Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (18 page)

T
he first adult musical savant I met was a retarded man who had been admitted to a nursing home where I worked.
1
Martin had been normal at birth, but at the age of three he contracted meningitis, which caused seizures and a spastic weakness of his limbs and voice. It also affected his intelligence and personality, so that he became impulsive, “odd,” and unable to keep up with his classmates at school. But along with these problems, he developed curious powers: he became fascinated by music, would listen to it intently, and would then sing the melodies he had heard or play them on the piano, as best he could with his spastic limbs and voice. He was greatly encouraged in this by his father, who was a professional opera singer.

Along with his musical abilities, Martin also developed a prodigious rote memory. Once he was fitted with glasses for the very severe visual problems he had been born with, he became an avid reader, retaining (though often not understanding) everything he read. And this, like his musical memory, was auditory— whatever he read he heard in his mind’s ear, sometimes in his father’s voice. As some people may be said to have a photographic memory, Martin had a phonographic one.

Though solitary in his habits, Martin was able to live independently and to do simple, unskilled work. His only pleasure, seemingly, was to sing in church choirs; he could not be a solo singer with his hoarse, spastic voice. But by the time he was sixty-one, his increasing physical disabilities (arthritis and heart disease among them) brought him to the nursing home.

When I met him in 1984, he told me that he knew more than two thousand operas, as well as the
Messiah,
the
Christmas Oratorio,
and all of Bach’s cantatas. I brought along scores of some of these, and tested him as best I could; I found I was unable to fault him. And it was not just the melodies that he remembered. He had learned, from listening to performances, what every instrument played, what every voice sang. When I played him a piece by Debussy that he had never heard, he was able to repeat it, almost flawlessly, on the piano. He then transposed it into different keys and extemporized on it a little, in a Debussyan way. He could grasp the rules and the conventions of any music he heard, even if it was unfamiliar or not to his taste. This was musicianship of a high order, in a man who was otherwise so mentally impoverished.

What was the origin of Martin’s musical powers? He had an intensely musical father, and musical ability is often inherited, as with the seven generations of the Bach family. He was born into and grew up in a musical household. Was this enough, or did his auditory and potentially musical powers also gain strength from the poorness of his vision? (Darold Treffert, in his remarkable book on savantism,
Extraordinary People,
notes that more than a third of all musical savants are blind or have very poor vision.) Martin was born with very severe visual problems, but this was not recognized and corrected until he was almost three, so in these early years he must have been nearly blind and dependent on hearing to orient him and make sense of the world. Or was it the meningitis, which, while stripping him of some of his cortical controls and higher powers, also stimulated or released previously unsuspected savant powers?

The term “idiot savant” was introduced in 1887 by Langdon Down, a London physician, in reference to “feebleminded” children who had special and sometimes remarkable “faculties.” Among these were exceptional powers of calculation, drawing, mechanical aptitude, and, above all, of remembering, playing, and sometimes composing music. The case of Blind Tom, an American slave who exhibited prodigious musical powers from an early age, attracted worldwide attention in the 1860s.
2
Musicality is indeed the most common and perhaps the most dramatic form of savant talent, for it readily comes to public notice and commands attention. Darold Treffert devoted a large part of
Extraordinary People
to musical savants, and Leon K. Miller wrote an entire book about a single musical savant, Eddie.
3
Detailed studies of savant talents and especially of musical savant skills have been carried out by Beate Hermelin and others in London, and these confirm that such skills depend on the recognition (which may be implicit and unconscious) of essential musical structures and rules, as is the case with normal musical skills. The anomaly is not in the skill itself, but in its isolation— its unusual and sometimes prodigious development in a mind that may otherwise be markedly underdeveloped in verbal and abstract thought.

Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic English prodigy, is widely known as a visual savant; he can produce amazingly detailed drawings of complex buildings and even whole cityscapes, sometimes after a single glance.
4
He is able to hold these images in his mind, with little loss or distortion, for years on end. When he went to school at the age of six, his teacher commented that his drawings were the most “unchildlike drawings I have ever seen.”

Stephen is also a musical savant. Savant abilities usually appear before the age of ten, and this is especially so of musical savant talents. Yet when Stephen’s mentor, Margaret Hewson, phoned me to say, “Stephen has erupted musical powers—
huge
powers!” he was already sixteen. Like Martin, Stephen had absolute pitch and could instantly reproduce complex chords, play melodies he had never heard before, even if they were several minutes long, and transpose them easily into different keys. He also showed powers of improvisation. It is unclear why Stephen’s musical gifts seemed to appear relatively late. It seems likely that he had great musical potential from an early age, but, perhaps due to his own passivity and the focus of others on his visual gifts, this was not noticed. Perhaps, too, adolescence had an effect, as Stephen suddenly became fixated on Stevie Wonder and Tom Jones at this point, and loved to mimic their movements and mannerisms along with their music.

I
T IS A CHARACTERISTIC
— indeed, the defining characteristic— of savant syndromes that there is a heightening of certain powers along with an impairment or poor development of other powers.
5
The powers that are heightened in savant skills are always of a concrete sort, whereas those that are impaired are abstract and often linguistic— and there have been many speculations as to how such a conjunction of strength and weakness may come about.

It has been known for a century and a half that there is a relative (but not absolute) specialization in the functions of the two sides of the brain, with the development of abstract and verbal powers being especially associated with the left, or dominant, cerebral hemisphere and perceptual skills with the right. This hemispheric asymmetry is very pronounced in humans (and present in a lesser degree in primates and some other mammals) and is observable even in utero. In the fetus, and perhaps the very young child, the situation is reversed, for the right hemisphere develops earlier and more quickly than the left, allowing perceptual functions to be established in the first days and weeks of life. The left hemisphere takes longer to develop, but continues to change in fundamental ways after birth. And as it develops and acquires its own (largely conceptual and linguistic) powers, it starts to suppress or inhibit some of the (perceptual) functions of the right hemisphere.

The functional (and perhaps immunological) immaturity of the left hemisphere in utero and during infancy makes it unusually susceptible to damage, and if such damage occurs— so Geschwind and Galaburda have hypothesized— there may be a compensatory overdevelopment of the right hemisphere, an actual enlargement made possible by neuronal migration. This may reverse the normal course of events and produce an anomalous right-hemisphere dominance instead of the usual left-hemisphere dominance.
6

Shifts to right-hemisphere dominance can also occur after birth, at least in the first five years of life, if the left hemisphere is damaged. (Geschwind’s interest in this phenomenon was ignited in part by the remarkable fact that a left hemispherectomy— a drastic procedure sometimes performed for intractable epilepsy, in which the entire left hemisphere is removed— does not render a young child permanently languageless but is followed by the development of language functions in the right hemisphere.) It seems quite possible that something like this happened with the three-year-old Martin, following his meningitis. Such hemispheric shifts may also occur, though to a lesser degree, in adults who have predominantly left-sided damage to the brain.

Savantlike talents may sometimes emerge in later life. There are several anecdotal descriptions of such an emergence following brain injuries, strokes, tumors, and frontotemporal dementia, especially if the damage is confined initially to the left temporal lobe. Clive Wearing, described in chapter 15, had a herpes encephalitis infection affecting especially his left frontal and temporal regions and, in addition to his devastating amnesia, developed a savantlike speed of calculation and punning.

The rapidity with which savant talents may emerge in such circumstances suggests a disinhibition or release of right-hemisphere functions from an inhibition or suppression normally exerted by the left temporal lobe.

In 1999, Allan Snyder and D. J. Mitchell inverted the usual question of why savant talents are so rare and asked instead: why don’t we
all
have savant talents? They suggested that the mechanism for such skills might reside in all of us in early life but that as the brain matures, they are inhibited, at least from conscious awareness. They theorized that savants might have “privileged access to lower levels of information not available through introspection.” Subsequently they started to test this theory experimentally using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which now allows a brief and virtually instantaneous way of inhibiting physiological functions in different parts of the brain. Using normal volunteers, they applied TMS to the left temporal lobe for a few minutes, in a stimulation designed to inhibit the abstract and conceptual thought governed by this area of the brain and, they hoped, to allow a transient release of perceptual functions in the right hemisphere. These experiments have produced modest but suggestive results, seemingly improving skills like drawing, calculating, and proofreading for a few minutes. (Bossomaier and Snyder are also investigating whether absolute pitch can be released by TMS.)
7

Similar techniques have been used by Robyn Young and her colleagues, who found in one study that they could duplicate the release effect but only in five out of seventeen subjects. They concluded that “these mechanisms are
not
available to everyone and individuals may differ in either their ability to access these mechanisms or even whether they possess such a mechanism.” Whether or not this is the case, it certainly seems that a sizeable minority, perhaps thirty percent, of “normal” adults may have latent or suppressed savant potentials which may be released to some degree by techniques such as TMS. This is not entirely surprising, given that various pathological conditions— frontotemporal dementia, dominant-hemisphere strokes, certain head injuries and infections— may lead on occasion to the appearance of savantlike abilities.

One must infer that there are, in many individuals, at least, very concrete eidetic and mnemonic powers which are normally hidden, but which may surface or be released under exceptional conditions. The existence of such potentials is only intelligible in evolutionary and developmental terms, as early forms of perception and cognition which once had adaptive value but are now suppressed and superseded by other forms.
8

Darold Treffert, who has studied dozens of people with savant powers, both congenital and acquired, emphasizes that there are no “instant” savants, no easy path to savantism. Special mechanisms, whether they are universal or not, may be necessary but not sufficient for savantism. All savants spend years developing and honing their skills, sometimes obsessively and sometimes drawn on by the pleasure of exercising a special skill— a pleasure perhaps heightened by its contrast with their own overall intellectual impairments, or by the recognition and rewards their powers may bring. Being a savant is a way of life, a whole organization of personality, even though it may be built on a single mechanism or skill.

W
hen I was growing up in London in the 1930s, I especially enjoyed the visits of Enrico, the piano tuner, who would come every few months to tune our pianos. We had an upright and a grand, and since everyone in the family played, they were always getting out of tune. Once when Enrico was ill, a substitute tuner came— a tuner who, to my amazement, got around without a white stick and could apparently see normally. Up to that point, I had assumed that, like Enrico, all piano tuners were blind.

I thought of this years later in regard to my friend Jerome Bruner, for in addition to his many other gifts, he is immensely sensitive to music and possesses extraordinary powers of musical memory and imagery. When I asked him about these, he said that he did not come from a musical family but that he was born with congenital cataracts, not operated on until he was two. He was functionally blind in his first two years, seeing only light and shadow and some movement before his cataracts were removed— and this, he thought, forced him to focus on sounds of all sorts, especially voices and music. This special sensitivity to the auditory has stayed with him all his life.

It was similar with Martin, my musical savant patient, who wore thick pebble glasses like Jerry Bruner; Martin had been born with very severe farsightedness, more than twenty diopters, which was not diagnosed and corrected until he was almost three. He too must have been functionally blind as an infant, before he had glasses. Did this play a part in making him a musical savant?