Nadia appeared healthy at birth, but by the time she was 2, her parents knew something was amiss. She avoided eye contact and didn’t respond when her mother smiled or cooed. She didn’t even seem to recognize her mother. She was unusually clumsy and spent hours in repetitive play, such as tearing paper into strips. But at 3½ she picked up a pen and began to draw—not scribble, draw. Without any training, she created from memory sketches of galloping horses that looked like the work of an adult. Unlike the way most people might draw a horse, beginning with its outline, Nadia began with random details: first a hoof, then the horse’s mane, then its harness. Only later did she lay down firm lines connecting these floating features. And when she did connect them, they were always in the correct position relative to one another.
Nadia is an autistic savant, with a rare condition marked by severe mental and social deficits but also by a mysterious talent that appears spontaneously, usually before age 6.
Sometimes the ability of a savant is so striking, it eventually makes news. The most famous savant was a man called Joseph, the individual Dustin Hoffman drew upon for his character in the 1988 movie Rain Man. Joseph could immediately answer questions like this: “What number times what number gives 1,234,567,890?” (His answer: “Nine times 137,174,210.”) Another savant could perform mental feats such as doubling 8,388,628 twenty-four times within several seconds, yielding the sum 140,737,488,355,328. A 6-year-old savant named Trevor listened to his older brother play the piano one day, then climbed onto the piano stool himself and played better. A savant named Eric could find what he called the “sweet spot” in a room full of speakers playing music, the spot where sound waves from the different sources hit his ears at exactly the same time.
Most researchers have offered a simple explanation for these extraordinary gifts: compulsive learning. But Allan Snyder, an award-winning physicist who is director of the Center for the Mind at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, has advanced a new explanation of such talents. “Each of us has the innate capacity for savantlike skills,” Snyder says, “but that mental machinery is unconscious in most people.”
Savants, he believes, can tap into the human mind’s remarkable processing abilities. Even something as simple as seeing, he explains, requires phenomenally complex information processing. When a person looks at an object, for example, the brain immediately estimates its distance by analyzing the subtle differences between the two images on his retinas (computers programmed to do this require extreme memory and speed). During the process of face recognition, the brain analyzes countless details, such as the texture of the skin and the shapes of the eyes, jawbone, and lips. Most people are not aware of these calculations. In savants, Snyder says, the top layer of mental processing—conceptual thinking, reaching conclusions—is somehow stripped away. Without it, savants can access a startling capacity for recalling endless detail or for performing lightning-quick calculations. Snyder has a radical conclusion: He believes it may be possible someday to create technologies that will allow anyone to exploit these abilities.
