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How to unleash your brain's inner genius

CLAD in a dark suit and sunglasses, Derek Paravicini makes a beeline for the
sound of my voice and links his arm into mine. "Hello, Celeste. Where have you
come from today?" I reply and his response is immediate: "From Holborn?" He
repeats the word several times, savouring each syllable. "Hol-born, Hol-born,
Hooool-bbooorn. Where's Hoollll-booorn?" As our conversation continues, the
substance of much of what I say doesn't seem to sink in, but the sounds
themselves certainly do, with Paravicini lingering over and repeating
particularly delightful syllables. "Meewww-zick. The pi-aan-o."

Such touching and immediate friendliness is not quite what I expected from my
first meeting with the 29-year-old, blind musical savant, but his obsession with
reproducing sounds certainly makes sense, given his talent. Paravicini can play
just about any piece of music you request, entirely from memory, with formidable
technical ability, despite having severe learning difficulties that mean he
needs constant support in everyday life. And as I find out an hour later, he
constantly improvises the pieces he has learned by ear, rather than simply
copying as you might expect.

Paravicini is a prodigious savant - someone with a dazzling talent in one or two
fields, normally music, maths, art or memory, but who also has some kind of a
disability, such as autism. Psychologists have puzzled long and hard over savant
skills, which confound their traditional understanding of intelligence. "What
makes savants so interesting is this jarring juxtaposition of ability and
disability in the same person," says Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist based in
Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin who was also a consultant for the film Rain Man. "We are
used to seeing skills that are consistent with each other."

But now researchers are beginning to unearth clues as to how savants' formidable
brains work, and that in turn is changing our view of what it means to be a
savant. In the past, savants were considered rare, solitary figures capable of
mind-boggling skills that appeared as if by magic. "There have almost been
suggestions that their skills appear like the birth of Venus in Botticelli -
fully formed," says psychologist Richard Cowan, who studies savants at the
Institute of Education, University of London.
Savants were considered solitary figures, capable of mind-boggling skills. There
have almost been suggestions that their talents appear like the birth of Venus
in Botticelli - fully formed

A flurry of research published earlier this year in the journal Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B paints a very different picture. It turns
out that these skills are far more common than previously thought. They may even
arise from traits found in the general population, implying that savants are not
fundamentally different from the rest of us. What's more, these skills may only
blossom after years of obsessive practice, raising the question of whether many
more people might cultivate similar skills, if only they had the motivation.

One of the biggest clues to the origins of savant talent lies in the fact that
savants are far more common within the autistic population than among people
with other mental difficulties. "When you talk about savants, you have to talk
about autism," says Greg Wallace, who studies savants at the National Institute
of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. "In many ways they are inextricably
linked."

Previously, about 1 in 10 people with autism were thought to have a special
ability but in April, Patricia Howlin at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's
College London found a much higher figure in the autistic adults she surveyed
for savant skills or an exceptional cognitive ability. Those with an exceptional
cognitive ability scored higher than the general population on at least one
aspect of an intelligence test, which included arithmetic, spatial and motor
skills and memory span. Savant skills included more fully developed talents,
such as being able to name the elevation of both the sun and the moon at any
time of day, on any specified date; being able to name the day of the week for
any date in the distant past or future (a talent known as calendrical
calculation) and perfect pitch. Importantly, the abilities and the skills had to
be exceptional by the standards of the general population, but also well above
the individual's overall level of
ability. In total, roughly 30 per cent had some kind of special ability
(Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1359).

But while highlighting the link between autism and savantism, Howlin's results
didn't offer any further clues as to why the two are so entwined. To investigate
the nature of this link, Francesca Happé, also at the Institute of Psychiatry,
and her colleagues decided to test which aspects of autism predispose people to
talent, and whether these traits also occur in the general population, albeit
less commonly.

Her team turned to a questionnaire called the Childhood Asperger Syndrome Test,
which assesses social interaction, communication and whether someone has
"repetitive and restrictive behaviours and interests" (or RRBIs) associated with
autism. The team sent the CAST survey to the parents of more than 6000 autistic
and non-autistic 8-year-olds along with a questionnaire assessing the child's
special abilities in maths, musical ability, art and memory.

On analysing the results, one RRBI trait in particular emerged as the biggest
indicator of talent. Children who "notice details that other people miss", or
"remember details that other people miss" were twice as likely to have a special
gift than those without these attributes (Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2009.02076.x).

Happé has concluded that this one aspect of autism rather than the whole
"package", may turn out to be the "starting engine" for talent in savants. "An
eye for detail is a cognitive style that runs through the normal population, and
it is that quality that gives you the foothold into talent," she says.
An eye for detail gives you a foothold into talent. It may be this one aspect of
autism, rather than the whole package, that turns out to be the starting engine
for savant abilities

But how could such an unremarkable trait give rise to a gift? For musical
savants like Paravicini, Happé suggests that a bias towards small details might
have led their developing brains to focus more on the exact notes than the
overall melody, leading to perfect pitch and an exceptional musical memory. In
art, a focus on small regions of a picture could lead to accurate perspective
drawing.
Precocious artists

That theory fits with another study of non-autistic children with a talent for
drawing that belies their age. Although these "precocious realists" don't
qualify as savants because they don't have a disability, the ease, speed and
accuracy of their drawing are similar to the distinctive qualities found in
savant artists.

To see if a detail-focused mindset might also explain these childrens' skills,
psychologists Ellen Winner and Jennifer Drake of Boston College gave them the
block design test, which assesses your ability to piece together a pattern from
its component parts. Most people find this harder when they are shown an
unsegmented version of the pattern versus a segmented one, but people with
autism don't have this preference, demonstrating their skill at seeing a whole
in terms of its parts even if there are no obvious dividing lines (see diagram).
"It shows they are able to do the segmentation in their minds," says Winner. The
precocious realists did not have this preference either, indicating a talent for
realistic drawing may arise from this isolated trait commonly found in autism
(Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1449).

Although these results help to pinpoint exactly what it is about autism that
predisposes people to talent, it's still not clear why an eye for detail is more
common in autistic people in the first place. Clues might lie in the work of
Simon Baron-Cohen from the University of Cambridge, which suggests that people
with autism are "hypersensitive" to sensory information. He now proposes that
such acute sensitivity might predispose people with autism to pick out
differences that would escape the rest of us, fostering an unusual focus on
detail that leads to the development of savant skills (Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1522).

But while a focus on smaller details may well be a necessary ingredient for
talent, no one is yet claiming that it alone can explain the appearance of
savant abilities. For instance, the ability to "toggle back and forth" between a
detail-focused view and a broad view might be important to produce a good work
of art. "To draw very well you have to be able to see the gestalt as well," says
Winner.

Daniel Tammet, a prodigious savant who has memorised pi to 22,514 digits,
believes his own talents have arisen from a special ability to connect different
pieces of information together. "Savant abilities are linked to a highly
associative type of thinking, an extreme form of a kind that everyone does -
examples would include daydreaming, puns and the use of metaphors," he says.

There's also the question of how much practice contributes to the savant's
specific talent. Savants practise tirelessly, but is that a big contributing
factor, or are they born with major brain differences that predispose them to
excel in their particular field?

The few studies of savant brains certainly suggest they are physically different
from the average brain. For example, when Happé and Wallace studied the brain of
a savant gifted at art, calendrical calculation and memory, they found his
cortex was thicker in the areas associated with visuospatial processing and
calculation and thinner in other regions associated with social cognition,
compared with people who were neither savants nor autistic. But whether these
differences were innate or grew with lifelong practice was still unclear.

The answer to that question may come from an unlikely source - a study of London
taxi drivers who have acquired an encyclopedic memory of the streets of London
known as "the Knowledge". Given that taxi drivers must remember the layout of
25,000 streets and the location of thousands of places of interest, and retrieve
the information instantaneously, some researchers like Happé believe the
Knowledge qualifies as a savant-like skill.

Eleanor Maguire and colleagues at the Institute of Neurology at University
College London and colleagues found that drivers with the Knowledge have a
bigger rear hippocampus than bus drivers and adults who do not drive taxis. In
addition, the hippocampus appears to be larger the longer a taxi driver has been
working, and shrinks once they retire (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0288). That suggests the drivers were born
with typical brains which then adapt with training to accommodate the skill. If
that's true of other talents, it is possible that although savants may have an
unusual detail-focused cognition, their brains aren't fundamentally different at
birth but become so with training.

Further preliminary evidence that many of us may have the basic brain equipment
to develop such skills emerged from a calendrical savant known as GC. By
scanning his brain, Cowan found that GC uses the same regions of his brain to
process dates as non-savants use for mental arithmetic (Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 364, p 1417). In another experiment
Cowan and his colleagues asked GC to learn a new calendrical system. With a
limited amount of time to practise, he performed no better than a non-savant.

So if the traits that make a savant are found in the general population and
practice is a big contributing factor, could we all develop a prodigious talent
if we put in the hours? "I do not know any reason why not, though many would
lack the motivation," says Cowan.
Motivation

But while the results of the brain scans show that savant brains may not start
out with large physical differences, Happé's study - which considered both
identical and fraternal twins - indicates that there is still a strong genetic
component to the detail-focused mindset necessary for talent.

And it's doubtful that even those who do inherit the necessary eye for detail
could unleash the phenomenal talents of someone like Paravicini through practice
alone.

"I agree that many people could acquire the least creative types of savant
skill, such as calendrical calculation," says Tammet. "I do not believe however
that most people could learn to draw a city landscape in gorgeous detail like
Stephen Wiltshire, or compose several albums of original jazz music like the
American teenager Matt Savage, or create an original way of visualising numbers
and language, like in my case."

In fact, it seems the remaining mystery is not so much how savants achieve their
talents, but what drives them in the first place. "Motivation is a big unknown,"
says Wallace. "It's an enormous driving force in giftedness and in savants, but
we don't know a lot about it."

One person who has something of an inside view on what contributes to savant
ability is Paravicini's mentor, Adam Ockelford, a professor of music at
Roehampton University in London who has watched Paravicini's talent blossom
since the age of 4. When they first met, Paravicini was entirely self-taught and
bashed at his plastic keyboard with his fists and elbows to reproduce the sounds
he was hearing. It was only after years of practice that his technical skills
developed.

But as researchers like Wallace have suggested, Paravicini seemed motivated way
beyond the average music student. In fact, he seemed to be playing as if his
life depended on it, and Ockelford thinks it's this that truly sets savants
apart from their peers. "The survival instinct gets turned with extraordinary
force into something else - in Derek's case music," says Ockelford. "When people
see Derek, they think it is amazing, almost religious. But to me, it's mainly
just hard work."