The Little Girl Who Could Draw
When we returned from the holiday to France during which I followed Tom Simpson and cycled up Mont Ven-toux, I asked my five-and-a-half-year-old daughter to draw a man on a horse. Ten minutes later, she proudly presented this:
Now, obviously, I consider my daughter to be an artistic genius. But I will agree all of her talent perhaps doesn’t show itself here. In fact, as much as it pains me to admit it, the drawing is pretty average for a child of her age.
The scale is good – the rider’s head, body and leg are in the correct proportions – and while the reins are a little wayward, the overall impression is definitely man-on-a-horse-y. But if you wanted to be critical you might point out the legs of the horse are rather stuck on to its body, and the leg of the rider is a bit of a token effort. But then, that’s common with children’s drawings. They show what they know to be true, not what they see. The same principle explains how children draw square tables. They know there is a leg at each of the four corners, so they draw all four legs in place, as if the table top was transparent glass.
On the next page, there is another drawing of a man on a horse, done by another five-and-a-half-year-old girl. It’s a bit better. Actually, it’s a LOT better. It’s so good, in fact, most artists and child psychologists agree it should be impossible for a child of that age to draw. Indeed, the first people to see the picture insisted the girl could not have drawn it. But she did. Take a look.
The girl who drew this picture was called Nadia Chomyn. When Nadia’s mother first showed it and others her daughter had sketched to clinical psychologists in Nottingham in the early 1970s, the scientists assumed the mother was mistaken, or worse, trying to deceive them.
The detail, the perspective and the unusual head-on approach were all the signs of a far more mature mind than that of a five-year-old. Most strikingly – and this perhaps didn’t register with you at first – the image breaks the boundaries of the paper. That is unheard of for a young child. Much older children and many adults strive to make a picture fit the frame, even compressing features and squashing letters as they approach the margin, so the image does not bleed off the edge.
Nadia was born in 1967. Growing up in the English Midlands she stood out, not least because her parents and grandmother were from Ukraine. Her father spoke good English but the rest of her family didn’t. In fact, her grandmother rarely spoke at all, which might help explain why Nadia, who spent most of her time with her, was virtually mute. As Nadia grew into a toddler, her behaviour became difficult to control. She would run off to the park, where she seemed oblivious to traffic and other dangers, and, while quiet most of the time, Nadia was prone to outbursts and bouts of aggressiveness and screaming. Struggling to cope, her grandma increasingly confined Nadia to her bedroom.
At school her differences from the other children were even more apparent, she struggled to show even a passing interest in her surroundings and would stare into space and wander aimlessly around the classroom. A year later, her language skills had not improved and her increasingly anxious parents sought medical advice, including getting her seen at the famous Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street in London. These early medical reports noted Nadia’s exceptional drawing skills, but only when she was assessed by child psychologists at Nottingham University was the true depth of her artistic talent revealed.
Still, it was not a promising start in Nottingham. Large for her age, Nadia was clumsy, slow and lethargic. While one of the psychologists showed her toys in a playroom, the other scientists spoke to her mother as they observed Nadia through a one-way screen. There was, frankly, no sign of the artistic ability the mother claimed for her daughter. It seemed impossible that the detailed and skilful sketches the anxious woman clutched and tried to show to the scientists with pride could have been produced by the chubby, brown-haired girl they watched through the glass.
Handed a thick yellow wax crayon, Nadia merely scrubbed roughly at the paper to produce a tangle of scribbles. The mother, the scientists feared, had brought her child into what was supposed to be a safe and controlled environment, apparently concerned about her welfare, and then lied through her teeth.
Everything changed when they gave Nadia a ballpoint pen. The sullen little girl came to life, smiling and chatting to herself as she quickly and confidently drew her pictures. Cockerels, dogs, cats, a giraffe, pelicans, human figures and the occasional train filled hundreds of pieces of paper. Each was put together with precise and accurate movements totally out of keeping with the slow and ponderous way Nadia usually held herself and walked.
And then there were the horses – the glorious, dynamic, saddled and decorated horses and riders. Muscles bulged as one galloped; its legs in perfect unison and ready to reach for another stride. One bared its teeth from the page. They were, one of the psychologists would say later, like the sketches left by Leonardo da Vinci.
The scientists were dumbstruck. Everything they knew about children’s mental and drawing abilities – and they knew a lot – said it was impossible. Nadia’s use of perspective, shading and foreshortening were years ahead of children her age. She did not include token objects: no sun in the sky or trees in the background.
How could the scientists be so sure Nadia’s drawing was exceptional? They had seen more pictures drawn by five-year-olds than one would ever want to. A few years earlier, they had been passed some 24,000 ‘pictures of mummy’ collected by the Observer newspaper when it ran a children’s painting competition. These researchers had looked through enough legs and arms stuck onto formless female bodies to think they knew what children were capable of.
Asked to draw a square or a diamond, young children tend to construct it from four separate lines, taking the pen away from the paper after each to reassess. Nadia completed a diamond with two movements. Her hand–eye coordination was extraordinary. Children usually draw with jerks and small movements, constantly checking on the progress of each stroke with their eyes and altering the direction of the resulting line as they go. Nadia drew with continuous confident movements, as if she trusted her hand to do what was required. (This was a girl who could not tie her shoelaces.)
If the line she drew was not right, she would draw another and another until it was. That’s different to the way other children’s drawings are influenced by the process itself – after they make a line, they use it as a cue to draw the connecting lines, rather than rely on a more accurate mental picture. All lines are anchored to the first.
Another difference was how Nadia had no interest in colour. Her pictures were black, white and grey. They were as stark and monochrome and cold and as reluctant to engage with easy appeal to outsiders as the little girl herself.
The psychologists saw Nadia for five months, but her behaviour stayed the same. Mostly, she seemed disinterested in the questions they asked and the help they wanted to offer. But, in time, things did improve. Aged seven, she started at a special needs school and became more sociable. By nine she was talking much more, and able to initiate requests and conversations, such as asking for a sticking plaster if she cut her finger. She seemed happier, but as other mental abilities began to unlock, so her drawing ability faded.
Her pictures started to look increasingly like those done by her friends and other older children. She started to notice the drawings of others and to copy them. She started to include childlike features such as token objects and her sketches lost the life-like quality that previously made them stand out.
It was clear Nadia would always struggle to survive without daily help. Even as a young adult she had no concept of money, and could not reliably feed herself. A place was found for her at a dedicated residential unit, where she would spend the rest of her life. In 2010, Lorna Selfe, one of the original Nottingham psychologists, tracked her down for a visit.
By then in her early forties, the Nadia who Selfe met with was again a virtual mute and struggled to use cutlery, preferring to eat with her fingers. She still had fits of rage and had smashed objects in her room, including televisions, so it was kept bare. Nadia, Selfe concluded, was now ‘an unremarkable person with severe learning difficulties’.
While her childhood masterpieces were hung on the walls of the unit, Nadia took no interest in them and no longer picked up her previously precious black pen. If one was handed to her and a member of staff suggested she draw, Nadia would break it in two. And her talent had receded. Her most recent drawings, some done when she was in her early twenties, looked like the work of a five-year-old. One she sketched of a horse looked more like the one drawn by my daughter. After a short illness, Nadia died in October 2015.
Given Nadia’s learning difficulties, her drawing skill was extraordinary but it wasn’t unique. As an eleven-year-old at a special needs school, Stephen Wiltshire was introduced in a 1987 BBC television documentary as the best young artist in Britain. With learning difficulties and an estimated IQ of 60, Stephen became fascinated by London buildings he saw from the street and started to draw them with terrific precision from memory. He’s now a professional artist with a unique approach: places from Istanbul to Singapore arrange a quick helicopter trip and then set Stephen up to draw their cityscape from his amazing memory.
How can a brain that struggles with basic functions like language and understanding social cues manage to dazzle in these ways? Where do these magnificent splinter skills shown by Nadia and Stephen come from? Neuroscientists aren’t certain, but one popular explanation – similar to the explanation offered to John Elder Robison – is a mental rewire.
Nadia’s learning difficulties suggest she was born with a part of her brain damaged or not functioning properly. And when that happens, the brain can set up a neural diversion and ask a different region to step in and perform the damaged area’s tasks. Because different parts of the brain tend to specialize in different functions, they often try to perform the same task in different ways. And, sometimes, those different ways can bring about a massive improvement, a mental phase transition.
Some of the most striking differences in the way brains operate are between functions on the left and right sides. A bit like the myth we only use 10 per cent of our brains, the common belief in a clear distinction between left-brained and right-brained people is false, but projected from a foundation of truth. The left and right side of the brain communicate across the divide all the time, and much of what we think and do, especially the higher-level stuff, is partly controlled by both hemispheres. But there are certainly some skills and abilities neuroscientists have traced to one side more than the other.
The left side of the brain, for example, is more heavily involved in language, speech and some motor skills. The specialisms of the right brain are less verbal and based on spatial awareness, visualization and construction skills. The left brain has more to do with functions that are logical, abstract, sequential and symbolic, including stuff like speaking and reading. The right brain focuses more on parallel processing and intuitive problem-solving strategies.
This perceived contrast between the hemispheres of the brain is the basis for one of the most popular explanations for the artistic skills of people like Nadia and Stephen. When the left side of the brain is damaged, the theory says, the right side either takes over some tasks and does them in a different way, or is given more freedom to express its own specialist abilities. In such circumstances, the right brain is freed from the inhibition and oversight of the left.
When the left side of the brain does not develop normally, a common result is autism. Nadia and Stephen were both diagnosed with autism. In fact, about one in ten people with autism show some kind of exceptional skill. These people are called savants.
Savants don’t fit the positive manifold model of human intelligence very well. If they are supposed to have a general intelligence, well, nobody told them that. Their intelligence, or at least their mental ability, is anything but general. It is highly, highly specific. There are savants who can multiply 1,345,873 by 749,823 quicker in their heads than you can punch the numbers into a calculator. There are some who are unable to read but can recall extraordinary details of past events. Others could not spell piano but can play one like a virtuoso. Their abilities could reveal a secret of mental phase transition, and so of neuroenhancement.
Savants are rare, but Darold Treffert knows hundreds of them. Treffert is a psychiatrist in Wisconsin who has worked with and studied people with extraordinary mental abilities since the early 1960s.
Treffert has seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of patients over the years. But he still remembers some children he met on the first day on the job. He started work on a new children’s unit at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute near Oshkosh. The unit cared for thirty kids, all of whom had severe disabilities. Many were mentally handicapped and had been diagnosed with autism. All had been hospitalized.
Most of the children were there because they struggled to look after themselves. They found even the most basic tasks – washing, dressing, and eating – difficult. Robert, for example, was mute and suffered from severe learning difficulties. Yet Robert could do an extraordinary thing. He could rapidly put together a 500-piece jigsaw, picture side down. He could scan the shapes, mentally construct the upside-down puzzle, and then assemble the pieces on the table, Treffert says, ‘with the precision, motion and rhythm of a sewing machine’.
Arthur was a ‘walking this-day-in-history almanac’ who had a vast reservoir of facts about what had happened on any given date, and loved to quiz people about them. Knowing what was to come each morning, Treffert would try to read up the night before, but was still unable to answer many of Arthur’s questions.
Henry had a different kind of talent. He could shoot baskets, from the free-throw line, with unerring accuracy. He had an ‘obsessive-compulsive’ routine, Treffert observed, putting his feet in exactly the same position and holding the ball in exactly the same way each time.
Finally, John knew every bus route in the city of Milwaukee, from start to finish, the entire public transport system. John liked buses. He would walk around the mental health unit with a cardboard model of the destination window on the front of a bus, and had a scroll of paper with all the stop and street names to display.
One summer evening in 1980, Treffert’s daughter Joni came home bursting with excitement about a miracle. The miracle was Leslie Lemke, a mentally disabled boy, who had been born prematurely and suffered terrible complications. Before he was six months old both his eyes had been surgically removed.
Leslie’s foster parents were told he would probably die, but they refused to give up on him, his mother especially. She taught him to swallow and strapped him to her own legs to show him how to walk. Aged eight or nine, she bought him a piano, and Leslie would place his hands over hers as she played.
One night, woken by music, Leslie’s mother walked into the living room to find her severely disabled son playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1. The composition had been used as the theme music for a television movie – Sincerely Yours – the family had watched earlier that evening. That was, she said, the first time Leslie could have heard it.
Leslie became so good on the piano he was invited to play at a local high school, as part of Wisconsin Foster Parent Recognition Month. Joni Treffert was at the concert and, when she came home, she told her father how Leslie had played ‘from memory all sorts of classical, religious and popular music like a skilled piano virtuoso’.
Also at the concert was a film crew from a Green Bay television station. Amazed at what they had seen, they wanted to run it past a mental health expert and so took the footage to Treffert, who explained Leslie was a savant. The story went viral, well, as viral as it could in 1980. By Christmas, much of the US was in love with Leslie and the great TV anchorman Walter Cronkite closed his CBS Evening News show that year with the words: ‘This is a season that celebrates a miracle, and the story belongs to the season. It’s a story of a young man, a piano and a miracle’.
Three years later, Leslie was one of three savants featured in an episode of the show 60 Minutes. Watching him, ‘with tears in his eyes’, was the actor Dustin Hoffman. When Hoffman was approached about a part in the movie Rain Man, and was told the producers wanted him to play Charlie, the younger brother of a man called Raymond who was an autistic savant, Hoffman said that, no, he wanted to play Raymond.
Rain Man introduced savant skills to a wider audience. In fact, the movie had such an impact the ideas of autism and savant skills are now tied together in popular culture. But it’s important to stress savantism and autism are not the same. Most people with autism don’t have a special savant skill, and they and their families are sometimes distressed by the common assumption they should do. And not all savants have autism.
The unusual skills shown by savants, Treffert says, are islands of genius. That makes Treffert a James Cook-like explorer, discovering and mapping these islands, and recording the human life he finds there.
He now has a roll call of more than 300 savants from around the world, both children and adults. Some of these people he has met and some he has only read reports on, in local newspapers and websites. He finds many of them when they write to him, after they pull up his name when they search the internet after hearing or reading about others with similar abilities.
The majority of the savants on Treffert’s registry have autism – but some don’t. And, while most of the savants have had their unusual skills since birth, intriguingly for the idea of cognitive enhancement, some haven’t. These people are called acquired savants. Their mental talent emerged later in their life. Thanks to a mental phase transition, an extraordinary new ability inside their brain was unlocked somehow. And if it was lying dormant in those people before they realized it, then it could be inside you too.
In his short story, ‘Funes the Memorious’, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges described a man who became a savant when he fell from a horse and knocked his head. The man developed a memory so powerful, Borges wrote: ‘The least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasures or physical torment.’
But this detailed recall came at a price. The man could not think in abstract ways, he could not join all the dots he saw together by a shared concept. Even the concept of ‘dog’ with all of its variety and dissimilar animals baffled him, because to him a dog he saw from the side became a different thing when it turned to face him.
‘Funes’, Borges wrote, ‘could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw – he noticed – the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momen-taneous and almost unbearably precise world’.
Since Borges wrote his story in 1942, science has discovered people who really do become savants after a bang on the head. In the summer of 2015 I went to meet one of them.
Pip Taylor believes her first miracle began on an Edinburgh bus. It was late summer 1994. The city was returning to normal after another festival season and Pip was on her way to work. The sun was already high over the glittering Firth of Forth, where the seagulls danced around the high poles of the suspension bridge that carried the river of cars and trucks toward the city from the ancient Kingdom of Fife. Pip did not know it yet but her life was in danger.
Pip was twenty-nine years old and working as a waitress in the staff canteen at one of the office buildings in town. She liked to let her mind wander on the short journey through the rush hour streets from the Morningside house she shared with two friends. On that morning she was sitting with her back to the window, so she almost failed to notice when the bus pulled up at her stop. She jumped to her feet, black skirt flapping, and, forgetting the seat was on a raised platform, Pip banged her head, hard, on one of the time-worn leather loop hand straps that dangled from the roof. Deep inside her brain, something stirred.
By mid-afternoon that day, the lunchtime chaos had passed and the cleaned plates had been placed back in their teetering piles. Pip had to finish one final task and was steering the hose of a vacuum cleaner through the legs of the empty chairs. Satisfied for another day, she straightened her back and stood. That’s when it happened. A sagging bulge of capillary vessel inside her head gave way, somewhere above her left eye. A cerebral aneurysm had exploded inside her brain. It produced a subarachnoid haemorrhage.
Pip did not know this at the time. All she knew was pain, and an odd sensation some water had been spilt onto the back of her head and was dripping down her neck. It was not water, but blood. And the blood was running down the inside, not the outside, of her head. A colleague asked Pip why she was crying. Until then, Pip had not realized she was.
According to the NHS website: ‘A subarachnoid haemorrhage causes sudden, severe head pain. This condition requires immediate medical care to prevent brain injury and death’.
Her colleague asked Pip if he should call a taxi to take her home. Pip’s reply almost certainly saved her life. She asked for an ambulance. Her survival, one of the doctors told her, was miraculous.
Today, Pip lives on the Wirral peninsula in northwest England. Head north from her house and you can catch a ferry across the Mersey. Go south and you wade into the silt of the River Dee. Nobody ever wrote a song about the ferries that cross the Dee, but the sluggish Dee tide rolling along the southern edge of the Wirral draws some tourists of its own. They watch as barges carry the giant wings of the Airbus-380 along the Dee to a deep-water port at Mostyn from the factories making them at Broughton. The town lies just to the west of Chester, which some historians claim the Romans had once earmarked for their capital ahead of London. Within the city walls of Chester, Pip Taylor was granted miracle number two.
It happened late one spring evening in 2012. Pip and a group of friends were at one of the city’s pubs. Pip was talking to a man she knew. She was pleased to have bumped into him again. He kissed her and got up to buy some more drinks.
There are two versions of what happened next. In his, he returned with his pint of lager, her glass of white wine and a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps to find the woman he thought he had been getting on with had vanished. Still, if he felt his night was ruined, then it was nothing compared with how the evening ended for Pip.
Exactly what happened is unclear. Pip certainly can’t remember, but friends, her sister and a doorman who was working in a rival pub across the street have helped her to piece it together. Smiling as he walked away, she stood, perhaps to stretch her legs, and took a step forwards. Then she passed out and collapsed head first down the set of narrow and steep stone stairs to the road. As she descended, she banged the right side of her head, hard, on each step. If she was still conscious at the top of the stairs, she wasn’t at the bottom.
Another ambulance ride followed, and another stay in hospital; another trip home with a headache and instructions to take it easy. Against the odds, another doctor told her there seemed no lasting damage.
If anything, Pip felt better after the fall. Though she had recovered from her haemorrhage almost two decades before, it had left her demotivated and listless. It also prompted dizzy spells and the occasional blackout. That might have been why she fell. This time the repeated blows to her head, she says, seemed to put right whatever the haemorrhage had damaged and her mood in the weeks after the fall improved.
Something else changed too. As the time since her accident passed, she developed a craving. Her recovering brain fizzed with tension. She felt the urge to express herself. This wasn’t out of character, Pip had enjoyed art at school and could draw a decent cartoon Snoopy. But her talent had been limited, so much so an art teacher gently advised her to look elsewhere. It was the eyes, always the eyes. She struggled to draw them. When she tried to draw real faces, the eyes would still always look like they came from a cartoon.
Remembering the art teacher’s judgement, in the weeks after her accident Pip turned instead to wood carving. No use. She bought a heavy-duty bench and vice and installed it in the shed in her small garden. Three years later, it still stands there unused. Woodwork was too slow, she realized, and would not hold her attention. Modelling clay was the same. So one afternoon she picked up a pencil and notepad and started to sketch.
The result, a still-cartoonish fat boy, was good – better than she remembered. Startled, she drew a cat, copied from a picture in a book. That too was good. Something had changed. Pip’s brain had changed. She had talent, skill, a whole new ability. She showed her mum. It was, her mum said, a miracle.
Judge for yourself. Before the fall, this is how Pip drew a girl’s face.
And this is one she drew afterwards.
Psychologists describe Pip Taylor as an acquired savant. And reports of the mental phase transition in acquired savants like Pip Taylor often prompt two different reactions. There is wonderment, awe and mystery. And scepticism and disbelief. In many ways, scepticism and disbelief is the more rational response.
It’s possible, of course, Pip is simply having us on. Perhaps she was always able to draw and her claims about the miraculous transition are a hoax. The rest of us, after all, have no way to check she was as rubbish before as she says. That was part of the reason I wanted to meet her.
Having done so, I believe her story. I can’t offer a castiron guarantee the friendly and open woman in her early fifties who I shared a coffee with – whose mum lives next door and who sticks her head over the wooden fence between their gardens to see who she is talking with so early on a Monday morning – is not an elaborate fraud. But it seems unlikely. Not least because it’s difficult to see what she would get from such a scam. She does not sell her pictures; she does not even like to give the originals away. And she is not a publicity-seeker. I only found her because a chance conversation she had with a head-injury charity about her drawings made its way through the media food chain from a local paper to the Daily Mail. When I arrived at her house for the arranged interview, Pip had forgotten and was still in bed.
The bang to Pip’s head – and the subsequent phase transition in her brain – improved her drawing ability. But did it increase her intelligence? She reported no other obvious changes in mental ability, such as maths or memory. And without the results of an IQ test before and after the incident we can’t judge that. But according to some measures, she did get smarter. For one of the skills long used to judge intelligence is drawing.
For decades, psychologists have tested children’s mental development simply by asking them to draw a person. Points are awarded for life-like features, such as the number of arms and legs (and other body parts) depicted, and if they are attached and presented in the correct proportions. A nose, for example, must be drawn longer than it is wide. Clothing scores points, as long as the body parts do not show through. Extra points are awarded for details: eyelashes, pupils, toes, thumbs, beards, teeth and recognizable hair styles.
Similar to Alfred Binet’s tests of mental age, the draw-a-person exercise assesses stages of development in kids’ artistic ability. Aged two to five years, children usually draw faces only and then people as tadpoles: heads on legs. Then come bodies, with arms attached halfway up, and then hands with a generous supply of fingers. From four years, the drawings start to feature details such as a waist, and while the arms correctly move up to the shoulder region, legs are typically set well apart and parallel. From five years old, pattern and decoration feature, and the neck arrives. A year later, the figure is often placed against a (often colourful) background, and aged eight, the child starts to draw dynamic scenes, like people engaged in an activity.
Drawing gets more difficult at this point, and decoration and colour are not enough to make a picture look good. Human figures in action demand that arms and legs bend and interact with objects in a realistic way. Combined with increasing self-consciousness, this is a key stage in development. Unsatisfied with the results, some children give up drawing. Others are able to upgrade their instinctive skills to conscious technical ability. Many (and this was me) retreat into facetiousness, and realizing they lack the ability to progress, deliberately draw what they know – and can defend from criticism – as unrealistic images. Bodies are distorted, often to bizarre effect. Jokes and visual puns appear. The child wants their pictures to be admired, not as artistic, but as clever.
Intelligence tests based on drawing a person simply compare a score for a sketch to the expected score for a child of that age. According to this system, the young Nadia Chomyn had an intelligence off the charts.
Scores significantly lower than the average on this drawing test signal a child of equally low intelligence, complete with all the social and educational implications that such a designation has brought over the years. The test is rarer now than a few decades ago, but it’s still used, particularly in some developing countries. It’s even used in some places to probe the intelligence of adults, typically those with learning disabilities and other mental disorders. And that means that bangs on the head, or other techniques that can improve drawing, can be argued to increase intelligence. And one way scientists have found to improve someone’s drawing is electrical brain stimulation.
In 2013, scientists at Harvard University used electrical stimulation to improve the drawing skills of a former builder called Bob. Bob had suffered a stroke on the left-hand side, and the scientists wanted to see if they could encourage the kind of rerouting of activity in the brain believed to unlock new abilities following such trauma. So they attached an electrical brain stimulator to the skull above his prefrontal cortex on the right-hand side. They asked Bob to draw pictures: sometimes while they used an electrode to stimulate his brain, and sometimes when they only pretended to.
We’re back to horses. Here’s Bob’s ‘before’ picture, without the electrical stimulation:
And here’s the drawing he did when the current was switched on:
Admittedly, neither picture is striking, especially when compared to Nadia’s and Pip’s. But then Bob only had two and a half minutes to draw each one. The scientists didn’t want to expose him to the electrical current for too long. Nadia and Pip could, and did, take hours over their pictures. Anyway, it’s not their general artistic merit that matters, but any notable difference in quality between the before and after sketches.
Bob also drew houses. Here’s one without the current to his brain:
And here with the current on:
The Harvard scientists mixed the pictures up and asked eleven of their colleagues to rate them from one to ten on the following categories: creativity (use of the imagination or original ideas), perspective (representation of solid object on a two-dimensional surface), aesthetics (beauty or the appreciation of beauty), reality (representing a real thing, not imagined) and accuracy (careful and free from errors).
In each case, the scores for the pictures Bob drew under the influence of the electric current were significantly higher. Again, I think it’s clear that Bob did not become an artistic genius, but, according to the results of the study, the electrical stimulation had a significant effect.
To understand what is happening during this type of change in the brain, how it shows itself in savants like Pip Taylor, and how it offers a possible route to mental phase transitions and cognitive enhancement for all, we need to consider one further definition of intelligence. In 2014, while grappling with the problem of how to develop artificial intelligence, computer scientists from Israel and the US posed a provocative question: ‘How much information should we drop to become intelligent?’
While intelligence is usually measured in additive terms – the more factual knowledge the better – the scientists argued true intelligence demands some of this knowledge be ignored in favour of higher-level abstraction. Cognition, they say, is categorization, and has to involve the loss of some of the concrete detail. What’s the difference between concrete and abstract categories systems? The mental process of abstraction and categorization sees two, 2, II, ii and deux as all the same. But in concrete terms the order and shape of the marks on the page are different.
As children’s brains develop they move from concrete thinking to abstract. They start to ignore, for example, the differences between individual cats and instead group them into an abstract category of Cats, which are different to Dogs. We have to do this or our brains would be swamped: imagine trying to hold the detail of every type of cat, dog and an infinite number of other concrete examples in your consciousness. Much easier to think of a Cat by default, and then zoom into a specific type of cat if necessary. For this kind of dropped concrete detail is not lost: it’s buried in our memory banks should we need it, and more importantly, should we go looking for it.
To achieve their mental phase transition, many savants seem able to access this dropped concrete information. But in exchange, they lose the ability to process it into abstract ideas and concepts, to make the most of the P-FIT mental circuitry that helps humans interact with the world. A similar trade-off seems to take place in autism. One of the most popular explanations for the way the autistic brain operates is called the weak central coherence theory.
A rewiring of their brains, the weak central coherence theory says, makes people with autism unable to perform the higher-level processing to convert concrete information – the where and what – into abstract concepts, the why. Someone with this kind of mind could easily tell you how they keep fit – running, swimming, whatever – but might struggle to explain why they do so.
Again, drawing and art helps to show this distinction between abstract and concrete most obviously. One group of acquired savants are people with frontotemporal dementia, a relatively rare debilitating condition linked to Alzheimer’s disease. It usually emerges earlier in life than other dementias and it attacks the frontal and temporal regions of the brain we rely on for language, to plan and make decisions, and to govern our behaviour. As these neurons, and the connections between them, are slowly poisoned by invasive, toxic, sticky clumps of protein, they die and their functions wither.
Patients with frontotemporal dementia often lose the ability to speak and comprehend, and combined with a decline in other social skills, they can revert to a childlike state. But they can also show one or two mental skills that continue to shine amid the ruin caused by the disease.
Mavis, for example, spoke eight languages and played professional-level bridge. She noticed the first symptoms of dementia at sixty-four, and when she had her IQ tested aged sixty-eight it was obvious some parts of the brain were being more affected than others. Her arithmetic was brilliant, but she often couldn’t remember a single word of a list read to her. She lost her general knowledge and struggled to answer basic questions, but could still play chess.
In some extraordinary dementia cases, as the sufferer’s brain dies off a different skill can emerge. Patients with frontotemporal dementia can feel a compulsion to draw and paint pictures, and many of them do so with a savantlike skill or style they did not show before their illness.
The neurologist Bruce Miller has studied this transition in a group of dementia patients at a hospital in San Francisco. He believes – and brain scans support the idea – that damage to the front left part of the brain triggers a burst of activity on the right. And with the left side out of action and the right side in charge, the pictures tend to be focused and realistic, without significant abstract or symbolic features.
The dementia patients, in other words, showed a switch from abstract categorization to distinct concrete detail. The pictures they produced were technically proficient, but limited in approach. They were not what artists describe as conceptual or abstract works. Indeed, a few cases of established artists who have suffered this dementia show a similar trend, away from abstract shapes and more towards conventional images of landscapes and portraits of people and animals.
Research with savants is rare, but some studies show evidence of rewiring in the brain that would support such a shift in emphasis. In 2014, Japanese scientists reported research they carried out on a retired office worker called JN, who suffered a brain haemorrhage in his mid-sixties. JN liked to paint, and one of the last pictures he completed before his brain injury was a portrait of his wife. His brain damage was to the left prefrontal lobe, the same site as injuries in the frontotemporal dementia patients, and the scientists were keen to see what would happen to his art.
About a year later, with no prompting from anyone, JN reached for his paint brushes again. One of the subjects he returned to was his wife, and he painted what looked, to the inexpert eyes of the researchers, to be a more realistic and life-like portrait.
To check, they brought in the acknowledged specialists – twenty-seven professional reviewers from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Without telling them why, or the circumstances, the scientists asked the critics to judge and score each picture on several criteria. The results confirmed first impressions. The experts rated the second picture as higher on realism and technical skill, but lower on aesthetics and evocative impact – exactly what would be expected as JN’s brain switched from abstract to concrete processing.
Scans of blood flow in his brain showed the back of his parietal lobe on the right-hand side had become more active. The injury to JN’s left-hand prefrontal lobe, the scientists said, provoked a compensatory increase in the activity of this other region. The inhibition of the left was lifted and the right side of JN’s brain was thrown the keys.
Beyond art, another good example of this distinction between abstract and concrete information is the savant skill of absolute or ‘perfect’ pitch, the ability to recognize a single musical note played alone. Only one person in every 10,000 has absolute pitch and it is said to be impossible to teach. Most musicians – even those we think of as geniuses – don’t have it. They need a reference note to work from. Play them a C (and tell them it’s a C), then they can correctly call everything that follows – G, E, F, whatever. But play them a C without identifying it for them, and someone without absolute pitch will struggle.
Yet arguably all of us have the mental equipment for absolute pitch. To hear sounds we must analyse and identify the discrete frequencies of all the component noises. This means, in a physiological sense, our brains should be able to identify a sound with a frequency of 440 hertz as the note ‘A’ just as we identify light with a frequency of 660 terahertz as ‘blue’. Yet most of us can’t or don’t.
This seems to be because our brains usually pass over the information on the individual sounds and instead focus on the combined effects of all the different notes, and the relationships between them, because that is the aspect of what we hear that we consider most important. In contrast, savants with perfect pitch seem to have access to the raw, unprocessed data – the concrete information on the sound frequency.
(Something similar seems to happen when some people with autism look at fluorescent lights. While other people see the big picture, the continuous glow, the unusual, concrete-focused processing of the autistic brain can see it flashing on and off 120 times a second, which can explain why some people with autism find them so disorientating.)
Another group of people with unusual mental abilities supports the idea that a switch from abstract to concrete processing in the brain can trigger high-level savant cognitive skills, and perhaps offers a route to neuroenhancement. Just like savants, these people seem to have privileged access to cognitive machinery denied to the rest of us. They have synaesthesia, an unusual condition that blends and confuses the input and output of different senses. Some people with synaesthesia see sounds and hear colour; those are probably the most well-known forms of the condition and have received wide attention.
Lesser known is a form of synaesthesia where people see the passing of time in physical space. We all do this to an extent. In cultures where reading and writing goes from left to right, people tend to think time flows in that direction as well. Ask someone what they did last week and they are more likely to wave around their left arm. Future events are denoted with the right. In scientific tests, people respond to the names of the earlier days of the week and earlier months of the year when allowed to signal with their left hand, and to the later days and months with their right. American children order time-related concepts like meals from left to right (breakfast on the left and dinner to the right) while Arabic-speaking children place them right to left.
In a similar way, we tend to visualize smaller numbers on the left. We hold an imaginary line in our mind’s eye onto which we hang time, numbers and other sequences. Psychologists call this process the reification of abstract concepts into concrete representations. It reverses the process of how intelligence demands concrete examples are categorized into abstract concepts. It turns the abstract concept of time in the brain into mental units as discrete and concrete as the numbers on a clock face. This type of concrete processing notices the counting of minutes and hours and days, rather than the sense of passing time. And this sense of detail in time is what some people with syn-aesthesia report.
Most striking, they say they are consciously aware of their imaginary time line, which they clearly visualize in three-dimensional space, either in their mind’s eye, or circling or wrapping around their body. Just as an architect might design a building in their head – this window over here and this bit of the roof at a different angle – so these people construct a spatial framework for time – early morning over there and late afternoon up a bit. It might sound unusual, but to a visuo-spatial synaesthete, as they are known, to not visualize time in this way is equally bizarre. That’s a common feature of many forms of synaes-thesia; people with the condition are often astonished to discover (and some discover it late in life) not everybody experiences the world the way they do.
The concrete visualization of time was noted as long ago as 1880 by the early intelligence researcher Francis Galton (he of the ugly map and eugenic ideas), who made woodcuts and engravings to reproduce the mental maps his subjects reported. One, a ‘mathematical astronomer of rapidly rising reputation’, told Galton: ‘The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 etc are in a straight row, and I am standing a little on one side. They go away in the distance so that 100 is the farthest number I can see distinctly. It is dusky grey and paler near to me; up to 20 it occupies a disproportionate size. There are sorts of woolly lumps at the tens.’
Recent research at the University of Edinburgh suggests visuo-spatial synaesthesia is more than a mental curiosity. It could confer cognitive benefits, some of which seem to relate to the kinds of questions asked on IQ tests. It could, in other words, increase intelligence.
In one Edinburgh study, ten synaesthetes consistently scored better than other people on tests of their awareness of time. They were significantly better, for example, at identifying the years in which major events of the twentieth century occurred, when Oscar-winning movies were released, and when songs reached the Christmas number one slot. That might not seem surprising, given these people’s brains focus so heavily on time and its passing. But the study showed the benefits went further.
The scientists also gave the synaesthetes tests to measure their spatial ability, by asking them to manipulate real or imagined objects in 3D space. They were shown images of complex shapes and told to build them one-handed from wooden blocks. They were asked to identify objects (like a gun and a trumpet) placed at various angles from their silhouettes. And they had to work out how a mixture of blocks would look when rotated. They performed better in all of them.
The above-average mental skills of the people with synaesthesia were especially noticeable when the scientists asked them to recall autobiographical details. Each was given a series of years, spaced evenly from when they were five years old until three years before the test, and told to write as many facts as they could remember. They were given one minute for each year – what they were doing, who their friends were etc. Most were aged in their thirties and forties, so the details they were being asked to remember were from two or three decades before.
All of the synaesthetes scored impressively, but the recall of one, a thirty-two-year-old man called Ian, blew the scientists away. The synaesthetes, on average, could remember seventy-four facts from the nine selected years combined, almost double the number detailed by other ‘normal’ volunteers (try it, it’s harder than it sounds). But Ian wrote down 123.
Just like the way the Nottingham psychologists responded with disbelief to the claims of Nadia’s mother that her daughter had drawn those astonishing pictures, the Edinburgh scientists struggled to believe Ian’s score. So they checked if he was doing what he remembered during those years with his sister, his aunt and his fiancée. Everything happened as he remembered.
The cases we have discussed – autistic savants, dementia patients and synaesthetes – together demonstrate how the human brain can break from the collectivism of general intelligence. The performance of one mental skill can vastly overshadow the rest. And this imbalance seems to be down to changes in the way the brain communicates, the neural routes selected and the regions brought online. This altered brain state arises as compensation for loss to disease or as a consequence of unusual development. And importantly, in the search to harness this effect for cognitive enhancement, experiments show these positive effects can be triggered and released without the downside of damage and disease.