The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens Page A

are presented. Extreme memory for at least some types of information seems to bea trait of some but not necessarily all autists. The memory of savants is an altogether different beast.

    Nadia was born in Nottingham, England, in 1967, the second child of two Ukrainian immigrants. She said a few words before she turned one but then stopped speaking. She was sluggish and clumsy; she struggled to feed herself. She was extremely particular about her clothes and arranged her dolls and stuffed animals in a precise order on her bed. She was prone to violent tantrums, some of which lasted for two to three hours. Eventually, she was diagnosed with autism.
    When Nadia was three and a half, her mother spent a few months in the hospital. Nadia was ecstatic upon her return. Without warning, she began drawing on the walls.
    After that, she drew often. She drew quickly, dashing off lines and often finishing her drawings within only a few minutes. She would rip through several sheets of paper during a sketching session. She never checked her drawings against any sort of reference material; she relied only on her memory. At the peak of her obsession, Nadia drew everywhere: blank paper, lined paper, newspaper, picture books, cereal packets, and the tablecloth.
    Her drawings didn’t look like those of other children. A typicaldrawing of a horse by a six-year-old portrays the animal from the side; the image is static and simplistic. The horse may be distorted, its body stretched out, or it might resemble a table, a square body with four legs popping out from it.
    But some of Nadia’s earliest sketches portray a horse head-on. Her lines, almost always drawn with pen, capture the wild complexity of the horse’s mane and depict some of the musculature of the leg. These pictures of horses—one of her favorite subjects—improved rapidly; she captured the animal at unusual angles and always depicted it with a sense of perspective. The frenzy of her lines captures the horses in motion: the animals appear arrested in mid-stride, ripped from the hunt, frozen while ambling along with a rider in tow.
    When Nadia’s mother first showed the child’s drawings to a team of psychologists, they thought it was a hoax. Such drawings could not possibly come from six-year-old hands—especially not the hands of a child who was mute, tantrum prone, and otherwise uncoordinated.
    Nadia was certainly unique in this way, but she was not alone. She was a savant, an individual with what DaroldTreffert, a Wisconsin psychiatrist who has spent more than fifty years studying savant syndrome, has termed an “island of genius”—a spike in aptitude combined with a more general impairment. Sometimes this aptitude or talent is merely surprising in light of the individual’s disability. Sometimes the savant’s level of talent would be amazing even without the disability, as was the case with Nadia’s drawing. It’s the underlying disability, though, that technically distinguishes the savants from the prodigies; savants have one, while prodigies do not.
    Savants displaya varied collection of talents. One common specialty is calendar calculating, the ability to quickly and accurately determine the day of the week on which a particular date will fall. A famous pair of twin savants could perform this calculation forty thousand years into the future or the past, easily able to determine the day of the week on which July 23, 12,213, will fall. Other savants are particularly gifted at music, art, performing complex calculations, orbuilding models and working with machinery. Leslie Lemke, for example, can perfectly replicate complicated music pieces after hearing them only once, despite being blind and having an extremely low IQ. George Widener, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder in his thirties, creates intricate artwork into which he incorporates dates and historical facts.
    Over time, scientists realized that in