The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

I suggest that poor functioning in many of Nadia’s brain areas results in freeing her spared right parietal—her rasa module—to get the lion’s share of her attentional resources. You and I could achieve such a thing only through years of training and effort. This hypothesis would explain why her art is so much more evocative than Leonardo’s. It may turn out that a similar explanation holds for autistic calculating prodigies: profoundly retarded children who can nonetheless perform astonishing feats of arithmetic like multiplying two 13-digit numbers in a matter of seconds. (Notice I said, “calculating,” not math. True mathematical talent may require not just calculation but a combination of several skills, including spatial visualization.) We know that the left parietal lobe is involved in numerical computation, since a stroke there will typically knock out a patient’s ability to subtract or divide. In calculating savants, the left parietal may be spared relative to the right. If all of the autistic child’s attention is allocated to this number module in the left parietal, the result would be a calculating prodigy rather than a drawing prodigy.

In an ironic twist, once Nadia reached adolescence, she became less autistic. She also completely lost her ability to draw. This observation lends credibility to the isolation idea. Once Nadia matured and gained some higher abilities, she could no longer allocate the bulk of her attention to the rasa module in her right parietal (implying, perhaps, that formal education can actually stifle some aspects of creativity).

In addition to reallocating attention, there may be actual anatomical changes in the brains of autistics that explain their creativity. Perhaps spared areas grow larger, attaining enhanced efficacy. So Nadia may have had an enlarged right parietal, especially the right angular gyrus, which would explain her profound artistic skills. Autistic children with savant skills are often referred to me by their parents, and one of these days I will get around to having their brains scanned to see if there are indeed spared islands of supergrown tissue. Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, as autistic children often find it very difficult to sit still in the scanner. Incidentally, Albert Einstein had huge angular gyri, and I once made the whimsical suggestion that this allowed him to combine numerical (left parietal) and spatial (right parietal) skills in extraordinary ways that we lesser mortals cannot even begin to imagine.

Evidence for the isolation principle in art can also be found in clinical neurology. For example, not long ago a physician wrote to me about epileptic seizures originating in his temporal lobes. (Seizures are uncontrolled volleys of nerve impulses that course through the brain the way feedback amplifies through a speaker and microphone.) Until his seizures began quite unexpectedly at the age of sixty, the physician had no interest whatsoever in poetry. Yet all of a sudden, voluminous rhyme poured out. It was a revelation, a sudden enrichment of his mental life, just when he was starting to get jaded.

A second example, from the elegant work of Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, concerns patients who late in life develop a form of rapidly progressive dementia and blunting of intellect. Called frontotemporal dementia, the disorder selectively affects the frontal lobes—the seat of judgment and of crucial aspects of attention and reasoning—and the temporal lobes, but it spares islands of parietal cortex. As their mental faculties deteriorate, some of these patients suddenly, much to their surprise and to the surprise of those around them, develop an extraordinary ability to paint and draw. This is consistent with my speculations about Nadia—that her artistic skills were the result of her spared, hyperfunctioning right parietal lobe.

These speculations on autistic savants and patients with epilepsy and frontotemporal dementia raise a fascinating question. Is it possible that we less-gifted, normal people also have latent artistic or mathematical talents waiting to be liberated by brain disease? If so, would it be possible to unleash these talents without actually damaging our brains or paying the price of destroying other skills? This seems like science fiction, but as the Australian physicist Allan Snyder has pointed out, it could be true. Maybe the idea could be tested.

I was mulling over this possibility during a recent visit to India when I received what must surely be the strangest phone call of my life (and that’s saying a lot). It was long distance, from a reporter at an Australian newspaper.

“Dr. Ramachandran, I’m sorry to bother you at home,” he said. “An amazing new discovery has been made. Can I ask you some questions about it?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“You know Dr. Snyder’s idea about autistic savants?” he asked.