Chapter 3 The Tiniest Chef

By the time Greg Grossman was a toddler, the skinny New Yorker with the fluffy dark hair already had a wide palate. Fellow diners around Manhattan and East Hampton gaped, astonished, as the doe-eyed kid requested foie gras and other adult fare. “He’d order anything—anything different and weird,” his mother, Terre Grossman, recalled. While waiting for his food, he scavenged for ways to observe the back-of-the-house action. He climbed onto his chair for a better view of the pizza oven; he snuck into the kitchen to watch the chefs at work.

Greg soon began experimenting in his own kitchen. At age four, he presented special candlelight dinners to his parents—often little more than a stuffed baked potato. At six, he used canned tomatoes to whip up his own pasta sauce. His recipes grew ever more sophisticated as he began sautéing fresh basil to add to his sauce and switched from limp spaghetti to al dente pasta. He began directing his mother as to what produce was in season when they went to the supermarket. “I would be buying stuff, and he would actually be telling me not to buy certain things, you know, ‘This isn’t ripe; it’s not in season,’” Terre said.

Around the time Greg was nine, the complexity of his creations swelled. He began using a grill, an appliance he described in a school essay as an “infrared, propane masterpiece of stainless-steel.” His repertoire exploded. He went from riffing on classic pasta dishes to pairing melon carpaccio with anchovies and wrapping sushi with foie gras.

That year, he prepared the meal that convinced him he wasn’t just messing around in the kitchen. With his father out of town, Greg urged Terre to watch television while he cooked dinner for the two of them. Terre stuck her head into the kitchen occasionally to monitor her child’s use of the stove and knives, but her worry was unfounded. Greg emerged from the kitchen unscathed, having crafted a meal that he would later declare his “first work of cooking art”: pan-seared scallops with a balsamic vinegar glaze and a wild mushroom medley. “It was so unbelievably good,” Terre said. “I totally freaked out.”

After that, food was everywhere. The family television pulsed with culinary programs as Greg discovered a stable of talented chefs he admired: Jacques Pépin and Rachael Ray for bringing cooking to a broad audience; Andrew Zimmern for his use of exotic ingredients (Greg declared he would eat many of the bugs Zimmern featured but not the beating snake heart). Greg monopolized the computer, researching chefs and cooking techniques. He satisfied middle school world civilization assignments with reports on ancient food cultivation and completed science projects by experimenting with Scoville heat units and inspecting bacteria growth in kitchens. He saved his money to buy specialty food products, requested only professional chef products as gifts, and dreamed of owning his own truffle.

Kitchen implements became contested territory in the Grossman household. For months, Greg hounded his parents for a new knife set. At first, the Grossmans refused. When Greg received the coveted knife set from a family friend, Terre nearly returned it. But after hours of watching Greg work with the knives, his parents finally relented: he was skilled and invariably careful. Their next battles were over fire (Greg insisted he needed it for crème brûlée) and liquid nitrogen (essential, Greg said, for ice cream and cotton candy). Greg won them both. “I was a little scared. What if I’m not home and he’s playing with some friends and something happens, the thing blows up or he burns somebody?” Terre recalled. “It was very, very difficult.”

Hands-on training proved hard to come by. Most cooking classes that would admit a young person were geared toward beginner fare like introductory cupcake making. Greg eventually enrolled in a course for teens. His skill at the stove drew the attention of the instructors, who asked him to work at an upcoming benefit with them. Greg found an adult class that sparked his interest, but he couldn’t participate because wine was served during the course. He would have to find a different way to learn.

Around the time he was twelve, Greg got a job busing tables and washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in East Hampton. When one of the prep cooks bailed on his shift, Greg stepped in, cutting carrots and peeling potatoes. He proved adept at the work, and soon he was filling in on this shift every week, eventually working as a line cook. When he was called on to run the pizza station, he made, by his mother’s count, forty-two pizzas in one night without burning a single one. Fearing he would be teased, he kept his job a secret from his friends.

But it was the cafeteria at Greg’s East Hampton school that really jump-started his education. The Ross School Café, an eatery committed to “regional, organic, seasonal, and sustainable purchasing and culinary practices,” wasn’t a meat-loaf-and-mashed-potatoes kind of place. The chefs used vegetables culled from the school’s garden to produce spinach and shiitake mushroom salads and poached asparagus with miso scallion vinaigrette. For Greg, it was a haven. He lit out for the café every chance he got.

When Greg was in fifth grade, one of the chefs at the café lent him a copy of a book by Ferran Adrià. For decades, Adrià had helmed elBulli, a restaurant in Spain frequently heralded as the best in the world until closing its doors in 2011. The book included stunning photographs of foods prepared and presented in fantastically unexpected ways. Greg was captivated by it. The ten-year-old carefully wrapped the book in paper to protect it and then devoured its contents. He searched the Internet for an inexpensive copy so that he could have one of his own. “That’s one of the things that really sparked my deep dive into cooking,” Greg recalled. “That set me off on this quest for creativity and technique and trying to figure out what the book was about.”

Greg began buying food equipment and chemicals and experimenting with cooking techniques unfamiliar to many professional chefs. He hunted down information related to the science of food preparation and dragged his mother to food trade shows in pursuit of liquid nitrogen. He acquired cooking implements his parents had never heard of.

The following summer, having just turned a whopping thirteen years old, Greg announced that he would no longer attend sleepaway camp in the Adirondacks. The camp lacked air-conditioning, there were bugs everywhere, and, most damningly, the food was terrible. One day in June, Greg accompanied his mother on a trip to Vered Gallery, an upscale art gallery in East Hampton where she had a business meeting. Greg perked up at the mention of an upcoming event at the gallery, a silent art auction fund-raiser.

You’re having an event? he asked. Who’s catering? We just cut up cheese and do a few little things, the gallery owner told him. There is no caterer. Give me a credit card and a budget, Greg offered, and I’ll get together a few servers and do four hors d’oeuvres. The co-owner gave Greg $100 to work with. Just keep it semi-kosher, she told him.

Greg hired two girls from school and told them to wear black dresses and black shoes. He hired a sous chef, a friend he was working with a lot at the Ross School Café.

On the night of the event, Greg told his classmates turned servers how to pronounce the hors d’oeuvres and explain the ingredients. Relying on a tidbit culled from the Food Network, Greg told them that they needed to know what they were serving to avoid any allergy mishaps.

For his first catering job, Greg served salmon gravlax with shiso crème fraîche—a raw, cured salmon appetizer. Other offerings included Thai chicken satay with citrus turmeric tzatziki and Indian spiced hummus with black sesame and curried nacho chip. For dessert, he prepared fresh whipped cream with peach gelée and mixed berries in a phyllo cup and chocolate mousse with lychee foam in a phyllo cup.

After the event, the co-owner complimented Greg on his execution. The event was beautiful, she told him. Everything was wonderful. Her only complaint was that the citrus turmeric tzatziki sauce he served with the Thai chicken satay wasn’t kosher—an infraction that became a running joke because Greg is Jewish.

For the rest of the summer, Greg hawked his services around the Hamptons, making pitches to prepare food for parties and openings. When someone expressed interest, Greg proposed recipes more or less on the fly. He cooked a fiftieth anniversary dinner for thirty people and handled the food preparation for a friend’s grandmother’s party. Vered Gallery hired him back for another exhibition in August, and Greg prepared truffles and fish soufflés. By the end of the summer, Greg estimated for the New York Post that he had prepared seventy-five pounds of scallops, thirty pounds of salmon, and two hundred micro-green salads.

Greg had an eye for the business side of things. He made his own contracts and insisted on photographer credits for pictures he provided. He found a nondisclosure agreement online, sent it to a friend’s lawyer father for edits, and began using it before he would discuss industry-related ideas with potential partners. He did his own billing, created budgets, and sought out wholesale suppliers to help keep costs down.

He plunged into the circuit of food industry events. At the James Beard Foundation’s Chefs and Champagne event, a glitzy tasting party in the Hamptons, Greg hobnobbed with fellow chefs, dove into conversations about the nitty-gritty of ingredients and food prep, and gave a cooking demonstration and interview for a TV station covering the event. At the International Restaurant and Foodservice Show in Manhattan, he introduced himself to vendors and suppliers, listened to the industry legend Danny Meyer speak, and demoed a Pacojet, a machine that micro-purees frozen foods. He buzzed his way through the James Beard Foundation Awards at Lincoln Center, attended the New York International Gift Fair, and participated in the StarChefs convention.

He made the biggest splash at the National Restaurant Association Show, a Chicago event that NBC declared the thirteen-year-old Greg’s “coming out party.” Greg demonstrated how to whip up a smoked Maine lobster tail with orange/anise granita, carpaccio of melons, and whipped shiso oil. Taking a page from his favorite TV chefs, the eighth grader included instructions on simpler methods for preparing the same dish at home. His public relations team beamed from the sidelines. Rumblings of a possible TV deal filled the air.

Greg rode a media swell back to New York. The newspapers ribbed him for being younger than a 1994 Bordeaux and dissected his past experience. When TV came calling, Greg’s teen idol looks didn’t hurt. His hair—dark brown, thick, and wavy—garnered Justin Bieber comparisons. His eyelashes—long and dark—“would make a Jonas brother jealous.” Greg cooked on the Today show, appeared as a guest on Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, and chatted with Gayle King on Oprah Radio.

Just one summer after his Hamptons catering debut, the Greg Grossman cooking cyclone reached dizzying speeds. In June, Greg whipped up 450 desserts—an innovative take on strawberry shortcake—for a school benefit. In July, he stopped in at an event to celebrate Flatiron chefs in Madison Square Park. Days later, he zipped off to Ohio to help raise money for an event at Veggie U, an organization dedicated to teaching kids about healthy foods, where he and his team churned out 650 tastings in an hour. After hustling back to New York, Greg helped fete a new coffee product by using liquid nitrogen and spray-dried yogurt powder to craft a dessert that looked like a frozen cappuccino. Next it was off to the French Culinary Institute to watch another chef demo before ordering specialty food products from out of state. He flew to Los Angeles to help with another food product promotion. After he returned to the East Coast, he ventured out to the Culinary Institute of America for an event with the Avant-Garde Cuisine Society in Hyde Park, New York, and then darted back to Manhattan for an industry gift show.

He was almost always in a white chef’s coat emblazoned with the logo of the Culinaria Group—the organization he founded as a beachhead for his professional and charitable work. He still hadn’t started high school.

By the summer of 2009, Greg Grossman was all over the newspapers, all over the Internet, all over television. It was only a matter of time before Joanne found him.

But was he a prodigy? He more or less met Feldman’s standard: Greg performed at a professional level at a very young age. Joanne’s slightly modified definition was satisfied, too; there was no denying Greg’s accelerated development. The quality of his work and the depth of his knowledge were recognized by professional chefs at the top of the game.

But there was a question about his field of expertise: Can you be a cooking prodigy? Was cooking really as difficult to master as, say, theoretical physics or music composition?

Two words kept Joanne from forgetting the kid chef: “molecular gastronomy,” a term sometimes used to describe Greg’s style of cooking. It was no accident that it sounded scientific. The phrase was coined in the early 1990s to jazz up a conference on food science in Sicily. The conference’s host wanted something that sounded weightier than “Science and Gastronomy,” so the “International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy” was born.

In practice, molecular gastronomy looks a lot like science. Hervé This, one of molecular gastronomy’s chief practitioners, has created charts illustrating when coffee chills depending on when milk is added, spent more than three months researching the texture of egg whites used in soufflés, used nuclear magnetic resonance to analyze carrot-based soup stocks, and puzzled out how to uncook an egg (he said the key was to add sodium borohydride to detach the protein molecules from one another).

Such experiments aren’t restricted to the laboratory. The restaurant luminary Pierre Gagnaire regularly incorporates This’s ideas into recipes. Heston Blumenthal, the maestro behind the Fat Duck, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Bray, England, explored the science of cooking on Kitchen Chemistry with Heston Blumenthal, a series of six half-hour programs. Exotic-sounding ingredients and techniques like liquid nitrogen (causes rapid freezing), hydrocolloids (substances that form a gel when mixed with water), and dehydration (removing the water from food) are the tools of chefs as statured as Thomas Keller of the French Laundry and Per Se, Grant Achatz of Alinea, and Greg’s culinary idol, Ferran Adrià. Molecular gastronomy was all the rage. The chef as scientist was king.

Greg hated the term. He thought it implied flashy cooking. He preferred to call his cooking modern cuisine. The core idea was to enhance the flavor of the food, not to show off fancy ingredients for their own sake.

But molecular gastronomy or not, Greg’s method of cooking was, at heart, a science experiment. He used the precision of a chemist to test temperatures, cooking times, and preparation methods, always trying to extract the best of an ingredient’s flavor and texture. Greg wasn’t slaving over equations in the back rooms of academia, but in practice his cooking was just a different expression of the same thing. Joanne decided that Greg Grossman was a prodigy. She wanted the kid in the kitchen, if she could get him.

Joanne clicked her way through articles on Greg and stumbled upon a story detailing his involvement with Veggie U. Greg had recently been in Ohio—a mere fifteen minutes from Joanne’s house. She had just missed him.

She called her husband, Jim. He contacted a family friend who worked at the Chef’s Garden, an organization connected with Veggie U, and got the Grossmans’ contact information. A male voice answered Joanne’s call; she asked if she was speaking with Mr. Grossman. When the caller confirmed, Joanne launched into her pitch.

There was something a bit uncomfortable about asking parents if she could study their child, but Greg’s father immediately put her at ease. Her work sounded fascinating. He was interested. But about twenty minutes into the call, Joanne realized that the Mr. Grossman she was speaking to wasn’t Greg’s father; it was Greg. A fourteen-year-old with the voice and confidence of an adult.

Greg tried to reassure Joanne that it was no big deal—he did all kinds of cooking deals without his parents’ knowledge—but Joanne hung up. Her Institutional Review Board, the organization that oversees research ethics, forbade her to talk to a minor about her research without the consent of his guardian.

Joanne waited until Saturday morning and tried the Grossmans again. This time, Greg’s mother, Terre, answered her call. Joanne explained that she had inadvertently asked Terre’s young son if she could put him through a battery of psychological tests.

Terre just laughed. She said it happened all the time. A major broadcasting station talked to him for three weeks before she even knew about the conversation. Joanne offered to travel to New York, but Terre told her there was no need: they would be back in Ohio for another Veggie U event the following July.

When Terre and Greg arrived, Joanne dropped Greg off at the Chef’s Garden to prepare for the next day’s competition and drove Terre back to her house. Over the next two days, Terre detailed Greg’s development. The media was right: Greg was an astounding kid. But that was only part of the story. From Terre’s perspective, the road hadn’t always been smooth.

When Greg was born, Terre was forty-one years old, and her husband, Ed, was fifty-two. At six months pregnant, Terre had been bitten by a Lyme-infected tick in the Hamptons and panicked that her baby might be stillborn. A doctor put her on antibiotics, and the pregnancy continued.

Greg entered the world seven weeks before his due date. He weighed a mere four pounds, eleven ounces, but he was otherwise healthy. He began speaking at the usual time, but he garbled his words well into preschool, spitting out syllables that sounded nonsensical to all but his mother. Greg eventually corrected his speech through therapy and tongue exercises. School presented other problems. In early grade school, Greg often finished assignments quickly, leaving him with free time. He filled it by talking or joking around, and this often landed him in trouble with his teachers.

But from Greg’s youngest days, an irrepressible industrious streak propelled him to learn, to do, to create. When Greg’s parents bought him a battery-operated toy piano to play with during car rides, he quickly began composing little ditties, such as “Black Notes,” a tune played exclusively on the sharp and flat keys of the piano. He demonstrated a knack for computers and, at four, declared himself the “Komputer Kid.” He generated business cards to advertise his services and offered his computer expertise to friends’ parents. A couple of years after that, Greg grew fascinated with clusters of rocks, shapes in the snow, and other natural formations that looked like human faces. He began photographing these as part of a venture he dubbed Naturefaces and developed plans to display them on a Web site, a calendar, and a movie. Eventually, Greg became fully engrossed with food, and his other interests fell by the wayside.

Greg’s insatiable fascination with food unexpectedly provided common ground with his classmates. Greg loved to teach other kids the ins and outs of cooking, and Terre often found him and his buddies in her kitchen, making tortillas or fanning sushi rice. When a colleague asked Greg to store his anti-griddle (a cooking appliance with a surface that plummeted to -30°F), Greg invited classmates over to flash freeze their favorite foods, creating frozen chocolate pudding and olive oil treats.

The Grossmans sold their East Hampton home during the financial crisis and relocated to Manhattan. Greg finished the school year in the Hamptons, living on a friend’s couch. But his need to cook didn’t flag. Through all the upheaval—and his first year of high school—Greg grew ever more consumed by food. At school, he assembled a proposal for a culinary-focused course of independent study. After his idea was approved, he vacuum-sealed meat and then cooked it in a vat of water, flash pickled foods, and experimented with creating new textures using hydrocolloids. On his own time, he attended the International Chefs Congress, yukked it up with fellow chefs online, devoured forty-plus meatballs at the New York City Wine & Food Festival, and bemoaned the closing of Gourmet magazine. He launched the Amaya Project, the aim of which was to integrate food with other forms of art, with a ten-course meal; celebrated the end of the Food Network’s banishment from Cablevision; and attended a competition at the Culinary Institute of America. It never occurred to Greg to take a break.

This constant call to create followed Greg when he traveled to Ohio for the Veggie U Food and Wine Celebration. It was a behemoth of an event. More than thirty chefs, together with their teams, participated. Greg and his team prepared thirty pounds of beef tongue as part of a dish that also included chickpeas, caramelized fennel, and a sugar snap pea broth. When the event ended, Greg got dropped off at Joanne’s house. Like a moth to a flame, he went straight to Joanne’s kitchen. He got a knife in his hand and vegetables on the table. Within moments, he was chopping.

Another piece of the prodigy puzzle fell into place as soon as Greg completed the Stanford-Binet IQ test.

He did well across the board, never dipping below the ninetieth percentile in any subtest and often hovering far above it. But it was the working memory result that again caught Joanne’s attention. It’s a score meant to reflect an individual’s ability to manipulate (rather than merely recall) information stored in short-term memory. Repeating a series of numbers back to the examiner would measure recall, for example, while adding together the first three numbers in the list would measure working memory. On this subtest, Greg reached the tip-top of the scale, registering a score at the 99.9th percentile—just as Garrett James had before him.

And just like Garrett James, Greg had plenty of amazing-memory anecdotes. As a small child, he could listen to a complicated musical piece and then reproduce it from memory. For school plays, he memorized not just his own part but the entire dialogue; he could always be counted on to help classmates struggling with their lines.

When it came to food, he almost never forgot. His mind was awash with all he had learned about restaurants, chefs, and supplies, techniques he picked up on TV, and knowledge gleaned from food Web sites. His memory for cooking formulas, ratios, and recipes was sharp. When Joanne asked him to write down the recipe for one of the dishes he prepared at her house, Greg seemed surprised by the request: you’ll remember it, he said.

It’s well documented that experts have exceptional memories for information relevant to their specialty. In a groundbreaking 1946 doctoral dissertation, the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot reported that expert chess players could recall the configuration of pieces on a chessboard with much greater accuracy than less skilled players. Since then, dozens of studies have examined the power of expert memory, and the same supremacy of experts for recalling facts relevant to their domain has been found in fields as varied as engineering and figure skating. The pattern holds for food and music, Greg’s and Garrett’s specialties: waiters demonstrate better memories for food and drink than nonwaiters, and musicians demonstrate better memories for music notation than nonmusicians. It was fairly predictable, then, that Greg would have a great memory where food was concerned and that the same would be true for Garrett with respect to music.

But it’s equally well established that the memories of these experts tend to be notable only for facts relevant to their domain. Master chess players demonstrate superior recall for configurations of pieces that could emerge in real games. But when chess pieces are positioned randomly across the board, their recall is no better than that of weaker players. Psychologists have thus theorized that the memory advantage is due to the experts’ greater experience and familiarity with their subject matter, not superior overall memory capacity.

What was interesting about Garrett and Greg, though, was that they weren’t following 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’t operating 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 an excellent 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.”

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 typical drawing 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 Darold Treffert, 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 display a 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, or building 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 many—perhaps most—cases, the savants’ underlying disorder is autism. Treffert estimated based on his most recent study that 70 to 75 percent of savants have autism. With figures like that, it’s not a strange coincidence that Nadia, a child with developmental abnormalities and extreme drawing ability, was autistic; it’s highly probable.

Savants also seem to have nearly infallible memories. This ability is so predominant among savants that Treffert has declared “massive memory” present in every individual with savant skills. An early, large-scale study of savants included a child, Ilene, who knew “practically every song written—who wrote it, what show it is from (or film), who first recorded it, in what year it was popular, etc.” Another child in the study could recite the actor who played each part in the TV program Roots after once watching a quick display of the credits. John, the first savant Treffert ever encountered, memorized the Milwaukee bus system; if you told him the time of day and a bus number, he could tell you the precise location of that bus.

But those turned out to be almost run-of-the-mill memory exploits. As Treffert recounts in his book Islands of Genius, during his decades of working with savants, he encountered savants with skills—and memories—so notable they had the press running three-ring circuses around them. Daniel Tammet, a man with Asperger’s disorder, memorized pi to the 22,514th decimal; he recited the figure without error in just over five hours. A pair of identical twin autistic savants memorized every question and answer (as well as what the host wore) from every episode of their favorite game show. An exceptional memory is, as Treffert once characterized it, “integral” to savant syndrome.

Joanne’s pilot study had suggested that child prodigies’ family members had a heightened attention to detail, a trait associated with autism. She had worked closely with only two prodigies, barely scratching the surface in her quest to understand the underpinnings of their abilities. But already she had discovered that both children had extraordinary working memories—an occurrence highly unlikely to occur by chance. It seemed probable that extraordinary memory was an important characteristic of prodigy—and another possible link to autism, or at least autistic savants.