The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens

the typical pattern for adult experts. Their memories were certainly finely tuned with respect to information relevant to their specific fields. But when Joanne administered the working memory section of the Stanford-Binet, she wasn’t quizzing Garrett on music patterns or grilling Greg about recipes. She was reading off sentences or pointing to strings of numbers and listening as Garrett and then, later, Greg flawlessly repeated them back to her. The information had nothing to do with music, nothing to do with cooking. But the prodigies were unstoppable. Unlike the adult experts, the prodigies’ working memories were excellent
in general
.
    As Joanne moved forward with her research, the pattern she saw with Garrett and Greg repeated itself.Again and again, the prodigies earned exceptional scores on the working memory portion of the Stanford-Binet. It wasn’t that they remembered everything. Many of the prodigies reported that their memories were nothing special when it came, for example, to names or faces or movie plots. But when they paid attention to a particular task, as they did during their IQ testing, their working memories dazzled.
    This pattern seemed to suggest that the prodigies’ abilities were somehow different from those of typical experts. But if the prodigies weren’toperating like miniature adults, how to explain their abilities? Could the prodigies’ extreme memories have something to do with the link to autism that Joanne was pursuing?

    Hidden in the depths of the
DSM-IV,
within the pages devoted to autism, a mention of extraordinary memory could be found by the careful reader.
    It would be easy to miss. Extraordinary memory wasn’t listed in autism’s two-page “Diagnostic Features” section. Nor was it mentioned in the page-long “Associated Features and Disorders” section. In a section labeled “Specific Age and Gender Features,” buried in a sea of information—sandwiched between a description of social shortcomings and the higher incidence of autism among men—was a single mention of notable memory: “In older individuals, tasks involving long-term memory (e.g., train timetables, historical dates, chemical formulas, or recall of the exact words of songs heard years before) may be excellent.”
    Having briefly mentioned extraordinary memory, the
DSM-IV
quickly dismissed it. Even when an autist demonstrates outstanding recall, the manual said, “the information tends to be repeated over and over again, regardless of the appropriateness of the information to the social context.”
    From reading the
DSM-IV,
you might think that exceptional memory was hardly worth mentioning (and even this brief description was struck from the
DSM-5
). But the idea that some individuals with autism might display extraordinary memory can be traced all the way back to Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, the two men credited with identifying the condition in the 1930s and 1940s. Kanner, for example, noted that many of the children he saw could recite “an inordinate number of nursery rhymes, prayers, lists of animals, the roster of presidents, the alphabet forward and backward, even foreign-language (French) lullabies.”Asperger similarly observed that one of his subjects had anexcellent memory for digits and that, among autists, there were some who could name the saint for every day of the year, young children who knew all the Vienna tramlines, and some who demonstrated “other feats of rote memory.”
    Similar reports of autists with extraordinary memories appear in popular reports and academic papers—a boy who memorizes movie release dates, another who memorizes train schedules.But systematic studies have revealed that memory in autism is complicated: autists’ performances on memory tests vary across many dimensions, including the type of memory test, the nature of the stimuli presented, and the context in which those stimuli