every question and answer (as well as what the host wore) from every episode of their favorite game show. An exceptional memory is, as Treffert once characterized it, “integral” to savant syndrome.

  Joanne’s pilot study had suggested that child prodigies’ family members had a heightened attention to detail, a trait associated with autism. She had worked closely with only two prodigies, barely scratching the surface in her quest to understand the underpinnings of their abilities. But already she had discovered that both children had extraordinary working memories—an occurrence highly unlikely to occur by chance. It seemed probable that extraordinary memory was an important characteristic of prodigy—and another possible link to autism, or at least autistic savants.

  Chapter 4

  Growing a Prodigy

  Can you create a prodigy?

  If you focus on prodigy’s external markers—the astounding work with the brush, the early entrance to college, the excellence at the piano—it almost seems possible. Maybe with the right expertise, maybe with enough determination, you could get the right teachers, instill an unstoppable work ethic, and place a kid on the fast track to Carnegie Hall.

  Or could you?

  Between the summer of 2010 and the summer of 2011, Joanne zigzagged across the East Coast and the Midwest in pursuit of prodigies. Her sample swelled from two to nine. That may not sound like a big number, but it was the largest group of prodigies anyone had assembled in eighty years.

  As Joanne went from one home to the next, she examined the kids and spent time with their families. She listened as the parents described their experiences raising their ch
ildren. Did they share some little-known secret to unleashing prodigious abilities? What portion of the prodigies’ skills was the product of nurture, careful shaping in the hands of adept parents, and what portion was the product of nature?

  It’s a question perhaps best investigated by exploring the lives of two of those nine prodigies: Jonathan Russell, the son of an expert, and Lauren Voiers, the daughter of an amateur.

  Jonathan Russell is a twenty-year-old New York University student with curly dark hair, thick eyebrows, scruffy facial hair, and a near-encyclopedic knowledge of film scores. He recently released an independent album of fifteen original instrumental tracks, gives occasional violin performances in Central Park, and often rescores portions of popular movies, TV shows, and video games for fun.

  The pieces that make it into Jonathan’s schoolwork or onto his album or YouTube channel are only a fraction of his original compositions. As Jonathan describes it, music is always on his mind: “My brain is in constant music mode a lot of the time. I kind of have this internal iPod, but instead of playing music that already exists, it composes completely by itself, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

  The idea of having an internal music composition system operating on autopilot sounds incredible, but it’s something of a mixed blessing. The stream of music gets stronger the closer Jonathan gets to sleep. Sometimes he has to play the music or write it down, just to get it out of his head.

  He has a similar, almost reflexive ability to imagine people’s voices. When he sleeps, every person he dreams about has a distinct voice. When he reads, he can easily conjure up the sound of a favorite TV character (often those with a British accent, like Stewie Griffin, the evil genius toddler on Family Guy) or a friend speaking the words, as if he were listening to a one-of-a-kind audiobook.

  Music has been a part of Jonathan’s life for as long as he can remember. He was born into a musical household in Riverdale, an upscale part of the Bronx. His mother, Eve Weiss, is a guitarist; the New York Times chronicled her 1983 debut New York performance. She stopped performing when Jonathan was three or four, but she’s still a full-time guitar instructor; his father, Jim Russell, works in IT but minored in music in college.

  Almost from birth, Jonathan seemed interested in sound. He loved to strum Eve’s guitar, and when Eve sang to him in the stroller, he dictated song choice with a shake of his head.

  When Jonathan was eighteen months old, he pointed at a picture of a violin on a bag slung over a doorknob and said “violin”; he repeated the word whenever he saw an image of a violin in the house or on TV. Soon after, Jonathan picked out the sound of a violin on a recording and again piped up with his new favorite word: “violin.” At eighteen months, Jonathan recognized the instrument by sight and sound.

  “My reaction was two things. It was, I have to become a Suzuki teacher—that’s the best method I’ve heard for teaching young kids—and let’s get him started as soon as we can,” Eve said.

  Eve began teacher training for Suzuki around the time Jonathan turned two. It’s a “mother-tongue approach” to music instruction in which children learn an instrument just as they learn a language—by ear and with parental support. Jim and Jonathan tagged along when Eve had class, and father and son passed the time by strolling the music institute playing a game they called “looking for Mr. Bach.” Once, Eve and Jim put a “teeny tiny violin” under Jonathan’s chin, just to see what would happen. He got a huge grin on his face.

  Eve and Jim played the introductory Suzuki violin CD for Jonathan at home and in the car (Eve tells her students’ parents to “play it till you want to throw it out the window”). They put Jonathan to bed listening to Bach’s Partita in D Minor on violin. At two, Jonathan’s grandfather gave him an old keyboard, and Jonathan tinkered with it for hours at a time, figuring out sounds.

  When Jonathan was two and a half, Eve contacted the head of the School for Strings, a Suzuki-based music school in Manhattan. “I said, ‘You know, my kid, he can hear the sound of a violin, he loves music, he’s very musical, he’s left-handed, and he’s not potty trained yet,’” Eve said. The director told her that the school didn’t take on kids who weren’t potty trained. He told her to wait a year. “I kind of said, ‘I know my kid, and he’s gonna be playing “Twinkle” on the violin before he’s potty trained.’”

  Jonathan’s pediatrician put Eve in touch with Monica Gerard, a newly trained Suzuki instructor, and Jonathan began taking weekly lessons with Monica a few months before his third birthday. In place of a real violin, Jonathan and Eve wrapped a couscous box in paper, painted it, and stuck a ruler in it (a typical technique used when teaching young children to hold a violin); he named it Peter after the title character in Peter and the Wolf. Eve already knew how to play a bit of violin (“badly,” as she put it), so, as required in Suzuki training, she helped him at home.

  Jonathan gave his first performance at three (using a real violin) as part of a recital for Eve’s students. His face lit up as he stood in front of the audience, his baggy checked pants held up by suspenders. “Jonathan got up onstage and took his bow and held his violin out, put it under his chin, picked up the bow, played one round of ‘Peanut Butter Crackers,’ and then he wouldn’t get off the stage,” Eve said. (“Peanut Butter Crackers” is the name Eve uses for a common introductory Suzuki rhythm.) “He just grinned—stared at the audience and grinned—and they applauded and we had to drag him off the stage.”

  Jonathan picked up pieces quickly, but his motor skills were underdeveloped. He couldn’t hold the violin correctly; he had trouble positioning the bow. It was a struggle for him to bend his arm at the elbow. Sometimes he fell over while practicing posture.

  Eve and Jim had been keeping a close eye on Jonathan’s development. He was hypersensitive to loud sounds: the rock music at a dolphin aquarium show made him hysterical. Smells, too, like the fumes from a car or the odors of a restaurant, could set him off. He was clumsy, zigzagged when he walked, and had trouble staying in a straight line in tap class. At his violin teacher Monica’s suggestion, Eve and Jim had Jonathan formally assessed. He was diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder—a condition in which people under- or overreact to sights, smells, or sounds (or some combination thereof).

  His clumsiness made the technical aspects of the violin a struggle, but there were flashes of talent of a different sort. When Jonathan was three or four, Monica asked him to figure out the melody to “Old MacDonald.” When he played it for her, Jonathan put in a slide—a little embellishment of sorts. At first, Monica thought he had made a mistake. But when he played it back to her the same way, slide and all, three more times, Monica realized he was doing it on purpose; her pint-sized student was improvising.

  It was no fluke. About a year later, Jonathan went with Eve’s mother to see a klezmer band, a group that played traditional eastern European Jewish music. One of the tunes was familiar to him—Eve’s mother had sung the popular “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” to him before, replacing the words with “the bear missed the train”—and when Jonathan got home, he got his violin and pieced the song together.

  It was impressive, but not a complete shock. “Okay, he’s a Suzuki kid, they’re trained to do things by ear,” Eve remembered thinking. But once he had the song nailed down, he began improvising on it; he left the melody intact but altered the rhythm at certain points, a technique often used by jazz musicians. “That was like, yeah, okay, five-year-olds don’t normally do that kind of thing,” Eve said. “My mouth kind of dropped open.”

  A kid with a knack for jazz improvisation was a hot commodity. The next year, Eve took Jonathan, then six years old, to a recital for older children. After Jonathan gave an impromptu performance, a musician in the audience asked Jonathan to sit in with his jazz band, Dulit’s Dixieland Devils, at a Tarrytown restaurant. The group’s youngest member was a roughly fifty-year-old drummer. Some of the band members were supportive; some com
plained about Jonathan’s technical imperfections. It became a regular gig for Jonathan.

  A string of referrals created a domino effect of performance opportunities: at seven, he began playing at Arthur’s Tavern, a live jazz joint in Manhattan’s West Village (“the oldest gig in New York,” as Eve described it), and the Cajun, a Chelsea venue. “I had reservations about the cigarette smoke, but not playing at a bar,” Eve said of those early gigs. “It wasn’t a honky-tonk kind of drunken bar. It was a jazz club.”

  That same year, Jonathan began making the jazz festival rounds, where his head barely reached the elbows of the adult musicians. His performances snagged enough attention that the New York Times profiled him, commending his “sophisticated improvisations on the melodies of jazz standards.” Over the next few years, more friend-of-a-fan referrals put Jonathan onstage with a ninety-one-year-old Les Paul at Iridium in New York City and an eighty-one-year-old Bucky Pizzarelli, a pairing of “the rotary phone and the cell phone” of jazz, at the North Carolina Jazz Festival.

  For all his love of performing, Jonathan hated to practice, a characteristic that set him apart from most of the other prodigies. He knew all the pieces, but his motor skills were still behind the curve; he hated when Eve corrected his technical mistakes.

  He rehearsed, but only because Eve told him it was one way or the other: if he didn’t practice, she would cancel his gigs. He practiced, about two and a half hours a day; neither Jonathan nor Eve could tolerate more than that.

  That changed when, around the time Jonathan turned twelve, a friend played him a piece of the score from the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I forgot how good this was,’” Jonathan recalled. “I started listening to all the albums, and I kind of memorized everything on the first listen through, which happens sometimes.”