An Anthropologist on Mars (1995)

by Oliver Sacks

  Prodigious calculators attracted attention in the eighteenth century—Jedediah Buxton, a simpleminded laborer, had perhaps the most tenacious memory of these. When asked what would be the cost of shoeing a horse with a hundred and forty nails if the price was one farthing for the first nail, then doubled for each remaining nail, he arrived at the (nearly correct) figure of 725,958,096,074,907,868,531,656,993,638,851,106 pounds, 2 shillings, and 8 pence. When he was then asked to square this number (that is, 2139 squared), he came up with (after two and a half months) a seventy-eight digit answer. Though some of Buxton’s calculations took weeks or months, he was able to work, to hold conversations, to live his life normally, while doing them. The prodigious calculations proceeded almost automatically, only throwing their results into consciousness when completed.

  Child prodigies, of course, are not necessarily retarded or autistic—there have been itinerant calculators of normal intelligence as well. One such was George Parker Bidder, who as a child and youth gave exhibitions in England and Scotland. He could mentally determine the logarithm of any number to seven or eight places and, apparently intuitively, could divine the factors for any large number. Bidder retained his powers throughout life (and indeed made great use of them in his profession as an engineer) and often tried to delineate the procedures by which he calculated. In this, however, he was unsuccessful; he could only say of his results that “they seem to rise with the rapidity of lightning” in his mind, but that their actual operations were largely inaccessible to him. 92

  92. Later, Bidder described some of the techniques and algorithms which he found himself using; though their discovery in the first place, as well as their use, seemed to be unconscious. In our own time, A.C. Aitken, a great mathematician and calculator, observes:

  I have noticed at times that the mind has anticipated the will; I have had an answer before I even wished to do the calculation; I have checked it, and am always surprised that it is correct. This, I suppose (but the terminology may not be right), is the subconscious in action; I think it can be in action at several levels; and I believe that each of these levels has its own velocity, different from that of our ordinary waking time, in which our processes of thought are rather tardy. (This is cited by Steven B. Smith in “Calculating Prodigies.”)

  His son, also intellectually gifted, was a natural calculator as well, though not as prodigious.

  Besides these major domains of savant expertise, some savants have astonishing verbal powers—the last thing one might expect in intellectually defective individuals. Thus there are savants who are able, by the age of two, to read books and newspapers with the utmost facility but without the least comprehension (their expertise, their decoding, is wholly phonological and syntactic, without any sense of meaning).

  Almost all savants have prodigious powers of memory. Dr. J. Langdon Down, one of the greatest observers in this realm, who coined the term “idiot savant” in 1887, remarked that “extraordinary memory was often associated with very great defect of reasoning power.” He describes giving one of his patients Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The patient had read the entire book and in a single reading imprinted it in memory. But he had skipped a line on one page, an error at once detected and corrected. “Ever after”, Down tells us, “when reciting from memory the stately periods of Gibbon, he would, on coming to the third page, skip the line and go back and correct the error with as much regularity as if it had been part of the regular text.” Martin A., a savant I wrote about in “A Walking Grove”, could recall the entire nine volumes of Grove’s 1954 Dictionary of Music and Musicians. This had been read to him by his father, and the text would be “replayed” in his father’s voice.

  There is a large variety of minor savant skills, frequently described by physicians like Down and Tredgold, who consulted at institutions for the “mentally defective.” Tredgold describes J.H. Pullen, “the Genius of Earlswood Asylum”, who for more than fifty years made extremely intricate models of ships and machines, as well as a very real guillotine, which almost killed one of his attendants. Tredgold writes of an otherwise retarded savant who could “get” a complex mechanism like a watch and disassemble and reassemble it swiftly, with no prior instruction. More recently, physicians have described idiot savants with extraordinary bodily skills, able to perform acrobatic maneuvers and athletic feats with the greatest facility—again, with no formal training. (In the 1960s, I saw, on a back ward, such a savant myself—he had been described to me as “an idiot Nijinsky.”) 93

  93. Tredgold writes of savants with various sensory powers and skills, of olfactory savants—and of a tactile savant, too:

  Dr. J. Langdon Down told me of a boy at Normansfleld whose sense of touch was so delicate and his Angers so deft that he could take a sheet of the Graphic and gradually split it into two perfect sheets, as one would peel a postage stamp off an envelope.

  While early medical observers sometimes conceived of savant skills as the hypertrophy of a single mental faculty, there was little sense that savant talents were of much more than anecdotal interest. An exception here was the eccentric psychologist F.W. H. Myers, who, in his great turn-of-the-century book, Human Personality, tried to analyze the processes by which prodigious calculators arrived at their results. He was unable to do so, any more than could the calculators themselves, but he believed that a process of “subliminal” mentation or computation was involved, which threw its results into consciousness when complete. Their methods of calculation seemed to be—unlike the formal or formulary methods taught in primers and schools—idiosyncratic and personal, achieved by each calculator through an individual path. Myers was one of the first to write about unconscious or preconscious cognitive processes and foresaw that an understanding of idiots savants and their gifts could open not only into a general understanding of the nature of intelligence and talent but into that vast realm that we now call the cognitive unconscious.

  In the 1940s, when autism was first delineated, it became evident that the majority of idiot savants were in fact autistic and that the incidence of savantism in the autistic—nearly 10 percent—was almost two hundred times its incidence in the retarded population, and thousands of times that of the population at large. Furthermore, it became clear that many autistic savants had multiple talents—musical, mnemonic, visual-graphic, computational, and so on.

  In 1977, the psychologist Lorna Seife published Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an Autistic Child. Nadia suddenly started drawing at the age of three and a half, rendering horses, and later a variety of other subjects, in a way that psychologists considered “not possible.” Her drawings, they felt, were qualitatively different from those of other children: she had a sense of space, an ability to depict appearances and shadows, a sense of perspective such as the most gifted normal child might only develop at three times her age. She constantly experimented with different angles and perspectives. Whereas normal children go through a developmental sequence from random scribbling to schematic and geometric figures to “tadpole” figures, Nadia seemed to bypass these and to move at once into highly recognizable, detailed representational drawings. The development of drawing in children, it was felt at the time, paralleled the development of conceptual powers and language skills; but Nadia, it seemed, just drew what she saw, without the usual need to “understand” or “interpret” it. She not only showed enormous graphic gifts, an unprecedented precocity, but drew in a way that attested to a wholly different mode of perception and mind. 94

  94. Though prodigious musical abilities tend to show themselves extremely early—almost all the great composers exemplify this—“there are no prodigies in art”, as Picasso said. (Picasso himself was a remarkable draftsman at ten, but could not draw horses at three, like Nadia, or cathedrals at seven.) There must be fundamental neurodevelopmental and cognitive reasons for this. Though Yani, a non-autistic Chinese girl, showed her artistic powers very early—she had done thousands of paintings by the age of
six—her paintings are those of a very gifted, sensitive (and highly trained) child, arising from a normal, albeit accelerated, perceptual development, which was undoubtedly encouraged by her artist father. Her paintings are quite unlike the suddenly appearing, full-blown, “unchildlike” drawings characteristic of prodigious graphic savants like Stephen Wiltshire. There may, of course, exist in some non-autistic people a mixture of savant and normal talents (see footnote 100).

  The case of Nadia—set out at monographic length and minutely documented—aroused great excitement in the neurological and psychological communities and suddenly focused a belated attention on savant talents and on the nature of talents and special abilities in general. Where, for a century or more, neurologists had confined their attention to failures and breakdowns of neural function, there was now a move in the other direction, to exploring the structure of heightened powers, of talents, and their biological basis in the brain. Here idiot savants provided unique opportunities, for they seemed to exhibit a large range of inborn talents—raw, pure expressions of the biological: much less dependent upon, or influenced by, environmental and cultural factors than the talents of “normal” people.

  In June of 1987, I received a large packet from a publisher in England. It was full of drawings, drawings that delighted me greatly because they portrayed many of the landmarks I had grown up with in London: monumental buildings like St. Paul’s, St. Paneras Station, the Albert Hall, the Natural History Museum; and others, odd, sometimes out of the way, but dear and familiar places, like the Pagoda in Kew Gardens. They were very accurate, but not in the least mechanical—on the contrary, they were full of energy, spontaneity, oddity, life.

  In the packet, I discovered a letter from the publisher: the artist, Stephen Wiltshire, was autistic and had shown savant abilities from an early age. His London Alphabet, a sequence of twenty-six drawings, had been done when he was ten; an amazing elevator shaft, with a vertiginous perspective, when he was eight. One drawing was an imagined scene, of St. Paul’s surrounded by flames in the Great Fire of London. Stephen was not merely a savant but a prodigy. Sixty of his drawings, a mere fraction of what he had done, were to be published, the letter informed me; the author was just thirteen.

  Stephen’s drawings reminded me, in many ways, of drawings by my patient José—“The Autist Artist” whom I had known and written about, years before—with an extraordinary eye and gift for drawing. Though José and Stephen came from such different backgrounds, the similarity of their drawings was so uncanny as to make me wonder whether there might not be a distinctive “autistic” form of perception and art. But José, despite his fine gifts (not, perhaps, as great as Stephen’s, but quite remarkable nonetheless), was wasting away in a state psychiatric hospital; Stephen had somehow been luckier.

  A few weeks later, visiting family and friends in England, I mentioned Stephen and his drawings to my brother, David, a general practitioner in northwest London. “Stephen Wiltshire!” he exclaimed, very startled. “He’s a patient of mine—I’ve known Stephen since he was three.”

  David told me something of Stephen’s background. He was born in London in April of 1974, the second child of a West Indian transit worker and his wife. Unlike his older sister, Annette, born two years earlier, Stephen showed some delay in the motor landmarks of infant life—sitting, standing, hand control, walking—and a resistance to being held. In his second and third years, more problems appeared. He would not play with other children and tended to scream or hide in a corner if they approached. He would not make eye contact with his parents or anyone else. Sometimes he seemed deaf to people’s voices, though his hearing was normal (and thunder terrified him). Perhaps most disquieting, he did not use language; he was virtually mute.

  Just before Stephen’s third birthday, his father was killed in a motorcycle accident. Stephen had been strongly attached to him and after his death grew much more disturbed. He started screaming, rocking, and flapping his hands and lost what little language he had. At this point the diagnosis of infantile autism had been made, and arrangements made for him to attend a special school for developmentally disabled children. Lorraine Cole, the headmistress at Queensmill, observed that Stephen was very remote when he started school at the age of four. He seemed unaware of other people and showed no interest in his surroundings. He would simply wander about aimlessly or occasionally run out of the room. As Cole writes:

  He had virtually no understanding of or interest in the use of language. Other people held no apparent meaning for him except to fulfill some immediate, unspoken need; he used them as objects. He could not tolerate frustration, nor changes in routine or environment and he responded to any of these with desperate, angry roaring. He had no idea of play, no normal sense of danger and little motivation to undertake any activity except scribbling.

  She later wrote to me, “Stephen would climb onto a play-bike, pedal it furiously, then hurl himself off it, roaring with laughter, and sometimes screaming.”

  Yet at this point the first evidence of his visual preoccupation, and talent, appeared. He seemed fascinated by shadows, shapes, angles, and by the age of five he was fascinated by pictures, too. He would make “sudden dashes to other rooms, where he would stare intently at pictures which fascinated him”, Cole writes. “He would find paper and pencil and scribble, totally absorbed for long periods.”

  Stephen’s “scribblings” were largely of cars and occasionally of animals and people. Lorraine Cole speaks of his doing “wickedly clever caricatures” of some of the teachers. But his special interest, his fixation, which developed when he was seven, was the drawing of buildings—buildings in London he had seen on school trips or that he had seen on television or in magazines. Why he developed this sudden, special interest and preoccupation so powerful and exclusive that he now had no impulse to draw anything else is not wholly clear. Such fixations are exceedingly common in autistic people. Jessy Park, an autistic artist, is obsessed with weather anomalies and constellations in the night sky; 95 Shyoichiro Yamamura, an autistic artist in Japan, drew insects almost exclusively; and Jonny, an autistic boy described by the pioneer psychologist Mira Rothenberg, for a period drew only electric lamps, or buildings and people composed of electric lamps. Stephen, from this very early age, had been almost exclusively preoccupied with buildings—buildings, by preference, of great complexity and size—and also with aerial views and extremities of perspective. He had one other interest at the age of seven: he was fascinated by sudden calamities, and above all by earthquakes.

  95. Meeting a young physicist-astronomer, Ben Oppenheimer, recently, I mentioned Jessy’s paintings, and showed him copies of some. He was astounded at their astronomical accuracy, and was reminded of an amateur astronomer and minister, Robert Evans, in Australia. Evans single-handedly, with a small telescope, observed the incidence of supernovae in a sample of 1017 bright (Shapley-Ames) galaxies which he observed for a period of five years (examining, Oppenheimer calculates, sixty or moie galaxies each night); he went on from this to deduce a new figure for the supernova rate in such galaxies. (This work was published by van den Bergh, McClure, and Evans in The Astrophysical Journal.) Evans used no photographic or electronic assistance, and thus seemed able to construct and hold in his mind an absolutely precise and stable image or map of more than a thousand galaxies, as seen in the southern sky. It seems likely that his memory is either eidetic or savantlike, though there is no suggestion that he is autistic.

  Whenever Stephen drew these, or saw them on television or in magazines, he grew strangely excited and overwrought—nothing else disturbed him in quite this way. One wonders whether his earthquake obsession (like the apocalyptic fantasies of some psychotics) represented a sense of his own inner instability, which in drawing he could try to master.

  When Chris Marris, a young teacher, came to Queensmill in 1982, he was astonished by Stephen’s drawings. Marris had been teaching disabled children for nine years, but nothing he had ever seen had prepared him for S
tephen. “I was amazed by this little boy, who sat on his own in a corner of the room, drawing”, he told me. “Stephen used to draw and draw and draw and draw—the school called him ‘the drawer.’ And they were the most unchildlike drawings, like St. Paul’s and Tower Bridge and other London landmarks, in tremendous detail, when other children his age were just drawing stick figures. It was the sophistication of his drawings, their mastery of line and perspective, that amazed me—and these were all there when he was seven.”

  Stephen was one of a group of six in Chris’s class. “He knew the names of all the others”, Chris told me, “but there was no sense of interaction or friendship with them. He was such an isolated little chap.” But his native gift was so great, Chris felt, that he did not need to be “taught”, in the ordinary way. He had apparently worked out by himself, or had an innate grasp of, drawing techniques and perspective. Along with this, he showed a prodigious visual memory, which seemed able to take in the most complex buildings, or cityscapes, in a few seconds, and to hold them in mind, in the minutest detail—indefinitely, it seemed, and without the least apparent effort. Nor did the details need to be coherent, to be integrated into a conventional structure; among the most startling early drawings, Chris felt, were ones of demolition sites and earthquake scenes, with girders lying everywhere, exploded in all directions, everything in complete, almost random disarray. Yet Stephen remembered these scenes and drew them with the same fidelity and ease with which he drew classical models. It seemed to make no difference whether he drew from life or from the images in his memory. He needed no aide-mémoire, no sketches or notes—a single sidelong glance, lasting only a few seconds, was enough.