Finally, all the feedback from people who learned about Jake helped shed light on why his story captured the imaginations of so many. Narnie said it best: “Jake is good news.” People right away tapped into the fact that Jake is determined to do something good with his gifts. At a time when newspapers are filled with doom and gloom about America’s children and their terrible reading scores and growing rates of obesity, about guns in schools and Teen Mom on TV, there’s Jake. Indiana’s public schools are struggling so much with their budgets that some of them have cut bus service. There’s not a lot of good news about kids in this country, but Jake is indeed good news.
Jake’s story is an American story, too. Whenever you read about those terrible test scores, the article always ends in the same way. China, or India, or wherever is going to take over because their kids can do math and our kids are hopeless. Of course, that’s not true, but many of the people who contacted us said that’s why they were so heartened to know that Jake was out there. And even though I’m glad that children all over the world who love math are surging forward, I confess that seeing the Wikipedia page about Jake that began “Jacob Barnett, American mathematician,” made my heart soar.
It’s important to Michael and me to explain that there’s nothing supernatural or otherworldly about Jake. Some devotees of the mystical healer and psychic Edgar Cayce believe that Jake is Cayce’s reincarnation, as predicted by Cayce himself. This is a normal Saturday for me: I pick up the phone and have a conversation with someone who believes that my son is the fulfillment of some mystical prediction.
But Jake is not supernatural. He doesn’t even come from a private school in Manhattan. He lives in a cornfield in Indiana. He doesn’t look different from other kids his age, and he doesn’t act differently either, at least not most of the time. He’s just a goofy, adorable kid in a backward baseball cap who can do incredible things. Wrapped up in a very ordinary-looking package is this extraordinary mind.
Michael and I agreed to do the CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes partly to dispel any kind of supernatural myth. The first time the producer called, we honestly felt as if we’d entered the Twilight Zone. “We’re going to hear Rod Serling’s voiceover any minute now,” Mike wrote on our phone pad, cracking me up. But after we talked to the producer, we believed the show was committed to doing a thoughtful piece. I felt that I could trust them not to make Jake seem like some freak of nature. And I knew that if we gave hope to even one mom who was being told by experts all the things her autistic kid couldn’t do, it would be worth it.
Knowing 60 Minutes will be filming in your house is an excellent way to get your husband to deal with all those annoying little projects he’s been putting off. If you’d told me ten years ago I’d be yelling, “Jacob Barnett, you’d better be darn sure that Van de Graaff generator of yours doesn’t electrocute Morley Safer” up the stairs—well, I just don’t know what I would have said.
A Roller-Coaster Ride
After the article appeared in The Indianapolis Star, we were inundated by requests for interviews. A lot of them came from academics interested in talking to Jake. One email in particular stood out, from a doctor at Ohio State University who studies child prodigies.
I’ll be totally honest. I approached the email with a kind of horror. There was something a little unseemly about the idea of allowing my child to be used for scientific research, and I wasn’t interested in it at all. Mike couldn’t resist ribbing Jake about it: “We’re donating you to science!”
Jake responded dryly, “They can study me when I’m dead.”
But as soon as I opened Dr. Joanne Ruthsatz’s message, I could see that I had judged her too quickly. First of all, the research she was doing was itself compelling. Dr. Ruthsatz specializes in the genetic underpinnings that prodigies and autistic people have in common. Jake was already very interested in that topic, particularly because it has the potential to help a lot of people who are genuinely suffering.
In addition, Dr. Ruthsatz sounded like a real person, and she also sounded like someone who would treat Jake like a real person, not a rat in a maze. Her playful energy and her passion for her research were contagious. She invited us to come to Ohio.
By that point, Michael and I were starting to think that it might not be a bad idea to get away for a while. The media storm had abated slightly, but we were still getting many calls a day and being approached whenever we went out. The clincher was that Dr. Ruthsatz could get us passes to Cedar Point, a gigantic amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio, with more than seventy-five different rides, including sixteen roller coasters.
We drove to Ohio, and Dr. Ruthsatz arrived at our hotel the next morning to administer a new IQ assessment of Jake. The way she set up the test confirmed the good feeling I’d had about her. While Mike took Ethan and Wes to the pool, Jake was comfortably ensconced in a quiet sunroom looking out onto a pretty little garden. Seated in a wing chair in front of a window, with a tray of muffins in front of him, he began the test.
The Stanford-Binet IQ test is designed in such a way that as long as you’re answering questions correctly within each category, the tester keeps going. The questions get progressively harder as you proceed, until you eventually reach your ceiling in each cognitive area. Answering two consecutive questions incorrectly establishes that ceiling. The second wrong answer acts like a silent buzzer, directing the tester to move on to the next category. Very few people make it to the outer reaches of any one category, let alone more than one category.
Watching Jake, I could see that the harder the questions became, the more fun he seemed to be having. To give you one example, Dr. Ruthsatz read a list of sixty animals to Jake in a completely random order. He repeated them back, in exactly the same order. Next, she showed him a list of the animals, again randomly organized, this time by arbitrarily assigned colors (zebra = green, tiger = purple, dog = blue). Again, he repeated them all back correctly. Then, some twenty minutes later and after several unrelated problems, Jake was again prompted to repeat the animals back to Dr. Ruthsatz. This he did perfectly, still in the right order, in their correct color groupings, and with a huge grin on his face. That was when she turned to me and said, “That’s never been done before. Never, in history.”
Jake was clearly having a blast, but watching them became increasingly uncomfortable for me. The harder the questions got—and by the end, the level of difficulty was almost comical—the more overwhelmed I felt. How could anyone, let alone my own son, be answering these questions? It felt like flying too close to the sun, both breathtaking and terrifying. Of course, I knew that Jake’s IQ was high, and I knew that most twelve-year-olds weren’t studying quantum field theory. But maybe because I was on the other side of the table, a spectator to these amazing feats for the first time, what I saw that morning affected me in a new way. And at the end of the test, when Dr. Ruthsatz quietly closed the booklet and turned to me with tears in her eyes, I actually felt queasy.
Jake had maxed out the test. To reach the end of just one category is extremely rare. Dr. Ruthsatz had seen this happen only a very few times over the course of her career. And she had never seen anyone do what Jake had done, which was to max out the test in so many cognitive areas.
You don’t often come across someone who can tell you something you don’t know about your own child, but that weekend Dr. Ruthsatz helped me understand more about Jake’s incredible mind and how it works. She explained, for instance, that Jake had maxed out in “working memory,” the part of the brain we use when we look up a phone number and commit it to memory long enough to dial it. Most of us have to say the number over and over in order to keep it in our heads, even for a brief time. It’s different for Jake, and not just with a ten-digit phone number, but with twenty-page equations. And while you and I would probably forget that phone number seconds after we dialed it, for Jake it never disappears. He doesn’t remember a fact so much as he relives learning it, which is why he doesn’t need to re-memorize it in order to retri
eve it a week, a month, or even a year later. After he’s seen it, read it, and learned it, the material is there for him whenever he needs it.
That’s why he could learn pi to the two hundredth digit and recite it forward and backward with equal ease. He sees that two-hundred-digit string of numbers in his mind’s eye, and he can hold on to it as easily as we can hold on to two or three digits.
This turbocharged working memory is common in prodigies, part of what makes them able to do what they do. Dr. Ruthsatz believes that prodigies actually use a different part of their brains for working memory than the rest of us do—the part, in fact, that we use for storing the things we never forget, such as riding a bike. That, she believes, is what makes a prodigy’s ability to remember higher-order information so stable and fixed. For Jake, remembering that equation is like remembering how to swim for you and me.
Thinking about it another way, it would be impossible for most people to recite a two-hundred-digit number from memory, but if someone wrote it out for you on a piece of paper, you’d be able to recite it backward and forward with ease, because you’d be reading it. That’s exactly what the experience is like for Jake when he’s recalling a long string of numbers, a list of sixty animals, a complex graph, and so forth. As Dr. Ruthsatz explained it to me, instead of a single sheet of paper containing that two-hundred-digit number, Jake’s working memory is a piece of paper the size of a football field.
The truth is, we have no idea how powerful Jake’s working memory is, since it exceeded the measure of the test. What is certain is that he remembers everything he’s ever learned, and he has all that information immediately accessible to him whenever he wants it. Everyone, even physics professors, use formula sheets. You can find hundreds of them on the Internet, and laminated examples are sold in college bookstores. Students are encouraged to carry them everywhere, including into exams. Nobody on earth could be expected to memorize all the formulas they might need to solve higher-order math and science problems. But Jake has never used a formula sheet in his life.
Although Jake’s working memory is extraordinary in certain areas, it’s not very good in others. His memory for tastes, for instance, is precise, because he’s actually reliving every meal. He can instantly recall physical characteristics of a scene, especially anything that has a pattern to it, which is how he could draw each and every one of the hubcap designs of the cars he saw in the Best Buy parking lot. At the same time, he has a hard time remembering smells, which are powerful memory joggers for most people, and like many autistic people, he has a lot of trouble remembering conversations and what other people have said.
Dr. Ruthsatz was also struck by Jake’s incredibly advanced visual-spatial system, which is extremely rare even in prodigies. If his working memory explains how he can play a piece of classical music after hearing it once, then his visual-spatial abilities are why four-year-old Jake could look at a map for a minute or two and then chart a flawless course through downtown Chicago for me. Or why, more recently, Wesley was so insistent that Jake play with him one afternoon when Jake had research to do. I’d gotten the boys a crate of Popsicle sticks, and they’d been building forts and towns for their toy soldiers.
“You don’t need Jake to build,” I reminded Wes.
He rolled his eyes and said, “Mom, I cannot build Washington, D.C.”
Apparently, after we’d returned from a trip to New York, Jake had built Wes a perfect replica of the city, complete with major landmarks, road systems, and the place we’d stayed. After our trip to Washington, he’d built a replica of that city, too, complete with a tiny, perfect Capitol dome made of overlapping Popsicle sticks. Jake also had built Wes a model of Oahu, because one of Mike’s videogames contained a detailed map of the island. With Google Maps, Wesley explained, there wasn’t any city Jake couldn’t build. “He can build me anywhere I want to go,” he said.
Beyond Popsicle-stick cities, this advanced visual-spatial system is a key element in Jake’s ability to do high-level math and physics. Specifically, Dr. Ruthsatz was able to clarify for me that it is the key to what Jake means when he says that he “does math” in many, many dimensions.
Mathematicians knew the earth wasn’t flat long before Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet proved it. Similarly, many mathematicians hypothesize that there are more dimensions than the three we can perceive, even though they can’t yet prove it. Most people find it relatively easy to think in three dimensions. It’s not hard for you to conjure up the image of an apple or to imagine turning it upside down and around in space. You and I can do that in a way an ant crawling across the surface of that apple never could. To the ant, the “world” of that apple is flat, but we can zoom out and see that it is round.
Jake agrees that there are likely many more dimensions than three, but unlike many scientists, even those who work in this field, Jake is able to conceptualize objects as they might appear in those other dimensions. He doesn’t see them, per se, but he can do the tremendously complex math that would allow for other dimensions, and his visual-spatial gifts allow him to fully process what that math means. So just as you and I know the rules that apply to the apple we’re holding in our mind’s eye—we can visualize what it would be like to cut it in half, to turn it on its side, or to throw it and watch it smash into bits against a wall—Jake is equally agile with the properties and rules that apply to vastly more complex, multidimensional shapes.
This unique marriage of a turbocharged working memory, advanced powers of visual-spatial cognition, and an extraordinary attention to physical detail enables Jake to explore higher math and physics as very few people can. As Dr. Ruthsatz said, “He can see beyond what most of us can cognitively comprehend.”
Dr. Ruthsatz was also able to answer a number of other questions that had been mysteries to us. She explained that when baby Jake was looking right past his therapists, he probably wasn’t staring blankly into space, but concentrating the full force of his focus on the play of light on the wall. When he was rearranging the big box of crayons or putting himself to sleep by his shadow clock, Jake was already engaging the passions that still animate him today: light, the rules governing the movement of objects in space, the different dimensions of space, and the role time plays. In the same way that we can look at an artist’s early work and see the beginnings of the themes and preoccupations that later come to define his or her masterpieces, Jake has been working since babyhood on the very same things he’s interested in today.
Dr. Ruthsatz helped me to see how wide-ranging Jake’s interests are and how unusual that makes him. She was, for instance, amused to learn that Jake has eight whiteboards in his room, each one dedicated to original research in completely different areas of math and physics. Most scientists choose a particular facet of their fields and spend their careers doing research in that area. By contrast, any given day finds Jake switching with ease between subjects such as general relativity, dark matter, string theory, quantum field theory, biophysics, the spin Hall effect, and gamma-ray bursts.
How, you might be asking yourself, could his extraordinary gifts have been a surprise to me? After all, I cleaned up crayons arranged in the order of the color spectrum when he was three, watched him play perfectly a piece of music he’d heard only once at age seven, and called one of the world’s foremost physicists to validate his original theory in astrophysics when he was nine.
I’ve struggled with this question myself. There are, of course, a number of explanations, but I think the real answer lies in my relationship to Jake. Yes, I was the person who drove him down to the university at ten years old and watched him answer questions that stumped his professors. But I was also the person reminding him to pick up the dirty socks scattered all over his bedroom floor when it was time to do laundry, and the person who ordered him fuzzy Crocs from Zappos when it was clear that for all the physics he knew, he’d never remember to tie his own shoelaces. If I had stopped and let myself bask in the awe of Jake’s amazing abilities—if I had stoppe
d to ponder how unusual he really is—I don’t think I could have been a good mother to him.
The only compass I’ve ever followed is to let Jake do the things he loves and to make sure he gets to have a childhood. As shaky as that weekend with Dr. Ruthsatz made me feel, I knew it was time to go back to being Jake’s mom.
So the five of us went to Cedar Point, and I held the corn dogs and soda while my sons rode every single one of those sixteen roller coasters with their dad.
A First Summer Job
Whether you’re a camp counselor or scooping ice cream, early work experiences help a young person assume the kind of responsibilities that come with adulthood. So I always knew that my children would eventually have summer jobs. Jake’s happened to be as a paid researcher in quantum physics at IUPUI.
A mention in The Indianapolis Star was the first I’d heard of Jake doing research. Then, a month later, Jake got a packet in the mail, formally inviting him to be part of an undergraduate research program in the physics department at IUPUI. I was startled to learn that he’d be getting paid, too.
It was an amazing opportunity, and yet I wasn’t sure I wanted Jake to do it. Mostly, it felt like too big a step. Jake was just finishing up his freshman year. The university was adamant that he was ready for bigger challenges, and his professors said they would be derelict not to provide him with them. “Enough of the book work. You are here to do some science,” his physics professor, Dr. John Ross, told him. But I wondered whether they weren’t also motivated by the fact that many elite academic institutions were now actively courting Jake.
I couldn’t help worrying that we were going too fast and putting too much pressure on a twelve-year-old. I also didn’t want Jake to spend his entire summer chained to a computer screen. I wanted him to ride his bike and play paintball with his friends and to swim at the pool until his nose was a blur of freckles running together. I was haunted by the vision of all those gifted kids we’d seen over the years studying for math competitions while other kids their age took part in fun summertime activities.
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