by Oliver Sacks
Finally, after eleven hours of slow traveling—rural Russia slowly unrolling before us—we arrived at a grand station in Leningrad, a station of faded, prerevolutionary, czarist splendor. The whole panorama of the city, with its fine, low, eighteenth-century buildings, its sense of European cosmopolitan civilization, could be seen from our hotel windows, glittering in the northern white night. Stephen was eager to see it in full daylight and decided he would draw it the next morning, first thing. I was not in the room when he started, but Margaret told me later that he made an interesting false start. There was a famous old cruiser, the Aurora, moored in the Neva, and Stephen had drawn it way out of proportion to the buildings on the other side. When he realized what he had done, he said, “I’ll just start again. It’s no good. It won’t work.” He tore off another sheet of paper and started again.
The flagrant incongruity, initially, between boat and buildings made me think of other, smaller incongruities in his work, the fact that he might use multiple perspectives in his drawings and that these did not always precisely coincide. 98
98. This was pointed out to me, with many examples, by a very acute correspondent, John Williamson, of Brownsville, Texas, who plans to write about them at length.
Later that day, we went to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and found ourselves, unexpectedly, in the middle of a Russian Orthodox wedding. The choir consisted of a gaunt, ragged huddle, led by a blind woman with blazing blue eyes. But their voices were marvelous, almost beyond bearing, especially that of the basso profundo, who looked, Margaret and I felt, like an escapee from the Gulag. Margaret thought that Stephen was unaffected by their voices, but I felt the opposite, that he was profoundly affected—a measure of how difficult it was, at times, to know what he was feeling.
The climax of our time in Leningrad was a visit to the Hermitage, but Stephen showed a somewhat childish reaction to the incredible paintings there. “See how it’s built up in blocks?” Margaret said of one Picasso, a woman with a tilted head. Stephen merely asked, “Has she got a pain?”
Margaret told Stephen to take special note of the Matisse Dance, and Stephen gazed at it, without much sign of interest, for a full thirty seconds. Back in London, Margaret suggested he draw it, and he did—unhesitatingly, brilliantly. It was only later that a curious conflation was noted (again by the observant Mr. Williamson): Stephen had used the forms of the dancers in the Hermitage painting but had given them the colors of another version of the painting (which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York). His sister, Annette, it turned out, had given him a poster of the MOMA Dance years before, and now he gave the “American” colors to the “Russian” picture. One might wonder whether this was a lapse of memory or a confusion, but Stephen, I suspect, was being playful, and decided to give the Hermitage picture the MOMA colors, as he decided to give the History Museum onion domes (or, for that matter, my house a chimney, or, in another drawing, the Rockefeller Center Prometheus a penis).
Weary from a day of touring and drawing, we left the Hermitage and headed back to our hotel for tea. Seeing that Stephen needed some diversion, Margaret said to him, “You be the teacher now—You, Oliver, the pupil.”
A glint appeared in Stephen’s eye. “What is two take away one?” he asked.
“One”, I said promptly.
“Good! Now twenty minus ten?”
I pretended to think for a bit, then said, “Ten.”
“That’s very good”, Stephen said. “Now sixty minus ten?”
I cogitated hard, screwed up my face. “Forty?” I said.
“No”, said Stephen. “Wrong. Think!”
I tried to help myself by holding up my fingers in multiples of ten. “I’ve got it—fifty.”
“Right”, said Stephen, with an approving smile. “Very good. Now, forty minus twenty.”
That was really difficult. I thought for a full minute. “Ten?” “No”, said Stephen. “You must concentrate! But you did pretty well”, he added kindly.
The episode was a stunning imitation of an arithmetic lesson such as one might give to a retarded child. Stephen’s voice, his gestures, mimicked to perfection those of a well-meaning but condescending teacher, specifically (I felt with some discomfort) mine when I had tested him in London. He had not forgotten this. It was a lesson to me, to all of us, never to underestimate him. Stephen delighted in reversing roles, just as in his cartoon of himself fanning me.
The Russia trip was in some ways delightful, exciting, in others saddening, disappointing, disillusioning. I had hoped to get behind Stephen’s autism, to see the person underneath, the mind; but there had been only the merest intimation of this. I had hoped, perhaps sentimentally, for some depth of feeling from him; my heart had leapt at the first “Hullo, Oliver!” but there had been no follow-up. I wanted to be liked by Stephen, or at least seen as a distinct person—but there was something, not unfriendly, but de-differentiating in his attitude, even in his indifferent, automatic good manners and good humor. I had wanted some interaction,—instead, I got a slight sense, perhaps, of how parents of autistic children must feel when they find themselves faced with a virtually unresponsive child. I had still, in some sense, been expecting a relatively normal person, with certain gifts and certain problems—now I had the sense of a radically different, almost alien mode of mind and being, proceeding in its own way, not to be defined by any of my own norms.
Yet there were times—the egg cracking, the pupil-and-teacher game together—when I felt a current between us, so I still hoped for some sort of relationship with him and made a point of visiting him each time I went to London, generally a few times a year. On one or two occasions I was able simply to go for a walk with Stephen. I hoped, still, that he might unwind, show me something of his spontaneous, “real” self. But though he would always greet me with his cheery “Hullo, Oliver!” he remained as courteous, as grave, as remote as ever.
There was, however, one enthusiasm we shared—a fondness for car spotting. Stephen especially liked the grand convertibles of the 1950s and 1960s. My favorite cars, by contrast, were the sports cars of my youth—Bristols, Frazer-Nashes, old Jags, Aston Martins. Between us we could identify most of the cars on the road, and Stephen, I think, came to see me as an ally or comrade in the game of car spotting—but this was as close as we ever got.
Floating Cities was published in February of 1991, and quickly went to the top of the bestseller list in England. Stephen was told this, and said, “Very nice!” He seemed unaffected or uncomprehending, and that was the sum of it. He was, at this point, going to a new technical school, learning to be a cook, taking public transport, and beginning to acquire some of the skills of independent life. But Sundays remained consecrated to drawing, and his work, commissioned and uncommissioned, multiplied each weekend.
The question of Stephen’s artistic talents often reminded me of Martin, a retarded musical and mnemonic savant whom I saw in the 1980s. Martin loved operas—his father had been a famous opera singer—and could retain them after a single hearing. (“I know more than two thousand operas”, he once told me.) But his greatest passion was for Bach, and I thought it curious that this simple man should have such a passion. Bach seemed so intellectual, and Martin was a retardate. What I did not realize—until I started bringing in cassettes of the cantatas, of the Goldberg Variations, and once of the Magnificat—was that, whatever his general intellectual limitations, Martin had a musical intelligence fully up to appreciating all the structural rules and complexities of Bach, all the intricacies of contrapuntal and fugal writing; he had the musical intelligence of a professional musician.
I had never before properly recognized the cognitive structure of savant talents. I had, by and large, taken them to be an expression of rote memory and little else. Martin, indeed, had a prodigious memory, but it was clear that this memory, in relation to Bach, was structural or categorical (and specifically architectonic)—he understood how the music went together, how this variation was an inversion of
that, how different voices could take up a line and combine them in a canon or fugue, and he could construct a simple fugue himself. He knew, for at least a few bars ahead, how a line would go. He could not formulate this, it was not explicit or conscious, but there was a remarkable implicit understanding of musical form.
Having seen this in Martin, I could now see analogues in the artistic, calendrical, and calculating savants I had also worked with. All of them had a genuine intelligence, but intelligence of a peculiar sort, confined to limited cognitive domains. Indeed, savants provide the strongest evidence that there can be many different forms of intelligence, all potentially independent of each other. The psychologist Howard Gardner expresses this in Frames of Mind:
In the case of the idiot savant—we behold the unique sparing of one particular human ability against a background of mediocre or highly retarded human performances in other domains—the existence of these populations allows us to observe the human intelligence in relative—even splendid—isolation.
Gardner postulates a multitude of separate and separable intelligences—visual, musical, lexical, etc.—all of them autonomous and independent, with their own powers of apprehending regularities and structures in each cognitive domain, their own “rules”, and probably their own neural bases. 99
99. In a rare congenital condition, Williams syndrome, there is astonishing verbal (and social) precocity, combined with intellectual (and visual) defects—an extreme scatter between different intelligences. The combination of linguistic giftedness with intellectual deficiency is especially startling: children with Williams syndrome often appear exceptionally self-possessed, articulate, and witty, and only gradually is their mental deficit borne in on one. The precise neuroanatomical correlates of this are being investigated by Ursula Bellugi and others.
In the early 1980s this notion was put to the test by Beate Hermelin and her colleagues, exploring the powers of many different forms of savant talents. They found that visual savants were far more efficient than normal people at extracting the essential features from a scene or design, and at drawing these, and that their memory was not photographic or eidetic, but, rather, categorical and analytic, with a power to select and seize on “significant features”, using these to build their own images.
It was also evident that once a structural “formula” had been extracted, it could be used to generate permutations and variations. Hermelin and her colleagues, along with Treffert, also worked with the blind, retarded, and enormously gifted musical prodigy Leslie Lemke, who, like Blind Tom a century ago, is as renowned for his improvisational powers as for his incredible musical memory. Lemke catches the style of any composer, from Bach to Bartok, after a single hearing, and can thereafter play any piece or improvise, effortlessly, in that style.
These studies seemed to confirm that there were indeed a number of separate, autonomous cognitive powers or intelligences, each with its own algorithms and rules, precisely as Gardner had hypothesized. There had been a certain tendency before this to see savant abilities as extraordinary, as freakish; but now they seemed to be brought back into the realm of the “normal”, differing from ordinary abilities only by being isolated and heightened in degree.
But do savant powers really resemble normal ones? One cannot have contact with a Stephen, a Nadia, a Martin, with any savant, without sensing something deeply other in action. It is not just that savant performances are off the scale, statistically, or incredibly precocious in their first appearance (Martin could sing bits of operas before he was two)—but that they seem to deviate radically from normal developmental patterns. This was particularly clear with Nadia, who seemingly skipped the normal scribbling, schematic, and tadpole stages, and when she drew did so in a way unlike any normal child. So it was with Stephen, who at seven, we know from Chris, did “the most unchildlike drawings” he had ever seen.
The other side of the prodigiousness and precocity, the unchildlikeness, of savant gifts is that they do not seem to develop as normal talents do. They are fully fledged from the start. Stephen’s art at seven was clearly prodigious, but at nineteen, though he may have developed a bit socially and personally, his talent itself had not developed too greatly. Savant talents in some ways resemble devices, ready-made, preset, and ready to go off. And this is how Gardner speaks of them: “Assume that the human mind consists of a series of highly tuned computational devices—and that we differ vastly from one another in the extent to which each of these devices is ‘primed’ to go off.”
Savant talents, further, have a more autonomous, even automatic quality than normal ones. They do not seem to occupy the mind or attention fully—Stephen will look around, listen to his Walkman, sing, or even talk while he is drawing; Jedediah Buxton’s huge calculations moved ahead at their own fixed, imperturbable rate while he went on with his daily life. Savant talents do not seem to connect, as normal talents do, to the rest of the person. All this is strongly suggestive of a neural mechanism different from that which underlies normal talents.
It may be that savants have a highly specialized, immensely developed system in the brain, a “neuromodule, ” and that this is “switched on” at particular times—when the right stimulus (musical, visual, whatever) meets the system at the right time—and immediately starts to operate full blast. Thus, for the twin calendar savants, seeing an almanac at the age of six set off their extraordinary calendrical skill—they were able, straightaway, to see large-scale structural regularities in the calendar, perhaps to extract unconscious rules and algorithms, to see how the correspondence of dates and days could be predicted, which the rest of us, if we could do at all, could do only with consciously worked out algorithms and a great deal of time and practice.
The converse of this sudden kindling or turning on is also seen on occasion in the sudden disappearance of savant talents, whether in retarded or autistic savants, or normal individuals with savant capacities. Vladimir Nabokov possessed, in addition to his many other talents, a prodigious calculating gift, but this disappeared suddenly and completely, he wrote, following a high fever, with delirium, at the age of seven. Nabokov felt that the calculating gift, which came and went so mysteriously, had little to do with “him” and seemed to obey laws of its own—it was different in kind from the rest of his powers.
Normal talents do not come and go in this way; they show development, persist, enlarge, take on a personal style as they establish connections, and embed themselves, increasingly, in the mind and personality. They lack the peculiar isolation, uninfluenceability, and automaticity of savant talents. 100
100. It is possible for savant and normal talents to coexist, sometimes in separate spheres (as with Nabokov); sometimes, confusingly, in the same sphere. I have had this impression strongly with an extremely gifted young man I have known since infancy. At two, Eric W. could read fluently—but this was not just hyperlexia,—he read with comprehension. At the same age he could repeat any melody he heard, harmonize in singing with it, and had a grasp of fugue and counterpoint. By three he was doing remarkable drawings with perspective. At ten he wrote his first string quartet. He showed great scientific powers in early adolescence, and now, in his early twenties, is doing fundamental work in chemistry. (I never had any sense of Eric W. being autistic—he was full of spontaneity and playfulness as a child, and is full of deep feeling as an adult.) Had he had only savant talents, they would not have been capable of significant development or integration. Had he had only normal talents (at least in the graphic sphere) they would not have been presented in such a savantlike fashion. He has been singularly fortunate in having both.
But a mind is not just a collection of talents. One cannot maintain a purely composite or modular view of the mind, as many neurologists and psychologists now do. This removes that general quality of mind—call it reach or range or size or spaciousness—that is always instantly recognizable in normal people. It is a capacity that seems to be supramodal, and that shines through whatever particular talents ther
e are. This is what we mean when we say that someone has “a fine mind.” A modular view of the mind, no less importantly, also removes the personal center, the self, the “I.” Normally, there is a cohering and unifying power (Coleridge calls it an “esemplastic” power) that integrates all the separate faculties of mind, integrates them, too, with our experiences and emotions, so that they take on a uniquely personal cast. It is this global or integrating power that allows us to generalize and reflect, to develop subjectivity and a self-conscious self.
Kurt Goldstein was especially interested in such a global capacity, which he referred to as the organism’s “abstract-categorical capacity”, or “abstract attitude.” Part of Goldstein’s work was concerned with the effects of brain damage, and he found that whenever there was extensive damage, or damage involving the frontal lobes of the brain, there tended to be, over and above the impairments of specific abilities (linguistic, visual, whatever), an impairment of abstract-categorical capacity—often as damaging as, sometimes far more damaging than, the specific impairments. Goldstein also explored various developmental problems and (with his colleagues Martin Scheerer and Eva Rothmann) published the deepest study ever made of an idiot savant. Their subject, L., was a profoundly autistic boy, with remarkable musical, “mathematical”, and memorial talents. In their 1945 paper “A Case of ‘Idiot Savant’: An Experimental Study of Personality Organization”, they comment on the limitations of a multifactorial, or composite, theory of mind: