An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

  In July of 1993, Margaret phoned me, beside herself with excitement. “Stephen’s erupted musical powers”, she announced. “Huge powers! You must come and see him straightaway.” I was startled by her call; I had never known her so excited.

  Stephen’s musical talents clearly went back to early childhood, like his artistic talents. Lorraine Cole writes that, even when he was scarcely verbal, he was a natural performer and mime: “His portrayal of an angry man in a restaurant was so spirited and so funny that it was only when we played back the video we had made that we realized he had used no actual words, only a wide range of angry noises. It was then that we understood his capacity for imitating sounds.” This was especially striking after a brief visit to Japan—the sound of the language fascinated him, and when Andrew picked him and Margaret up from Heathrow, Stephen babbled pseudo-Japanese, complete with “Japanese” gestures, to such effect that Andrew almost crashed the car laughing.

  It had been clear to all of us, for years, that Stephen had an immense ability to reproduce instrumental sounds, voices, accents, intonations, melodies, rhythms, arias, songs—complete with words or lyrics when need be—an effortlessly large and accurate auditory memory. And, significantly, he liked music, too; it moved him with an almost physical pleasure, almost more, I think, than drawing did.

  But Margaret, who knew all this better than I, was obviously referring to something more, to some quite new and unexpected breakthrough. The crucial factor, she had said, had been finding the right music teacher for Stephen (“She’s marvelous, darling!”), and they had struck up an instant rapport. I timed a visit to London to coincide with one of their weekly music lessons and took along my niece Liz Chase, a music teacher and pianist with a very acute ear, skilled in improvisation, analysis, and theory.

  Liz and I had been chatting with Evie Preston, his music teacher, for a few minutes when Stephen came in, gustily, at the stroke of twelve. “Hullo, Evie, how are you I am fine”, he said, then, “Hullo Oliver Sacks, how are you?” and, when I introduced my niece, “Hullo Liz Chase, how are you?” He then rushed over to the piano and, under Evie’s bidding, started to play scales, then to sing chords, starting with major triads. He did all this very easily, and gleefully. The idea of thirds, fifths—this Pythagorean, numerical sense of musical intervals—seemed quite innate in Stephen. “I never had to teach him”, Evie remarked.

  He seemed hungry for more. “Let’s do sevenths now”, Evie said, and Stephen nodded and chortled as if he had been promised a chocolate.

  Next, Evie said, “Now we’ll do the blues—you take the top, I’ll do the bass.” Using only three fingers (it looked ungainly, but worked brilliantly), Stephen now improvised an upper voice, full of intriguing, delightful complications. At first he confined his improvisations to the lower half of one octave, but then became bolder, his improvisations steadily becoming wider ranging, more complex. He did six improvisations in all, rising to a climax in the last one. But, Liz said, “Improvisation is easy, you do it off the top of your head.” If one had the musical intelligence to catch the variational structure, she added, an ability to generate variations was almost automatic, a defining quality of intelligence itself. What she did find remarkable was how Stephen had infused his improvisations with feeling, with something of himself; how he had made them “creative, daring, and dramatically interesting.”

  Evie asked Stephen if he would sing “What a Wonderful World.” His singing seemed to be full of genuine feeling, and his gestures while he sang were not his usual stilted, ticlike ones. As soon as the song was over, Evie asked Stephen to analyze it harmonically; to sing and number all the chords. He did so without a moment’s hesitation. “It is clear that he is possessed of quite extraordinary powers of harmonic identification, analysis, and reproduction”, Liz noted. Then Evie gave him an exercise in “interpretation”, as she does every week, playing a theme he had never heard before, Schumann’s “Träumerei.” Stephen listened intently and told us his “associations” as he listened: “It’s about—air in the field, daffodils in springtime—a stream—sunshine—(I love it)—rose gardens—light breezes, fresh—children come out to play with their friends.”

  Was Stephen—so lacking in feeling or cut off from it, for the most part—actually feeling these affects and moods? Or had he learned, been taught somehow, to “decode” music, to learn that such-and-such forms were “pastoral” or “vernal”, and as such would have appropriate images? Was this a sort of trick, performed without any real feeling? I mentioned this thought to Evie later, and she told me that at first his associations to music were random or egocentric, strikingly irrelevant to the actual tone of the piece. She then explained what feelings or images “went with” different forms of music, and now he has learned these. But she thinks he also feels them.

  Finally, it was time for Stephen to choose a song he wanted to perform. He wanted to do “It’s Not Unusual”, a song much to his liking—a piece on which he could really let himself go. He sang with great enthusiasm, swinging his hips, dancing, gesticulating, miming, clutching an imaginary microphone to his mouth, addressing himself in imagination to a vast arena. “It’s Not Unusual” has become the theme song of Tom Jones, and in his version, Stephen took on Jones’s flamboyant physicality, adding to it a flavor of Stevie Wonder. He seemed completely at one with the music, completely possessed—and at this point there was none of the skewed neck posture that is habitual with him, none of the stiltedness, the ticcing, the aversion of gaze. His entire autistic persona, it seemed, had totally vanished, replaced by movements that were free, graceful, with emotional appropriateness and range. Very startled at this transformation, I wrote in large capitals in my notebook, “AUTISM DISAPPEARS.” But as soon as the music stopped, Stephen looked autistic once again.

  Until now, it had seemed to be part of Stephen’s nature, part of being autistic, to be defective precisely in that range of emotions and states of mind that defines a “self” for the rest of us. And yet in the music he seemed to have been “given” these, to have “borrowed” an identity—though these were lost the moment the music ended.

  It was as if, for a brief time, he had become truly alive.

  Stephen’s music lesson, then, was a revelation to me—not just of further talents (not wholly unexpected in an autistic savant), but of a mode of being that I would not have thought available to him. Nothing of what I had seen with him before, and nothing in his art, had quite prepared me for this. He seemed to be using his whole self, his whole body, with all its repertoire of movements and expressions, to sing, to enact the song—though it remained unclear to me whether this was basically a brilliant piece of pantomime or a true entering into the words, the feelings, the inner states of the song. It raised for me (even more acutely than some of his Matisse drawings) the question of whether he treated the originals (paintings or songs) as representations of inwardness, of others’ states of mind, or as objects. Did he, so to speak, enter the painter’s or the songwriter’s head, share their subjectivity, or merely treat their productions (like houses) as purely physical, as objects? (Was his repetition of Rain Man, for that matter, just a literal playback, a mimicry or echolalia, or was it charged with a sense of the significance of the film?) Were his gifts no more than mindless, “ament talents”, in Goldstein’s term, or were they genuine achievements of mind and identity?

  Goldstein is quick to equate “mind” with the abstract-categorical, the conceptual, and to regard anything else as pathological, as sterile. But there are forms of health, of mind, other than the conceptual, although neurologists and psychologists rarely give these their due. There is mimesis—itself a power of mind, a way of representing reality with one’s body and senses, a uniquely human capacity no less important than symbol or language. Merlin Donald, in Origins of the Modern Mind, has speculated that mimetic powers of modeling, of inner representation, of a wholly nonverbal and nonconceptual type, may have been the dominant mode of cognition for a million years or more i
n our immediate predecessor, Homo erectus, before the advent of abstract thought and language in Homo sapiens. 102

  102. Jerome Brimer, who has studied cognitive growth in children so minutely, speaks of “enactive” representation as its first expression. The enactive, he emphasizes, though it is supplemented by subsequently developed forms of cognition or representation (which he terms the “ikonic” and “symbolic”), is not superseded by them, but remains throughout life a potent mode of expression, instantly available for use. So it is with Donald’s mimetic stage—this did not go out with Homo erectus, but remains a perpetual and powerful part of our own “sapient” repertoire. All of us make frequent use of such nonverbal behaviors and communications, and they are supremely developed in mimes, in actors, in all performing artists, and in the deaf.

  As I watched Stephen sing and mime, I wondered if one might not understand at least some aspects of autism and savantism in terms of the normal development, even hypertrophy, of mimesis-based brain systems, this ancient mode of cognition, coupled with a relative failure in the development of more modern, symbol-based ones. And yet, even if some analogies can be drawn here, they are very partial and must not mislead us. Stephen is neither an ament, nor a computer, nor a Homo erectus—all our models, all our terms, break down before him.

  Stephen’s development has been singular, qualitatively different, from the start. He constructs the universe in a different way—and his mode of cognition, his identity, his artistic gifts, go together. We do not know, finally, how Stephen thinks, how he constructs the world, how he is able to draw and sing. But we do know that though he may be lacking in the symbolic, the abstract, he has a sort of genius for concrete or mimetic representations, whether drawing a cathedral, a canyon, a flower, or enacting a scene, a drama, a song—a sort of genius for catching the formal features, the structural logic, the style, the “thisness” (though not necessarily the “meaning”), of whatever he portrays.

  Creativity, as usually understood, entails not only a “what”, a talent, but a “who”—strong personal characteristics, a strong identity, personal sensibility, a personal style, which flow into the talent, interfuse it, give it personal body and form. Creativity in this sense involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one’s mind—while supervising all this with a critical inner eye. Creativity has to do with inner life—with the flow of new ideas and strong feelings.

  Creativity, in this sense, will probably never be possible for Stephen. But the catching of thisness, perceptual genius, is no small gift; it is quite as rare and precious as more intellectual gifts. I once referred to José as living not in a universe, but in what William James called a “multiverse”, of innumerable, unconnected though intensely vivid particulars, and as experiencing the world (in Proust’s term) as “a collection of moments”—vivid, isolated, with no before or after. I imagined José, who liked to draw animals and plants, as an illustrator for botanical works or herbals (indeed, I have since heard that an autistic artist is employed by the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew).

  Is autism necessary to, or an ingredient of, his art? Most autists are not artists, as most artists are not autists; but in the chance of their coming together (as in Stephen, or José), there must, I think, be an interaction between the two, so that the art takes on some of the strengths and weaknesses of autism, its remarkable capacity for minutely detailed reproduction and representation, but also its repetitiveness and stereotypy. But whether one can speak of a distinctive “autistic art”, I am not sure.

  Is Stephen, or his autism, changed by his art? Here, I think, the answer is no. I do not have the feeling that his art spreads or diffuses, in any sense, into his character, or alters the general tone of his mind. But this, perhaps, is not entirely surprising: there are many examples of artists who are great, even sublime, in their art, but whose personal lives are unremarkable, incoherent, or vile. (There are others, of course, whose lives match their art.)

  Of those with classical autism, 50 percent are mute, never use speech; 95 percent lead very limited lives—Stephen, in a sense, has escaped from these statistics, in part through his art, in part by virtue of those who have stood so committedly behind him. Gifts and art, unrecognized, unsupported, are not enough: José is almost as gifted as Stephen but has never been recognized, never supported, and continues to languish on a back ward; whereas Stephen lives a varied and stimulating life—he travels, goes out drawing, and now attends art school. Margaret Hewson, Chris Marris, and others have played an essential part in supporting him and nurturing his gifts, making possible for him his present creative life. But his passivity remains extreme, and he will continue, I think, to need such personal support, as Blind Tom needed the support of Colonel Bethune.

  Stephen’s drawings may never develop, may never add up to a major opus, an expression of a deep feeling or theory or view of the world. And he may never develop, or enter the full estate, the grandeur and misery, of being human, of man.

  But this is not to diminish him, or to call his gifts small. His limitations, paradoxically, can serve as strengths, too. His vision is valuable, it seems to me, precisely because it conveys a wonderfully direct, unconceptualized view of the world. Stephen may be limited, odd, idiosyncratic, autistic; but it is given him to achieve what few of us do, a significant representation and investigation of the world.

  7. An Anthropologist on Mars

  I had just returned from a few days with Stephen Wiltshire in July. I had driven up to Massachusetts to visit another autistic artist, Jessy Park (whose mother describes her in a most beautiful and intelligent personal narrative, “The Siege”), and had seen her intensely colored, star-studded drawings (very different from Stephen’s) and something of her labyrinthine, magic world of correlations (between numbers, colors, morality, the weather). I had paid flying visits to several schools for autistic children. I had spent an extraordinary week at a camp for autistic children, Camp Winston, in Ontario—the more so as one of the counselors there this summer was a friend of mine, Shane, with Tourette’s syndrome, who, with his lungings and touchings, reachings and buttings, his enormous vitality and impulsiveness, seemed able to get through to the most deeply autistic children, in a way the rest of us were unable to do. Turning west, I had visited an entire autistic family in California—both parents, highly gifted, and their two children, all of them given (between the serious business of life) to jumping on trampolines, flapping their hands, and screaming. And now, finally, I was on my way to Fort Collins, in Colorado, to see Temple Grandin, one of the most remarkable autistic people of all: in spite of her autism, she holds a Ph.D. in animal science, teaches at Colorado State University, and runs her own business.

  While autism was described almost simultaneously by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger in the 1940s, Kanner seemed to see it as an unmitigated disaster, where Asperger felt that it might have certain positive or compensating features—a “particular originality of thought and experience, which may well lead to exceptional achievements in later life.”

  It is clear even in these first accounts that there is a wide range of phenomena and symptoms in autism—and many more can be added to those that Kanner and Asperger listed. A majority of Kanner-type children are retarded, often severely; a significant proportion have seizures and may have “soft” neurological signs and symptoms—a whole range of repetitive or automatic movements, such as spasms, tics, rocking, spinning, finger play, or flapping of the hands; problems of coordination and balance; peculiar difficulties, sometimes, in initiating movements, akin to what is seen in parkinsonism. There may also be, very prominently, a large range of abnormal (and often “paradoxical”) sensory responses, with some sensations being heightened and even intolerable, others (which may include pain perception) being diminished or apparently absent. There may be, if language develops, odd and complex language disorders—a tendency to
verbosity, empty chatter, cliché—ridden and formulaic speech; the psychologist Doris Allen describes this aspect of their autism as a “semantic-pragmatic deficit.” In contrast, Asperger-type children are often of normal (and sometimes very superior) intelligence and generally have fewer neurological problems.

  Kanner and Asperger looked at autism clinically, providing descriptions of such fullness and accuracy that even now, fifty years later, they can hardly be bettered. But it was not until the 1970s that Beate Hermelin and Neil O’Connor and their colleagues in London, trained in the new discipline of cognitive psychology, focused on the mental structure of autism in a more systematic way. Their work (and that of Lorna Wing, in particular) suggests that in all autistic individuals there is a core problem, a consistent triad of impairments: impairment of social interaction with others, impairment of verbal and nonverbal communication, and impairment of play and imaginative activities. The appearance of these three together, they feel, is not fortuitous; all are expressive of a single, fundamental developmental disturbance. Autistic people, they suggest, have no true concept of, or feeling for, other minds, or even their own; they have, in the jargon of cognitive psychology, no “theory of mind.” However, this is only one hypothesis among many; no theory, as yet, encompasses the whole range of phenomena to be seen in autism. Kanner and Asperger were still, in the 1970s, pondering the syndromes they had delineated more than thirty years earlier, and the foremost workers of today have all spent twenty years or more considering them. Autism as a subject touches on the deepest questions of ontology, for it involves a radical deviation in the development of brain and mind. Our insight is advancing, but tantalizingly slowly. The ultimate understanding of autism may demand both technical advances and conceptual ones beyond anything we can now even dream of.