The Prodigy's Cousin (15 page)

Synesthesia comes in a variety of forms.
Sometimes numbers or words evoke a particular taste (like when the word “jail” calls to mind cold bacon) or
months occupy a spatial location (like December sitting an arm's length away from the left of the body). Some people personify letters, numbers, or months.
One woman perceives August as a chubby boy prone to becoming defensive and the number 8 as entangled in a love triangle—she is dating 9 but loves 7.

The most common form of synesthesia involves the pairing of letters, numbers, or words with a particular color.
Researchers have picked up on some trends in this area; those who associate letters with colors frequently perceive
a
as red,
d
as brown,
o
as white,
r
as red, and
y
as yellow. Some are tougher to pin down; the unreliable
p
was primarily viewed as green in one study, pink in another, and blue in a third.

These unexpected responses to letters, sounds, numbers, or other
stimuli are automatic. They also tend to be constant over time.
Tests taken months or even years apart reveal a consistency rate above 90 percent; if an individual with synesthesia perceives the letter
s
as lazy, self-centered, and feuding with the letter
p,
s
will never lead an industrious life or think of others, and its quarrel with
p
will continue forever.

Synesthesia is particularly interesting in the context of prodigies and autism because it comes with a memory boost: Synesthetes, as those with synesthesia are known, have enhanced recall for the types of stimuli that induce their synesthesia. Those who perceive letters as having a color, for example, have a superior ability to recall letters, while those who perceive time as having a particular spatial location have exceptional recall for dates.

Jacob's synesthesia memory boost is associated with numbers. When Jacob thinks about a number (say, 3), he doesn't just picture the numeral; he perceives it as having a specific color (like red) and a specific shape (like a triangle). As Jacob once put it during a conversation with a reporter, “
Every number or math problem I ever hear, I have permanently remembered.” But he has trouble remembering smells and conversations.

Over the years, there have been several anecdotal reports of an association between autism and synesthesia, including a case study of an extraordinary British savant, Daniel Tammet, the man who recited 22,514 digits of pi from memory. Daniel can also conduct complex calculations in his head quickly and without error. He speaks ten languages and learned Spanish over the course of a weekend.

Like Jacob, Daniel has synesthesia. He sees numbers as having a shape, color, and texture and perceives some words as having a color.
He also has Asperger's disorder. It's no coincidence that Daniel has both conditions;
a recent study found that adults with autism spectrum disorders are more than three times more likely to report synesthesia than non-autistic adults, making synesthesia another link between autism and talent and potentially another link between autism and child prodigies.

In 2011, a reporter from a small Indiana newspaper
wrote a story about Jacob.
Two months later, the
Indianapolis Star
published a lengthy profile on the twelve-year-old scientist who was trying to disprove the big bang theory, and that story got picked up by a wire service. Word of the whiz kid was rehashed in print and plastered all over the Internet. The full weight of the media crashed down on the Barnett household.

It was an exciting, frightening, sometimes overwhelming time. It was also eye-opening. As Kristine told Glenn Beck later that month, she hadn't realized that Jacob, who was sitting next to her in a backward baseball cap and a pi T-shirt, was
that
unusual. “I really just thought he was, you know, just another smart kid,” she said.

It was in the midst of this media frenzy that Joanne contacted the Barnetts about her research. Kristine was skeptical. “At first I sort of thought, well, I don't know about that,” she recalled. But then Joanne asked if Jacob might like to go to Cedar Point, a Sandusky, Ohio, amusement park jammed with roller coasters. The Barnetts packed their kids into the car and began the five-hour drive to Sandusky, eager to talk to someone who might provide a new perspective on the child who couldn't get enough theoretical physics.

The Barnetts also consented to one more interview. They had been approached by
60 Minutes,
and convinced that the reporters and producers there would do a thoughtful piece, the Barnetts said yes. They pointed them to Joanne as a prodigy expert.

Joanne arrived at the family's hotel toting a large poster of the United States that she had bought from a teacher-supply store. With the cameras rolling, Joanne showed Jacob a series of states and then asked him to repeat them back to her. Jacob zipped through the list of twenty-eight states, both forward and backward.

After
60 Minutes
finished taping, Joanne administered the more serious tests. Jacob issued a knockout punch in the working memory
test, just as the other prodigies had done. Afterward, he was chatty and eager to explain the fourth dimension.

When the segment aired the following January, it opened with a picture of Jacob, his baseball cap slung backward over his head, his freckled face happy and curious. The first few minutes focused on Jacob's accomplishments, his autism diagnosis, and his love for math and physics. Jacob used a light box to demonstrate the way he saw numbers: as colored shapes, often layered on top of one another. As the segment continued, it shifted to Joanne's work with Jacob. The correspondent Morley Safer explained the memory test Joanne had done with Jacob for the cameras. When Morley met with Jacob three months later, Jacob was still able to recite all twenty-eight states, in order, backward and forward.

At one point, Morley asked Jacob about his autism, noting that his parents said that he was proud of the condition. Just as Joanne had long suspected, Jacob believed that he had succeeded not
in spite
of his autism but
because
of it. “That, I believe, is the reason why I am in college and I am so successful,” Jacob said. “It is the rise as to my love for math and science and astronomy and it's the reason why I care. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gotten this far.” In Jacob Barnett, the connection between prodigy and autism wasn't just tangible; it was celebrated.

The prodigies and autists had behavioral similarities; they had cognitive similarities. But the biggest question remained: Was the connection between the two genetic?

Joanne partnered with two Ohio State genetics researchers, Chris Bartlett and Stephen Petrill, to find out. After Joanne appeared on
60 Minutes,
she spent a spring break zigzagging back and forth between prodigies, asking the kids and any willing family members (some autistic, some not) to spit into small vials.

Back in Columbus, Bartlett and his team
extracted the DNA from the saliva samples and prepared it for analysis. They then sent the DNA to an outside lab for genotyping. That outside lab extracted each individual's genetic code from his or her DNA and returned the raw data, “
a big text file with a lot of numbers,” as Bartlett put it, to the Ohio State team.

The idea was to find out whether autists and prodigies—two groups of people who, from the outside, often look completely different—shared genes that explained their commonalities. Once you stripped away their outer trappings, did the two conditions have common genetic roots?

The chances of finding anything were slim. The team used a linkage analysis, a study design that assumes the
sought-after genetic mutation has a big impact. It was unlikely to pick up on anything with a relatively small effect. And they were working with a very small sample. The team had DNA from eleven prodigies and their families, but only five of those families included a sibling, a prerequisite for inclusion in the initial analysis. The mutation they were looking for would have to be a powerful one (highly penetrant, in genetics speak) to show up in an analysis on such a small group.

The team coded both the prodigies and the autists in the sample as “affected” and all the non-prodigious, non-autistic relatives as “unaffected”—essentially pretending that the prodigies and the autists were equivalent to each other. The idea, then, was to look for a slice of DNA inherited by the prodigies and the autists but
not
by their non-autistic, non-prodigious siblings.

The team plugged their equations into the computers and waited. Some of the analyses took days; one left the computer churning for nearly a week. The main results, when translated into a graph, look like an EKG. A single dark line hovers around the baseline, and then occasionally darts upward, indicating a potentially relevant place on the genome.

There were several blips on the prodigy-autism radar—something
interesting on chromosome 8, something interesting on chromosome 20, maybe something worth looking into with a larger sample on chromosomes 5 and 11.

There was also one clear hit. At the very beginning of the chart, near the middle of chromosome 1, the line leaped up. On the short arm of chromosome 1, a location known as 1p31-q21, the team found something. They couldn't pinpoint the precise genes at play, but DNA in this region seemed tied to both prodigy and autism.

The researchers conducted two statistical analyses on the data; in both cases, the finding on chromosome 1 was statistically significant. They pressure tested the result. Would the link be cleaner and clearer if they changed their assumptions? What if they assumed that this particular region was tied only to prodigy? What if they assumed it was tied only to autism? Nothing came close. Not only did no other model achieve statistical significance, but the next-best fit with their data, the model that assumed that prodigy and autism did
not
have common genetic roots, was
fifty times
less likely to be true than the model that assumed that they did. “
We did gamble. We put it all on the line by coming up with what we thought were reasonable tests of this hypothesis, and we failed to falsify it,” Bartlett said. “In terms of science moving forward, this is really as good as it's going to get.”

In at least some of the families, there seemed to be a genetic link between prodigy and autism. Despite their outward differences, the two groups had a common genetic core.

The link isn't entirely clean. There are a few family members—“carriers,” of a sort—who are neither prodigious nor autistic but who seem to have a mutation in the same location on chromosome 1.

It's unlikely that those family members are secret prodigies or autists; both conditions are typically pretty hard to miss. The more likely explanation, the team believes, is that the identified region on
chromosome 1 doesn't act as an on-off switch for prodigy and autism; both conditions are far more complex than that.

Perhaps this area on chromosome 1 is tied to a particular characteristic shared by prodigies and autists, like exceptional memory, a sharp eye for detail, or a tendency toward developing passionate interests. According to this theory, those non-prodigious, non-autistic family members who share the variation on chromosome 1 would possess that particular trait but lack whatever genes are responsible for the other behaviors of autism, the other behaviors of prodigy.