Jacob fought for every inch of progress. He practiced sitting still; he practiced engaging in group activities. It took nearly a year for Jacob to master sitting next to another child for ten minutes, but he learned to do it. Kindergarten would be the test of whether he had learned it well enough.
When school started, there were bumps: Jacob struggled with social activities and communication. He had a hard time when things were out of the ordinary, like when the school had a pajama day or his class had a substitute teacher. But for the most part, he did fine. He read the class books on the weather and rocks and tried not to let on about how advanced his academic abilities were. He made it through kindergarten.
The next few years felt like steady progress. It was still difficult to have a conversation with Jacob about anything other than science, but he began connecting with some of the kids in the neighborhood over video games. Kristine set up a sports program for kids with autism; there, Jacob met Christopher, a child who became a close friend.
But as the social struggles eased somewhat, problems bubbled up on the academic front. Jacob’s boredom with the curriculum was wearing on him. The Barnetts headed it off as best they could. They spent most Saturday afternoons at Barnes & Noble, where Jacob used his two-book allowance on reference books and science textbooks. He loved reading about history and memorized the presidents and a motley assortment of facts about their lives and terms. As Kristine recalls in her memoir, The Spark, when Jacob discovered the test prep section of the bookstore, “he looked at me reproachfully, as if I’d deliberately been withholding this wonderful treat.” He particularly loved working his way through the math problems in the GED prep book.
But by third grade, the reference books weren’t enough anymore. At home, he stayed up late reading. Kristine found him hiding in the bookshelf again, just as he had during the most isolated days of his autism. He didn’t want to go to school. Jacob had been pleading with Kristine to help him learn algebra, so she hired her aunt to teach him. They perused the NASA Web site and watched Cosmos and videos about savants. It felt as if they were squeaking by, though, hanging on precariously to the progress they had made.
When the Butler planetarium, Jacob’s favorite haunt, closed for the winter, Kristine panicked. “That was like the whole world to Jacob,” Kristine said. “I was like, oh brother, this is gonna be really bad. He’s gonna lose all his social skills. He’s not gonna play with anybody. I have to have the planetarium.” She called around, searching for another planetarium they could visit. Eventually, she wound up on the phone with a professor at IUPUI, the joint Indianapolis campus of Indiana University and Purdue University, who said that Jacob could sit in on his astronomy class.
Eight-year-old Jacob lit up. He was eager to attend. During class, he asked and answered questions. When the course ended, he informally audited another and then another. The classes brought something in him alive. He was fully, deeply engaged.
Word of the kid attending college classes got around. When Jacob was ten, the Barnetts got a call from someone at IUPUI who proposed that Jacob formally enroll in college through SPAN, a program geared toward allowing high school students to take college classes.
The idea sounded crazy. Jacob was still in elementary school. The Barnetts couldn’t see a future in which Jacob never attended prom or went to a high school football game. Jacob wanted to do it, though. He was accepted into SPAN and withdrew from elementary school. But after a debacle during his college welcome interview—Jacob spent much of it chasing coins that had fallen on the floor—IUPUI started him with just one course.
Jacob had time on his hands. Other kids might have played video games or lost hours watching TV, but Jacob dove into his own research on an expanded theory of relativity. During this unstructured time, a dam broke. Ideas burst from Jacob’s brain like an unstoppable torrent of water. They flowed constantly—when he was working, certainly, but also when he was at the playground and when he was having dinner. He once stabbed his whiteboard with a fork because, in his haste to write down an idea that came to him while eating, he forgot to swap his utensil for a marker. He stopped sleeping.
The Barnetts grew concerned. They took Jacob to see his pediatrician and enrolled him in a sleep study. But nothing was wrong. Jacob was just completely engrossed in physics.
Kristine was still eager to get Jacob out of the house and away from his work, though. She thought an expert in the field might help him move forward on whatever problem he was working on and hopefully ease its grip on his mind. She contacted an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who confirmed that Jacob was working on some of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics.
After another semester of SPAN, Jacob applied for college through the traditional channels. He was accepted and awarded a scholarship. Formally enrolling in college brought new challenges: Jacob was too small to carry all his textbooks in his backpack; Kristine worried about him on campus. But Jacob found a home in the Honors College, a program with a suite of rooms in the library where he could hang out between classes. He tutored other students in math and science, and many of them began to treat him like a younger brother. To twelve-year-old Jacob, college felt like home.
In Jacob, the connection between autism and prodigy is palpable. As a kid, he had autism (which raises the interesting question of whether he should technically be considered a prodigy or a savant—and whether that distinction is really as clear-cut as the terminology makes it sound). He had the communication difficulties; he had the social difficulties.
He also had a tendency toward obsession (or a tremendous passion for his interests, depending on how you look at it). When Jacob thinks back on the most isolating days of his autism, he remembers already being highly focused on the interests that would later catapult him to college. “I was focusing on things in such extreme detail that it seemed like I wasn’t thinking at all,” he said during his TEDxTeen talk, “Forget What You Know.”
Even after Jacob no longer had social and communication difficulties, his obsession with math and physics persisted. He stayed up late into the night devouring the subjects; taught himself much of geometry, algebra, algebra II, trigonometry, and calculus just so he could sit through a calculus review course; and created a home laboratory equipped with whiteboards, the periodic table, space posters, and an oscilloscope (an instrument that measures voltage changes over time).
His memory was breathtaking—just like that of prodigies, just like that of savants. Once, when a three-year-old Jacob was shopping with his mom and Wes, he listened to the songs played by a series of music boxes. He found a keyboard in the store and played the songs from memory. Around the time he was four, he memorized a U.S. atlas, and his family nicknamed him JPS—Jacob Positioning System—for his ability to navigate even unfamiliar cities.
He had the extraordinary attention to detail. He picked up on even seemingly inconsequential facts, like the number of blue cars in a parking lot and what percentage of the electoral vote President James Buchanan received. When Jacob was four, his grandmother gave him a large, detailed map of Indianapolis. He studied it for a few minutes and then told his grandmother the map was out of date. A small section of I-465 had been renamed I-865, but the map didn’t reflect the change. It was inaccurate; Jacob didn’t want it.
Jacob embodied nearly all of these connections between autism and prodigy; he also possessed another, less well-known trait: synesthesia.
It sounds more like the stuff of science fiction than serious academic research. Synesthesia occurs when a certain type of stimulus, maybe a musical note or a number or a word, elicits a response, such as a color or a taste, usually associated with a totally different type of stimulus. Those with synesthesia don’t just see what others see or hear what others hear or taste what others taste; they see and hear and taste more.
Synesthesia comes in a variety of forms. Someti
mes numbers or words evoke a particular taste (like when the word “jail” calls to mind cold bacon) or months occupy a spatial location (like December sitting an arm’s length away from the left of the body). Some people personify letters, numbers, or months. One woman perceives August as a chubby boy prone to becoming defensive and the number 8 as entangled in a love triangle—she is dating 9 but loves 7.
The most common form of synesthesia involves the pairing of letters, numbers, or words with a particular color. Researchers have picked up on some trends in this area; those who associate letters with colors frequently perceive a as red, d as brown, o as white, r as red, and y as yellow. Some are tougher to pin down; the unreliable p was primarily viewed as green in one study, pink in another, and blue in a third.
These unexpected responses to letters, sounds, numbers, or other stimuli are automatic. They also tend to be constant over time. Tests taken months or even years apart reveal a consistency rate above 90 percent; if an individual with synesthesia perceives the letter s as lazy, self-centered, and feuding with the letter p, s will never lead an industrious life or think of others, and its quarrel with p will continue forever.
Synesthesia is particularly interesting in the context of prodigies and autism because it comes with a memory boost: Synesthetes, as those with synesthesia are known, have enhanced recall for the types of stimuli that induce their synesthesia. Those who perceive letters as having a color, for example, have a superior ability to recall letters, while those who perceive time as having a particular spatial location have exceptional recall for dates.
Jacob’s synesthesia memory boost is associated with numbers. When Jacob thinks about a number (say, 3), he doesn’t just picture the numeral; he perceives it as having a specific color (like red) and a specific shape (like a triangle). As Jacob once put it during a conversation with a reporter, “Every number or math problem I ever hear, I have permanently remembered.” But he has trouble remembering smells and conversations.
Over the years, there have been several anecdotal reports of an association between autism and synesthesia, including a case study of an extraordinary British savant, Daniel Tammet, the man who recited 22,514 digits of pi from memory. Daniel can also conduct complex calculations in his head quickly and without error. He speaks ten languages and learned Spanish over the course of a weekend.
Like Jacob, Daniel has synesthesia. He sees numbers as having a shape, color, and texture and perceives some words as having a color. He also has Asperger’s disorder. It’s no coincidence that Daniel has both conditions; a recent study found that adults with autism spectrum disorders are more than three times more likely to report synesthesia than non-autistic adults, making synesthesia another link between autism and talent and potentially another link between autism and child prodigies.
In 2011, a reporter from a small Indiana newspaper wrote a story about Jacob. Two months later, the Indianapolis Star published a lengthy profile on the twelve-year-old scientist who was trying to disprove the big bang theory, and that story got picked up by a wire service. Word of the whiz kid was rehashed in print and plastered all over the Internet. The full weight of the media crashed down on the Barnett household.
It was an exciting, frightening, sometimes overwhelming time. It was also eye-opening. As Kristine told Glenn Beck later that month, she hadn’t realized that Jacob, who was sitting next to her in a backward baseball cap and a pi T-shirt, was that unusual. “I really just thought he was, you know, just another smart kid,” she said.
It was in the midst of this media frenzy that Joanne contacted the Barnetts about her research. Kristine was skeptical. “At first I sort of thought, well, I don’t know about that,” she recalled. But then Joanne asked if Jacob might like to go to Cedar Point, a Sandusky, Ohio, amusement park jammed with roller coasters. The Barnetts packed their kids into the car and began the five-hour drive to Sandusky, eager to talk to someone who might provide a new perspective on the child who couldn’t get enough theoretical physics.
The Barnetts also consented to one more interview. They had been approached by 60 Minutes, and convinced that the reporters and producers there would do a thoughtful piece, the Barnetts said yes. They pointed them to Joanne as a prodigy expert.
Joanne arrived at the family’s hotel toting a large poster of the United States that she had bought from a teacher-supply store. With the cameras rolling, Joanne showed Jacob a series of states and then asked him to repeat them back to her. Jacob zipped through the list of twenty-eight states, both forward and backward.
After 60 Minutes finished taping, Joanne administered the more serious tests. Jacob issued a knockout punch in the working memory test, just as the other prodigies had done. Afterward, he was chatty and eager to explain the fourth dimension.
When the segment aired the following January, it opened with a picture of Jacob, his baseball cap slung backward over his head, his freckled face happy and curious. The first few minutes focused on Jacob’s accomplishments, his autism diagnosis, and his love for math and physics. Jacob used a light box to demonstrate the way he saw numbers: as colored shapes, often layered on top of one another. As the segment continued, it shifted to Joanne’s work with Jacob. The correspondent Morley Safer explained the memory test Joanne had done with Jacob for the cameras. When Morley met with Jacob three months later, Jacob was still able to recite all twenty-eight states, in order, backward and forward.
At one point, Morley asked Jacob about his autism, noting that his parents said that he was proud of the condition. Just as Joanne had long suspected, Jacob believed that he had succeeded not in spite of his autism but because of it. “That, I believe, is the reason why I am in college and I am so successful,” Jacob said. “It is the rise as to my love for math and science and astronomy and it’s the reason why I care. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten this far.” In Jacob Barnett, the connection between prodigy and autism wasn’t just tangible; it was celebrated.
The prodigies and autists had behavioral similarities; they had cognitive similarities. But the biggest question remained: Was the connection between the two genetic?
Joanne partnered with two Ohio State genetics researchers, Chris Bartlett and Stephen Petrill, to find out. After Joanne appeared on 60 Minutes, she spent a spring break zigzagging back and forth between prodigies, asking the kids and any willing family members (some autistic, some not) to spit into small vials.
Back in Columbus, Bartlett and his team extracted the DNA from the saliva samples and prepared it for analysis. They then sent the DNA to an outside lab for genotyping. That outside lab extracted each individual’s genetic code from his or her DNA and returned the raw data, “a big text file with a lot of numbers,” as Bartlett put it, to the Ohio State team.
The idea was to find out whether autists and prodigies—two groups of people who, from the outside, often look completely different—shared genes that explained their commonalities. Once you stripped away their outer trappings, did the two conditions have common genetic roots?
The chances of finding anything were slim. The team used a linkage analysis, a study design that assumes the sought-after genetic mutation has a big impact. It was unlikely to pick up on anything with a relatively small effect. And they were working with a very small sample. The team had DNA from eleven prodigies and their families, but only five of those families included a sibling, a prerequisite for inclusion in the initial analysis. The mutation they were looking for would have to be a powerful one (highly penetrant, in genetics speak) to show up in an analysis on such a small group.
The team coded both the prodigies and the autists in the sample as “affected” and all the non-prodigious, non-autistic relatives as “unaffected”—essentially pretending that the prodigies and the autists were equivalent to each other. The idea, then, was to look for a slice of DNA inherited by the prodigies and the autists but not by their non-autistic, non-prodigious siblings.
The team plugged their equations into the computers and waited. Some of the analyses took days; one left the computer churning for nearly a week. The main results, when translated into a graph, look like an EKG. A single dark line hovers around the baseline, and then occasionally darts upward, indicating a potentially relevant place on the genome.
There were several blips on the prodigy-autism radar—something interesting on chromosome 8, something interesting on chromosome 20, maybe something worth looking into with a larger sample on chromosomes 5 and 11.
There was also one clear hit. At the very beginning of the chart, near the middle of chromosome 1, the line leaped up. On the short arm of chromosome 1, a location known as 1p31-q21, the team found something. They couldn’t pinpoint the precise genes at play, but DNA in this region seemed tied to both prodigy and autism.
The researchers conducted two statistical analyses on the data; in both cases, the finding on chromosome 1 was statistically significant. They pressure tested the result. Would the link be cleaner and clearer if they changed their assumptions? What if they assumed that this particular region was tied only to prodigy? What if they assumed it was tied only to autism? Nothing came close. Not only did no other model achieve statistical significance, but the next-best fit with their data, the model that assumed that prodigy and autism did not have common genetic roots, was fifty times less likely to be true than the model that assumed that they did. “We did gamble. We put it all on the line by coming up with what we thought were reasonable tests of this hypothesis, and we failed to falsify it,” Bartlett said. “In terms of science moving forward, this is really as good as it’s going to get.”
In at least some of the families, there seemed to be a genetic link between prodigy and autism. Despite their outward differences, the two groups had a common genetic core.
The link isn’t entirely clean. There are a few family members—“carriers,” of a sort—who are neither prodigious nor autistic but who seem to have a mutation in the same location on chromosome 1.
The Prodigy's Cousin Page 12