An anthropologist on Mars: seven paradoxical tales
Oliver W. Sacks
Sacks, Oliver W.;
An anthropologist on Mars: seven paradoxical tales
Knopf, 1995, 327 pages
ISBN 0679437851 9780679437857
topics: | neuro | psychology | vision
Oliver Sacks passed away this week, so I thought I would revisit one of his favourite works...
This is yet another fascinating collection of case studies from the indomitable Sacks.
Much of the book deals with vision, starting off with colour-blindness (ch 1), prodiguous graphic savants (ch 6), and the problems when a congenitally blind person has his eyesight restored as an adult (ch 4).
In The Last Hippie the patient Greg F. is blind and unable to remember anything in the present. This story is the real-life basis for the movie "The Music Never Stopped" (2011).
The title story is about another high-functioning autist; the "Anthropologist on Mars" is Prof. Temple Grandin, who feels like an alien observer when she is with "normal" (non-autistic) people.
Excerpts
1 The Case of the Colorblind Painter
describes Mr. Jonathan I who is a well-known painter, with a long association with colours: He knew the colors of everything, with an extraordinary exactness (he could give not only the names but the numbers of colors as these were listed in a Pantone chart of hues he had used for many years). He could identify the green of van Gogh's billiard table in this way unhesitatingly. 7 So one day he was hit by a truck and had a concussion. A day later, he found his world "misty and grey". He was given a ticket for going through two red lights. However, Mr. I. arrived at his studio with relief, expecting that the horrible mist would be gone, that everything would be clear again. But as soon as he entered, he found his entire studio, which was hung with brilliantly colored paintings, now utterly grey and void of color. His canvases, the abstract color paintings he was known for, were now greyish or black and white. And they remained thus - he was profoundly colour-blind. And the colours he saw were not a gray or black - as he describes it later: neither "grey" nor "leaden" could begin to convey what his world was actually like. It was not "grey" that he experienced, he said, but perceptual qualities for which ordinary experience, ordinary language, had no equivalent. ... 11 as he was driving to the studio one morning. He saw the sunrise over the highway, the blazing reds all turned into black: "The sun rose like a bomb, like some enormous nuclear explosion," he said later. "Had anyone ever seen a sunrise in this way before?" 14 Parts of his description, draws on deep scholarship, but at the same time manages to be lyrical: Color is not a trivial subject but one that has compelled, for hundreds of years, a passionate curiosity in the greatest artists, philosophers, and natural scientists. The young Spinoza wrote his first treatise on the rainbow; the young Newton's most joyous discovery was the composition of white light; Goethe's great color work, like Newton's, started with a prism; Schopenhauer, Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, in the last century, were all tantalized by the problem of color; and Wittgenstein's last work was his Remarks on Colour. And yet most of us, most of the time, overlook its great mystery. p.4
Testing : Colours as shades of gray
We then gave him a large mass of yarns, containing thirty- three separate colors, and asked him to sort these: he said he could not sort them by color, but only by grey-scale tonal values. He then, rapidly and easily, separated the yarns into four strange, chromatically random piles, which he characterized as 0-25 percent, 25-50 percent, 50-75 percent, and 75-100 percent on a grey-tone scale (though nothing looked to him purely white, and even white yarn looked slightly "dingy" or "dirty"). ... a black-and-white photograph and a black- and-white video camera confirmed that Mr. I. had indeed accurately divided the colored yarns in a grey scale that basically coincided with their own mechanical reading.
Theories of Colour Perception
The colors of objects, Newton thought, were determined by the "copiousness" with which they reflected particular rays to the eye. Thomas Young, in 1802, feeling that there was no need to have an infinity of different receptors in the eye, each tuned to a different wavelength (artists, after all, could create almost any color they wanted by using a very limited palette of paints) postulated that three types of receptors would be enough: As it is almost impossible to conceive each sensitive point of the retina to contain an infinite number of particles, each capable of vibrating in perfect unison with every possible undulation, it becomes necessary to suppose the number limited, for instance to the three principal colours, red, yellow, and blue." 18 The idea lay dormant for fifty years, until Hermann von Helmholtz resurrected it and gave it a new precision, so that we now speak of the Young- Helmholtz hypothesis. For Helmholtz, colour was the translation of [wavelength into receptor signal]: "Red light stimulates the red-sensitive fibres strongly, and the other two weakly, giving the sensation red."
Schopenhauer : Oppponens theory
In 1816, the young Schopenhauer proposed a different theory of color vision, one that envisaged not a passive, mechanical resonance of tuned particles or receptors, as Young had postulated, but their active stimulation, competition, and inhibition—an explicit "opponens" theory such as Ewald Hering was to create seventy years later, in apparent contradiction of the Young-Helmholtz theory. These opponens theories were ignored at the time, and continued to be ignored until the 1950s. We now envisage a combination of Young-Helmholtz and opponens mechanisms... the colour perception system pays attention to the differences or oppositions between the three tuned receptors... Thus integration and selection, as Schopenhauer divined, start in the retina.oppponent colours. red-green colourblinds like me do not see much of a distinction in the middle column.
Colour perception in the brain
In 1884, neurologist physician Hermann Wilbrand - [based on seeing patients with a range of visual losses] - suggested that there must be separate visual centers in the primary visual cortex for "light impressions," "color impressions," and "form impressions," though he had no anatomical evidence for this. That achromatopsia (and even hemi-achromatopsia) could indeed arise from damage to specific parts of the brain was first confirmed, four years later, by a Swiss ophthalmologist, Louis Verrey. He described a sixty-year-old woman who, in consequence of a stroke affecting the occipital lobe of her left hemisphere, now saw everything in the right half of her visual field in shades of grey (the left half remained normally colored). The opportunity to examine his patient's brain after her death showed damage confined to a small portion (the fusiform and lingual gyri) of the visual cortex—it was here, Verrey concluded, that "the centre for chromatic sense will be found."
Opposition to the idea of a chromatic center
That such a center might exist, that any part of the cortex might be specialized for the perception or representation of color, was immediately contested and continued to be contested for almost a century. The grounds of this contention go very deep, as deep as the philosophy of neurology itself. Locke, in the seventeenth century, had held to a "sensationalist" philosophy (which paralleled Newton's physicalist one): our senses are measuring instruments, recording the external world for us in terms of sensation. Neurologists in the late nineteenth century were quick to accept this philosophy and to embed it in a speculative anatomy of the brain. Visual perception was equated with "sense-data" or "impressions" transmitted from the retina to the primary visual area of the brain, in an exact, point-to-point correspondence—and there experienced, subjectively, as an image of the visual world. Color, it was presumed, was an integral part of this image. There was no room, anatomically, it was thought, for a separate color center—or indeed, conceptually, for the very idea of one. Thus when Verrey published his findings in 1888, they flew in the face of accepted doctrine. His observations were doubted, his testing criticized, his examination regarded as flawed—but the real objection, behind these, was doctrinal in nature. If there was no discrete color center, so the thinking went, there could be no isolated achromatopsia either; thus Verrey's case, and two similar ones in the 1890s, were dismissed from neurological consciousness — and cerebral achromatopsia, as a subject, all but disappeared for the next seventy-five years.
Goethe and the constancy of colour perception
Goethe's color theory, his Faibenlehre (which he regarded as the equal of his entire poetic opus), was, by and large, dismissed by all his contemporaries and has remained in a sort of limbo ever since, seen as the whimsy, the pseudoscience, of a very great poet. But science itself was not entirely insensitive to the "anomalies" that Goethe considered central, and Helmholtz, indeed, gave admiring lectures on Goethe and his science... Helmholtz was very conscious of "color constancy"—the way in which the colors of objects are preserved, so that we can categorize them and always know what we are looking at, despite great fluctuations in the wavelength of the light illuminating them. The actual wavelengths reflected by an apple, for instance, will vary considerably depending on the illumination, but we consistently see it as red, nonetheless. This could not be, clearly, a mere translation of wavelength into color. There had to be some way, Helmholtz thought, of "discounting the illumi- nant"—and this he saw as an "unconscious inference" or "an act of judgement" (though he did not venture to suggest where such judgement might occur). Color constancy, for him, was a special example of the way in which we achieve perceptual constancy generally, make a stable perceptual world from a chaotic sensory flux—a world that would not be possible if our perceptions were merely passive reflections of the unpredictable and inconstant input that bathes our receptors.
Maxwell: Synthesizing colour from three channels
Helmholtz's contemporary, James Clerk Maxwell, had also been fascinated by the mystery of color vision from his student days. He formalized the notions of primary colors and color mixing by the invention of a color top (the colors of which fused, when it was spun, to yield a sensation of grey), and a graphic representation with three axes, a color triangle, which showed how any color could be created by different mixtures of the three primary colors. These prepared the way for his most spectacular demonstration, the demonstration in 1861 that color photography was possible, despite the fact that photographic emulsions were themselves black and white. He did this by photographing a colored bow three times, through red, green, and violet niters. Having obtained three "color- separation" images, as he called them, he now brought these together by superimposing them upon a screen, projecting each image through its corresponding filter (the image taken through the red filter was projected with red light, and so on). Maxwell wondered if this was how colors were perceived in the brain, by the addition of color-separation images or their neural correlates, as in his magic-lantern demonstrations. [These experiments led to the development of colour cameras - initially very bulky with three separate channels - but gradually more compact. It was not until 1907, however, that the Lumiere brothers developed the Autochrome process, where tiny starch grains dyed red, green, and violet, on the photographic emulsion, acted as a sort of Maxwellian grid through which the three color-separation images, mosaicked together, could both be taken and viewed.
Edwin Land : Colour relativism - Mondrian experiments
Edwin Land (of Polaroid fame) experimented on the relativity of colour perception using abstract displays resembling the paintings of Piet Mondrian, and Land therefore terms them "color Mondrians." Using the Mondrians, which were illuminated by three projectors, using long-wave (red), middle-wave (green), and short-wave (blue) filters, Land was able to prove that, if a surface formed part of a complex multicolored scene, there was no simple relationship between the wavelength of light reflected from a surface and its perceived color. If, moreover, a single patch of color (for example, one ordinarily seen as green) was isolated from its surrounding colors, it would appear only as white or pale grey, whatever illuminating beam was used. Thus the green patch, Land showed, could not be regarded as inherently green, but was, in part, given its greenness by its relation to the surrounding areas of the Mondrian.
Semir Zeki : Colour vision in V4
If Land was approaching the problem of how we see colors at a psychophysical level by asking human subjects to report how they perceived complex, multicolored mosaics in changing illuminations, Semir Zeki, working in London, was approaching the problem at a physiological level, by inserting microelectrodes in the visual cortex of anesthetized monkeys and measuring the neuronal potentials generated when they were given colored stimuli. Early in the 1970s, he was able to make a crucial discovery, to delineate a small area of cells on each side of the brain, in the prestriate cortex of monkeys (areas referred to as V4), which seemed to be specialized for responding to color (Zeki called these "color-coding cells"). Thus, ninety years after Wilbrand and Verrey had postulated a specific center for color in the brain, Zeki was finally able to prove that such a center existed.
Movement sensing area
Zeki was also able to find cells, in an adjacent area, that seemed to respond solely to movement. A remarkable account and analysis of a patient with a pure "motion blindness" was given by Zihl, Von Cramon, and Mai in 1983. The patient's problems are described as follows: The visual disorder complained of by the patient was a loss of movement vision in all three dimensions. She had difficulty, for example, in pouring tea or coffee into a cup because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier. In addition, she could not stop pouring at the right time since she was unable to perceive the movement in the cup (or a pot) when the fluid rose. Furthermore the patient complained of difficulties in following a dialogue because she could not see the movement of the face and, especially, the mouth of the speaker. In a room where more than two other people were walking, she felt very insecure and unwell, and usually left the room immediately, because "people were suddenly here or there but I have not seen them moving." The patient experienced the same problem but to an even more marked extent in crowded streets or places, which she therefore avoided as much as possible. She could not cross the street because of her inability to judge the speed of a car, but she could identify the car itself without difficulty. "When I'm looking at the car first, it seems far away. But then, when I want to cross the road, suddenly the car is very near." She gradually learned to "estimate" the distance of moving vehicles by means of the sound becoming louder.
Helping Mr. I
When I phoned Professor Zeki to tell him of this exceptional patient, he was greatly intrigued and wondered, in particular, how Mr. I. might do with Mondrian testing, such as he and Land had used with normally sighted people and with animals. He at once arranged to come to New York to join us— Bob Wasserman, my ophthalmologist colleague; Ralph Siegel, a neurophysiologist; and myself—in a comprehensive testing of Jonathan I. No patient with achromatopsia had ever been examined in this way before. [The Mondrian testing clarified the nature of the problem, and also served to pinpoint the location of the trouble. Mr. I.'s primary visual cortex was essentially intact, and it was the secondary cortex (specifically the V4 areas, or their connections) that bore virtually the whole brunt of the damage. These areas are very small, even in man; yet all our perception of color, all our ability to imagine or remember it, all our sense of living in a world of color, depend crucially on their integrity. A mischance had devastated these bean-sized areas of Mr. I.'s brain—and with this, his whole life, his life-world, had been changed. [But can do little to help Mr. I] We were, however, able to offer a little practical help. Mr. I. had consistently seen the boundaries of the Mondrian patches most clearly when these were illuminated by medium- wavelength light, and Dr. Zeki therefore suggested we give him a pair of green sunglasses, transmitting only this waveband in which he saw most clearly. A pair of glasses was specially made, and Mr. I. took to wearing them, especially in bright sunlight. The new glasses delighted him, for although they did nothing to restore his lost color vision, they did seem noticeably to enhance his contrast vision and his perception of form and boundaries. He could even enjoy color TV with his wife again. (The dark-green glasses, in effect, rendered the color set monochromatic—though he continued to prefer his old black-and-white set when alone.)
Mr. I. adapts
Mr. I., in the second year after his injury, found that he saw best in subdued light or twilight, and not in the full glare of day. Very bright light tended to dazzle and temporarily blind him—another sign of damage to his visual systems—but he found the night and nightlife peculiarly congenial, for they seemed to be "designed," as he once said, "in terms of black and white." I have developed acute night vision, it's amazing what I see — I can read license plates at night from four blocks away. You couldn't see it from a block away. Although Mr. I. does not deny his loss, and at some level still mourns it, he has come to feel that his vision has become "highly refined," "privileged," that he sees a world of pure form, uncluttered by color. Subtle textures and patterns, normally obscured for the rest of us because of their embedding in color, now stand out for him. He feels he has been given "a whole new world," which the rest of us, distracted by color, are insensitive to. He no longer thinks of color, pines for it, grieves its loss. He has almost come to see his achromatopsia as a strange gift, one that has ushered him into a new state of sensibility and being. In this his transformation is exceedingly similar to that of John Hull, who, after two or three years of experiencing blindness as an affliction and curse, came to see it as "a dark, paradoxical gift," a "concentrated human condition . . . one of the orders of human being." In terms of his painting, after a year or more of experiment and uncertainty, Mr. I. has moved into a strong and productive phase, as strong and productive as anything in his long artistic career. His black-and-white paintings are highly successful, and people comment on his creative renewal, the remarkable black-and-white "phase" he has moved into. Very few of them know that his latest phase is anything other than an expression of his artistic development, that it was brought about by a calamitous loss.
2 The Last Hippie
"The Last Hippie" has been widely commented on; it focuses on a patient who loses his vision completely owing to a large tumour. He also regresses into his youth, and retains a love for rock bands. It was made into the critically acclaimed movie by Jim Kohlberg - "The Music Never Stopped" (after the GD song). trailer from the movie ""The Music Never Stopped" (2011). The story (and the movie) ends on an emotionally powerful scene where Sacks has organized tickets for a Grateful Dead concert at the Madison Square Garden. Unexpectedly, Greg starts to to talk spontaneously — very unusual for him — and to reminisce about the sixties - using the present tense since he has continued to live in his youth: Yeah, there were the be-ins in Central Park. They haven't had one for a long time — over a year, maybe, can't remember exactly.... Concerts, music, acid, grass, everything.... First time I was there was Flower-Power Day.... Good times ...lots of things started in the sixties—acid rock, the be-ins, the love-ins, smoking.... Don't see it much these days.... Allen Ginsberg — he's down in the Village a lot, or in Central Park. I haven't seen him for a long time. It's over a year since I last saw him.... About the hash-laden air: "What a great smell," he said, inhaling deeply. "It's the least stupid smell in the world." Greg enjoys the first half of the concert, when they are playing old familiar songs. The second half he is intrigued by the "futuristic" songs. The next day, when Sacks to meet him at the hospital. I found Greg in the dining room, alone, facing the wall. I asked him about the Grateful Dead —- what did he think of them? "Great group," he said, "I love them. I heard them in Central Park and at the Fillmore East." "Yes," I said, "you told me. But have you seen them since? Didn't you just hear them at Madison Square Garden?" "No," he said, "I've never been to the Garden." p.76 But later he seems to be able to recognize some of the new piecces he had heard at the concert.
4. To See and Not See
[patient Virgil, who has been blind since early childhood, has his
cataracts removed.] p.108
Virgil told me later that in this first moment he had no idea what he was
seeing. There was light, there was movement, there was color, all mixed up,
all meaningless, a blur. Then out of the blur came a voice that said, "Well?"
Then, and only then, he said, did he finally realize that this chaos of light
and shadow was a face -- and, indeed, the face of his surgeon.
The rest of us, born sighted, can scarcely imagine such confusion. For we,
born with a full complement of senses, and correlating these, one with the
other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and
concepts and meanings. When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world
we have spent a lifetime learning to see.
Virgil saw, but what he saw had no coherence. His retina and optic nerve were
active, transmitting impulses, but his brain could make no sense of them; he
was, as neurologists say, agnosic.
Virgil could recognize large alphabets - esp capital letters - but had a
lot of difficulty recognizing faces, or the cat, and with shapes generally,
and with size and distance.
He told me that he had learned the alphabet by touch at school, where
they had used letter blocks, or cutout letters, for teaching the blind.
I was reminded of [R.L.] Gregory's patient S.B.: "much to our surprise,
he could even tell the time by means of a large clock on the wall. We
were so surprised at this that we did not at first believe that he
could have been in any sense blind before the operation."
But in his blind days S.B. had used a large hunter watch with no glass,
telling the time by touching the hands, and he had apparently made an
instant "cross-modal" transfer, to use Gregory's term, from touch to
vision.
We achieve perceptual constancy -- the correlation of all the different
appearances, the transforms of objects -- very early, in the first months of
life. It constitutes a huge learning task, but is achieved so smoothly, so
unconsciously, that its enormous complexity is scarcely realized (though it
is an achievement that even the largest supercomputers cannot begin to
match).
Notre Dame sketch by graphic savant Stephen Wiltshire, drawn at age 14.
(click to enlarge)
6 Prodigies
'Before the late 19th c., all types of mental trauma were considered simply
as "madness". In late 19th c., the German physician Emile Kraepelin
suggested that mental disorders can take two forms -
a. manic depression (now seen as a range of conditions termed "bipolar
disorder"), and
b. schizophrenia, which he called dementia praecox (lit. "early"
dementia - to distinguish it from late dementia such as Alzheimers).
The term autism was only identified in the 1940s and was not a term, or even
a concept, in the 1860s. p.190
[The term had been used earlier by Eugen Bleuler to describe schizophrenic
patients who were withdrawn.]
Musical genius : Blind Tom (b. 1849)
[Blind Tom] has never been instructed in music or educated in any way. He learned to play the piano from hearing others, learns airs and tunes from hearing them sung, and can play any piece on first trial as well as the most accomplished performer. . . . One of his most remarkable feats was the performance of three pieces of music at once. He played Fisher's Hornpipe with one hand and Yankee Doodle with the other and sang Dixie all at once. He also played a piece with his back to the piano and his hands inverted. He performs many pieces of his own conception—one, his "Battle of Manassas," may be called picturesque and sublime, a true conception of unaided, blind musical genius. . . . This poor blind boy is cursed with but little of human nature; he seems to be an unconscious agent acting as he is acted on, and his mind a vacant receptacle where Nature stores her jewels to recall them at her pleasure. from Darold Treffert's "Extraordinary People: Understanding Idiot Savants" (1989). [Born nearly blind, the fourteenth child of a slave, sold to a Colonel Bethune, Tom was, from infancy,] fascinated by sounds of all sorts — rain on the roof, the grating of corn in the sheller, but most of all music -— Tom would listen intensely to the colonel's daughters practicing their sonatas and minuets on the piano." Edouard Seguin, French physician, describes Tom in his 1866 book, "Idiocy and Its Treatment by the Psychological Method," : Till five or six years old he could not speak, scarce walk, and gave no other sign of intelligence than this everlasting thirst for music. At four years already, if taken out from the corner where he lay dejected, and seated at the piano, he would play beautiful tunes; his little hands having already taken possession of the keys, and his wonderful ear of any combination of notes they had once heard. At the age of six, Tom started to improvise on his own account. Word of the "blind genius" spread, and at seven Tom gave his first concert—and went on to earn a hundred thousand dollars in his eighth year. At eleven, he played before President Buchanan at the White House. A panel of musicians, who thought that he had tricked the president, tested his memory the following day, playing two entirely new compositions to him, thirteen and twenty pages in length—he reproduced them perfectly and without the least apparent effort. Although Tom was usually called an idiot or imbecile, his body movements, described by Seguin, are more characteristic of autism: As soon as the new tune begins, Tom takes some ludicrous posture [with one leg outstretched, while he slowly pirouettes on the other] . . . long gyrations . . . ornamented with spasmodic movements of the hands.
Autism - characterized by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger : 1940s
Autism was medically described, almost simultaneously, in the 1940s, by Leo Kanner in Baltimore and Hans Asperger in Vienna. Both of them, independently, named it "autism." Kanner's and Asperger's accounts were in many ways strikingly (at times uncannily) similar —- a nice example of historical synchronicity. Both emphasized "aloneness," mental aloneness, as the cardinal feature of autism; this, indeed, was why they called it autism. In Kanner's words, this aloneness "whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside." This lack of contact, he felt, was only in regard to people; objects, by contrast, might be normally enjoyed. The other defining feature of autism, for Kanner, was "an obsessive insistence on sameness," in the form of repetitive, stereotyped movements and noises, or stereotypies, most simply; then in the adoption of elaborate rituals and routines; finally, in the appearance of strange, narrow preoccupations -— highly focused, intense fascinations and fixations. The appearance of such fascinations, and the adoption of such rituals, often before the age of five, were not to be seen, Kanner and Asperger thought, in any other condition. Asperger brought out other striking features, stressing, they do not make eye contact . . . they seem to take in things with short, peripheral glances . . . [there is] a poverty of facial expressions and gestures . . . the use of language appears abnormal, unnatural. . . the children follow their own impulses, regardless of the demands of the environment.
Savant prodigies
Singular talents, usually emerging at a very early age and developing with startling speed, appear in about 10 percent of the autistic (and in a smaller number of the retarded—though many savants are both autistic and retarded). A century before Blind Tom there was Gottfried Mind, a "cretinous imbecile," born in Berne in 1768, who showed from an early age a striking talent for drawing. He had, according to A. F. Tredgold's classic 1908 Text-Book of Mental Deficiency, "such a marvellous faculty for drawing pictures of cats that he was known as 'The Cats' Raphael,'" but he also made drawings and watercolor sketches of deer, rabbits, bears, and groups of children.from the series, "Cat with three young", by Gottfried Mind (1768-1814) He soon acquired fame throughout Europe, and one of his pictures was purchased by George IV. [However, he could sign his name with greatest difficulty, and had not the slightest idea of Arithmetic - source: "The Mirror of Literature", Anon. 1828, as cited in "Nadia Revisited: A Longitudinal Study of an Autistic Savant", by Lorna Selfe, 2012]
Calculating genius
(see detailed descriptions in Mathematical Recreations and Essays by H.S.M Coxeter and W.W. Rouse Ball (1987) 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. His son, also intellectually gifted, was a natural calculator as well, though not as prodigious.
Feats of Memory
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. Tredgold also writes of savants with various sensory powers and skills, of olfactory savants -— and of a tactile savant, too:
The birth of the unconscious : F. W. H. Myers
The eccentric psychologist F. W. H. Myers (1843-1901), 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. [from Human Personality, ch.3 : Genius: I shall suggest, on the other hand, that Genius — if that vaguely used word is to receive anything like a psychological definition — should rather be regarded as a power of utilising a wider range than other men can utilise of faculties in some degree innate in all; — a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought; — so that an "inspiration of Genius" will be in truth a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being. ]
Relevance of Autism for understanding the normal mind
Myers was one of the first to write about unconscious or precon scious 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.
Nadia : Artist at three
In 1977, the psychologist Lorna Selfe 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. p.196 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. 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. |
Graphic savant: Stephen Wiltshire
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, he would not play with other children and tended to scream or hide in a corner if they approached. 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. 197 [includes many beautiful sketches by Wiltshire, mostly architectural.]the lavish interior of the Chicago Theater. (click to enlarge]
Contents
1 The Case of the Colorblind Painter 3 2 The Last Hippie 42 3 A Surgeon's Life 77 4 To See and Not See 108 5 The Landscape of His Dreams 153 6 Prodigies 188 7 An Anthropologist on Mars 244
About this book
* from NYT obituary for Sacks by Gregory Cowles: His other books included the best-selling “An Anthropologist on Mars” (1995), about autistic savants and other patients who managed to thrive with their disorders; ... Dr. Sacks wrote in “An Anthropologist on Mars,” that illnesses and disorders “can play a paradoxical role in bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life that might never be seen or even be imaginable in their absence.” A young woman with a low I.Q. learns to sing arias in more than 30 languages, and a Canadian physician with Tourette’s syndrome learns to perform long, complicated surgical procedures without a single tic or twitch. Some scholars believe, Dr. Sacks once wrote, that Dostoyevsky and van Gogh may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, that Bartok and Wittgenstein may have been autistic, and that Mozart and Samuel Johnson could have had Tourette’s syndrome. The 2011 movie “The Music Never Stopped” was adapted from “The Last Hippie,” one of the case studies collected in “An Anthropologist on Mars.” * from obituary by Michiko Kakutani: Dr. Sacks once described himself as a man with an “extreme immoderation in all my passions,” and his books pulsate with his “violent enthusiasms” and endless curiosity: his fascination with ferns, cephalopods, jellyfish, volcanoes, the periodic table — for all the marvels of the natural world; as well as his passion for swimming, chemistry, photography and perhaps most of all, writing. Known as Inky as a child, he began keeping journals at the age of 14. For the shy boy, writing was a way to connect with the world, a way to order his thoughts; and he kept up the habit throughout his life, amassing nearly a thousand journals, while using his books and essays to communicate to readers the romance of science and the creative and creaturely blessings of being alive.
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bookexcerptise is maintained by a small group of editors. get in touch with us! bookexcerptise [at] gmail [dot] .com. This review by Amit Mukerjee was last updated on : 2015 Sep 03