The Prodigy's Cousin

by Joanne Ruthsatz

  This former businessman had a specific type of dementia—frontotemporal—that attacks certain parts of the brain while leaving other areas relatively intact. Miller and his colleagues eventually calculated that 17 percent of their frontotemporal dementia patients demonstrated new abilities or preserved preexisting artistic or visual abilities despite their worsening conditions.

  It was a shocking phenomenon. Miller noted to a reporter for the Washington Post that it had never occurred to him “that somehow a disease could release an unknown talent.”

  These findings, moreover, dovetailed with the left-brain injury, right-brain compensation theory. Miller and his colleagues discovered that among their talented frontotemporal dementia patients, the disease had generally attacked their temporal lobe but spared their frontal lobe, and that most such patients showed greater deterioration of their left hemisphere than their right.

  Researchers put forward a flurry of theories to explain how left-hemisphere brain damage might result in savant-like abilities. Some proposed that damage to the left hemisphere might lead to increased development of the right. Others thought that left-hemisphere damage merely unleashed latent right-hemisphere abilities previously held in check by the dominant left hemisphere.

  Whatever the precise mechanism, the left-brain injury, right-brain compensation theory suggested that savants weren’t as dissimilar from other people—their talents might not be quite so inimitable—as it seemed. This raised an intriguing question: If scientists could simulate the left-hemisphere damage found in many of the talented dementia patients and some savants, could they expose the inner savant within us all?

  Allan W. Snyder, the founder of the University of Sydney’s Centre for the Mind, gave it a try. Snyder and his colleagues ran a series of experiments in which participants—typical, non-savant individuals—donned a “creativity cap” of sorts. The experimenters attached electrodes to the participants’ brains and zapped them with a weak electrical current targeted at inhibiting part of the left temporal lobe, an attempt to mimic the left-hemisphere injuries of the acquired savants.

  With part of the left hemisphere inhibited, at least some participants in each study showed an improved ability to proofread and differentiate true memories from false memories. Some showed stylistic changes in their drawing; some demonstrated improved numerosity, the ability to gauge the number of items in a group (the classic example of this was documented by Oliver Sacks when a pack of matches spilled and twin savants immediately cried out “111”—the number of matches on the ground). In a slightly different experimental design in which the researchers not only inhibited part of the left hemisphere but also stimulated part of the right, more than 40 percent of participants were able to solve a difficult puzzle that had previously stumped them.

  But not everyone who sported the creativity cap showed improvement. Many people still couldn’t solve the difficult puzzle, more than a third showed no reduction in false memories, a majority showed no change in drawing style, and a couple of people showed no improvement in numerosity. Similarly, not all patients with frontotemporal dementia develop or preserve special skills. Nor, certainly, does everyone who suffers a left-hemisphere brain injury or illness emerge a savant.

  There are at least a few ways to explain these inconsistencies. Perhaps the focal point of the electric shock Snyder and his colleagues administered landed off target and failed to inhibit the relevant part of the left temporal lobe. Perhaps not every head injury exposes savant skills because such transformation requires an extremely precise—and rare—type of injury. Perhaps there is another factor that prevents some individuals with frontotemporal dementia from exploding with artistic or musical interest.

  But it seems at least as plausible that the premise is wrong; maybe not everyone has an inner savant. Or maybe that inner savant is much more difficult to expose—for potentially interesting reasons—in some people than in others. Just as not every child with prenatal exposure to valproate or thalidomide is born with autism, it seems that not everyone who incurs a head injury (or dons the creativity cap) will develop prodigious skills. If true, that would suggest that some people are more susceptible to savantism than others. The interesting question then is why.

  There’s a very limited number of studies in which scientists have attempted to induce savant skills, and those studies that have been done are quite small, making it difficult to identify any characteristics that might distinguish those who demonstrate such skills from those who do not. But a 2004 study in which a trio of researchers in Australia applied the brain-zapping protocol and then looked for savant skills to emerge across a variety of areas identified one potentially important factor—gender. The male participants, the authors found, generally performed better under stimulation than the female participants.

  This finding hasn’t been replicated, and in one other small study, gender wasn’t predictive of the impact of the creativity cap. But while it’s certainly possible that the 2004 finding was a fluke, it seems worth contemplating whether gender impacts the ease with which savant skills can be induced. After all, the ratio of male to female savants is similarly skewed, possibly as lopsided as six to one. There’s a similar gender breakdown in Miller’s skilled dementia patients, among autists, and among prodigies. It seems that men may be more vulnerable than women to each of these conditions.

  There’s at least one theory as to why this might be the case. Studies have found that elevated levels of testosterone and other hormones in utero are associated with an increased risk of autism, and that boys naturally have more such exposure. Could this type of exposure also leave the brain primed for savantism and prodigiousness?

  There was something odd about Jason Padgett’s brain scan. When Padgett was presented with mathematical formulas during an fMRI, his results showed left-hemisphere activation—the opposite of what the left-brain damage, right-brain compensation theory would predict. As the authors of that study noted, his results were “perhaps surprising.”

  There have been similarly puzzling results in a couple of other cases: A PET (positron-emission tomography) scan of an autistic savant taken while he was calendar calculating revealed left-hemisphere activation. An fMRI of George Widener, a savant calendar calculator and artist, showed heavily concentrated left-hemisphere activity and “sparse” right-hemisphere activity when he was calendar calculating.

  These findings stand out among the large number of cases in which savant skills emerged following a left-brain injury. But they don’t necessarily mean that the left-brain injury, right-brain compensation theory is incorrect, at least not in all cases.

  Perhaps not all savant skills are the product of the same underlying mechanisms. The savants who demonstrated left-hemisphere activation were all calendar calculating or working on mathematical problems during their brain scans. Perhaps some calculating savants rely on different areas of the brain than savants who are skilled in art, music, or other fields. That could mean that the external similarities among savants conceal cognitive differences between those with different specialties.

  Do child prodigies, too, have notable underlying differences? As demonstrated by the story of Autumn de Forest, it seems that they do.

  Chapter 9

  Lightning in a Bottle

  As a toddler, Autumn de Forest occasionally drew pictures with crayons and markers. There were several prominent artists in the extended family, but her parents took little notice of Autumn’s “little kid drawings.” Her parents weren’t looking for signs of artistic genius; they assumed that Autumn, who had great rhythm and a great sense of pitch, was destined for a career in music, like her father, Doug.

  Autumn’s parents bought her a drum set for Christmas when she was three, about a year after the family had moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. She showed some interest; Autumn and Doug often messed around with the drums, mocking up songs and working on rhythm. For Autumn, it was enjoyable but n
ot life changing. Same story when her mother, Katherine, later signed her up for piano lessons: it was fun; it was play.

  When Autumn was in preschool, she brought home a painting of an elephant that Doug and Katherine would later recognize as the first sign of her artistic talent. She had dashed off an array of brushstrokes that seemed to capture the elephant in motion, walking straight toward the viewer, its tail swishing behind. The somewhat abstract piece (Autumn describes it as “elephanty”) seemed deliberate and artistic in a way that Doug and Katherine didn’t expect from a four-year-old. But the painting got stuck in a pile of papers, lost in the rush of unpacking Autumn’s knapsack. Doug didn’t find it until months later.

  The next flash of talent did not go unnoticed. When she was five, Autumn went out to the garage, where her father was staining furniture. She asked to paint, and Doug gave her a stray piece of plywood, a large paintbrush, and some stain. He returned to his patina, and the two worked back-to-back. When Doug checked on Autumn, she had created two rectangles on the plywood; she had emphasized the space between them by using a darker color along the rectangles’ edges. To Doug, it seemed simple yet profound. “Like a Rothko,” he later told the Tampa Bay Times.

  Autumn was nonplussed. The word “Rothko” meant nothing to her. But the feeling she got while painting, that was sharp and clear. “It was almost this feeling of—this feeling of contentment,” Autumn recalled. “I never had that feeling before, ever, in my entire life. I still get that every time I paint. I never had it for anything else, not music, not piano, and I liked all those, but it was just—it was different.”

  Doug had been preparing to introduce Autumn to music composition software. But after seeing her Plywood Rothko, he chucked those plans. Katherine and Doug ran out and bought a few canvases. Doug rigged a small table into a makeshift artist’s easel.

  Autumn set to work in the garage. She painted every day after kindergarten, spending a few days on each piece. As she finished her first canvas, Equator, a blue abstract with a thick streak of purple slashed across it, she noticed a bag of cement spewing dust in the garage. Struck by the urge to make her work three-dimensional, she threw a pinch of cement dust on the painting. Two more small pieces followed, both abstract works. She applied a handful of cement to Desert, a sunset-colored mesh of orange, red, and pink; with Pinkie, a work with a softer mix of colors, she covered the entire canvas with cement before she applied the paint.

  After finishing those three small canvases, Autumn had an overwhelming sense of wanting more. “I wanted a bigger space to put my ideas on,” she recalled. “More color, more three dimension, more cement, more big brushstrokes, more imagination.”

  Her parents ran with it. Though not visual artists, both are creative types. Doug is a dark-haired musician with a smattering of facial hair who composes and plays drums. Katherine is a former actress and model who has posed for romance novel covers and had a string of roles in 1990s movies and TV shows. They had no intention of taking a wait-and-see approach to their daughter’s talent. As Doug once told USA Today, “You see a spark and you want to do everything you can to create a wind.” Doug made room in his music studio, a thousand-square-foot structure behind their house, for Autumn to work. It turned out to be a temporary arrangement. Soon, the studio was Autumn’s; Doug moved his work space into the house. Katherine bought Autumn supplies. She brought home a haul of top-shelf equipment: paintbrushes, acrylics, oil paints, and, most important, large canvases.

  Autumn took a trial-and-error approach to the logistics of painting a five-foot-tall canvas. If the canvas was propped up, much of the surface was out of reach for her six-year-old hands. She tried standing on buckets, balancing on both feet while she reached up with her brush. She laid the canvases on the floor but couldn’t access the midsections. Eventually, Doug built a wooden bridge that arched over the canvas when it was lying flat. Autumn could sit on the bridge and tackle any part of her painting from above.

  While working on one of these first large-scale canvases, an abstract piece titled Greenie, Autumn found her “white room.” “It’s this place in my imagination that I can go to, and it’s a room. It’s all white, and there’s not a door, nothing. The only thing that’s there is me, my artwork, and my tools. And that’s it. I just go to this place where there are no distractions, and I feel as though I’m just engulfed in my painting,” Autumn said.

  She can stay there for hours. It’s a place of extreme focus and contentment; Autumn celebrated it in a later painting, Dripping Ideas, in which the sky, her imagination, drips ideas down to the ground where they land, sprout, and bloom into paintings. Her white room is just over the hills in the background of the piece. “Sometimes I wish I could live in my white room,” she once wrote. After Autumn discovered her white room, she quit piano lessons. She ran out to her art studio as often as possible.

  She never took formal art classes; “I think it was because I wanted it to be from me, and me only.” Instead, she learned from the masters in a self-assigned, self-designed independent study. During a visit to a bookstore, Autumn found a large tome filled with images of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s works. She asked for it, and her parents bought it.

  Girl and book were inseparable. Autumn looked at it in the morning, thought about it during school, and rushed right back to it when she got home. She couldn’t read much of the text, but the pictures entranced her. She stared at the images, soaking in the work of a professional artist.

  One volume followed another: Autumn lost herself in books on Salvador Dalí, Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. Doug put together a mini-library under the TV where Autumn could keep her books.

  In the studio, Autumn experimented, testing out unconventional tools. She plucked a plant out of the ground and whacked the canvas with it to create Fire, another large abstract. Once, frustrated by her paintbrush and “such in a hurry with my ideas,” she swiped a spatula from a kitchen drawer and used it to apply paint to canvas.

  She thought up a series of new techniques and worked them into her paintings whenever inspiration struck: the stink eye (hold a stick six inches from the canvas, place the palette knife between the stick and the canvas, close one eye so that the two line up, and paint the tree—“it came out pretty perfectly”); pole painting (put complementary colors on one end of the painting, place a long, thick wire just before the paint, and pull it over the paint to make “a beautiful streak of colors”); and wind painting (“how nature would paint”: use a shop vac or an air compressor to blow paint across the canvas).

  Doug devoted himself to keeping Autumn’s materials at the ready. When he wasn’t working, he prepped her canvases, videoed her in action, and soaped her up and sprayed her down when she was finished. “It takes an incredible amount of, I hate to say effort, to make things effortless for her, and I was committed to making things effortless for her,” Doug said. “It was about, quite honestly, doing whatever I had to do to capture that lightning in a bottle because I didn’t want the spell to break.”

  A constant, heavy flow of artwork emerged from Autumn’s studio. The completed works migrated into the house. Autumn churned out new pieces faster than Katherine and Doug could hang them.

  As Autumn approached her seventh birthday, she told her parents that she wanted to show her work. That April, Doug rented a van and packed up fifteen of her paintings. Doug, Katherine, Autumn, and Sarah (Autumn’s pink Pegasus stuffed animal) drove to the Boulder City Fine Arts Festival. When they arrived, Doug wrestled their tent into place. They hauled Autumn’s artwork into their tent and then waited.

  The first people to filter in walked away without really engaging. “We didn’t get that people wouldn’t know she was the artist,” Doug said. “They saw a forty-year-old man and a little girl, and they thought it was bring-your-kid-to-work day.”

  Autumn and Doug invented a game: Autumn pretended that the people at the event were gazelle
s (or, in Autumn’s words, “fancy deer”) and she was a cheetah; her job was to catch them. She stuck out her hand fearlessly to anyone in the vicinity, introduced herself, and launched into a discussion of her art before they could slip away. For Autumn, talking about her work felt like a second awakening. “I got that kind of comforting feeling,” Autumn recalled, describing the sensation as similar, though not precisely the same, as the one she gets when painting. She received a badge for participating in the event; that night, she slept with it still pinned to her shirt.

  The next day, they returned with a banner and a picture of Autumn, inviting people to meet the artist. People came in; Autumn, now with a day of experience under her belt, lit into her presentation. “By the time we went home on that Sunday afternoon, she was literally a different person than the little girl that we went down on the Friday afternoon with. I mean chemically, in her brain, she was a different person, her identity as a creator, as an artist, as an individual, as someone with things to say, with insights and legitimate statements of creativity. I mean, it was uncanny,” Doug said. “It was almost like the die was cast.”

  The next month, Autumn brought her work to the Boulder City Spring Jamboree. There were more gazelles to snare; there was more talking about her artwork. This time, the family was prepared. They had a sign made that read, “Autumn at six.” Autumn wore a pink T-shirt and perched a pink sun hat over her long red hair; she positioned herself inside the tent and waited. As the temperature rose and Autumn’s face grew splotchy from the heat, her mother tried to persuade her to go inside. Autumn refused. They compromised on a lunch break, but the whole time Autumn was itching to get back—gazelles were walking right past her tent; they were getting away! Autumn won best in show for Sunrise, a large piece with yellow streaks of paint bursting forth from a pale yellow center. She left the event exhilarated. She couldn’t imagine doing anything else with her life. As Autumn told Girls’ Life magazine, “My spirit was on fire.”