Chapter 8

Another Path to Prodigy

Sometimes the genetic, autism-linked explanation for prodigy comes up short. The family connection between autism and prodigy is strong, but it’s not perfect. Some—roughly half—of the prodigies come from families without autistic relatives.

These prodigies still have autistic traits. They demonstrate the same heightened attention to detail and penchant for obsessive interests as the other prodigies.

How could these traits stem from a family link with autism if there’s no autism in the family?

There are a few potential explanations. Perhaps there’s autism in far-flung parts of the family tree. Perhaps it’s the unique combination of the prodigies’ parents’ genes that introduced some autism-linked traits into the family for the first time. Perhaps these prodigies didn’t inherit the relevant genes at all but have de novo genetic mutations—mutations present in the individual but not in either parent—that contribute to their incredible memories and focus.

But there’s another possibility as well. Perhaps the pathway to prodigiousness is paved not just by the children’s genes but also by their environments—the events or substances to which they are exposed prenatally or even after birth.

This seems to be the case for autism. Though it’s highly heritable, genes don’t always tell the whole story. There are some known environmental risk factors for autism (environmental in the sense that they aren’t directly tied to genes—not in the long-discarded “refrigerator mother” sense). Children exposed in utero to valproate, an antiepilepsy medication, or to thalidomide, a medication once tragically prescribed to treat morning sickness (and now used to treat skin conditions and cancer) and known to cause severe birth defects, have increased rates of autism. Similarly, some studies have demonstrated an increased risk of autism for children with congenital rubella (a condition that can develop when a pregnant woman contracts rubella).

Exposure to such environmental risk factors doesn’t always actually result in autism. What accounts for the variance in outcome? Some scientists have proposed that one factor is the individual’s genes; some people’s genes may leave them more susceptible than others to such environmental exposure. Their genes and the environment interact in a way that may result in autism—though the same would not necessarily be the case for others with the same environmental exposure and different genetic profiles.

Perhaps, just as with autism, there are environmental “risk” factors for prodigy—events or exposures that increase the likelihood that a genetically predisposed child will demonstrate the unchecked drive, incredible memory, and heightened attention to detail that characterize prodigious behavior.

It’s a possibility that the Tiessens, a Canadian family of four with first one and then two prodigious sons, have experienced firsthand.

In 2012, The Huffington Post featured Josh Tiessen as one of “ten art prodigies you should know.” The accompanying video shows an interview with the artist, a soft-spoken seventeen-year-old with carefully styled, slightly spiked brown hair. He appears very thin, almost gangly, and he speaks with gentle reverence about celebrating God’s creations through his art.

The video of that artwork reveals stunningly detailed pictures of animals and architecture: in Snow White, a portrait of a tiger Josh created at thirteen, he painted tiny, distinct hairs on the animal’s face and body; in Behold the Door, a zoomed-in view of a battered doorway Josh painted at fifteen, he carefully portrayed chipping paint, knots in the wood, and tiny nails.

Joanne met Josh in the winter of 2013. Josh had graduated from high school but still lived with his parents in Ontario. Joanne drove through a snowstorm to the family’s charming Tudor-style home. When she arrived, Josh’s parents, Julie and Doug, provided a detailed family history. No one in Doug’s family was autistic. Julie was adopted; she had some information about her biological parents’ families, but there were also blank spots in the family tree. As far as Julie and Doug knew, though, they didn’t have any autistic relatives.

Julie and Doug brought Joanne to Josh’s studio—a bright space at the back of the house with a slanted ceiling and shiny wood floors—and showed her some of Josh’s work. It was as extraordinary as it appeared online.

Joanne knew that the Tiessens’ younger son, Zac, had a talent for music, but it wasn’t until Doug and Julie walked Joanne through his history that Joanne realized he, too, seemed prodigious. He had the same lightning-quick development of a skill that had served as Joanne’s hallmark for these distinctive children.

But, unlike the other prodigies, Zac didn’t show any particular passion for music early on. As a child, he hated music class and refused to take up an instrument. It wasn’t until a thirteen-year-old Zac bashed his head against a church floor that he wanted anything—and then everything—to do with music. Up to that point, he was just the kid brother of a child prodigy.

Josh Tiessen was born in Russia, where his parents were then serving as missionaries. It had been a harrowing pregnancy and birth that slung his parents through a labyrinth of Russian hospitals and medical procedures, but Josh emerged seemingly unscathed.

Zac eased into the world in a Moscow hospital thirteen months later, the product of an uncomplicated pregnancy and birth.

Josh learned to hold a crayon around the time Zac was born. He immediately wanted to draw, but he ignored the stacks of coloring books his grandparents mailed to Russia; he only wanted blank paper. His nanny, Lena Zhyk, fussed over Josh’s artwork. Look what he did today, she would say while holding up a sheet of paper. Julie and Doug rolled their eyes. It’s just scribbling, they thought to themselves. There’s no picture there.

When Josh was around three, Lena taught him perspective. She held up stuffed animals for him to draw and talked to him about shading. Josh would sit at the small table in the playroom drawing for long periods of time, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he worked. Lena often corrected him; if Josh got the perspective wrong, she would rub out what he had done and draw or paint over it.

Zac occasionally scribbled in the cast-off coloring books for a few minutes, but no project held him for long.

Increasingly impressive artwork began emerging from the playroom, but Julie was convinced Lena still had a hand in its creation. By the time Josh was five, Lena swore she was no longer touching his projects. Julie and Doug were skeptical that they had a great artist on their hands, but they encouraged Josh to sign his pictures and jokingly referred to them as “Joshy originals.” Colleagues who visited the Tiessen home never believed the pictures were truly Josh’s work: the art was far too advanced for five-year-old hands.

When Josh was six, the Tiessens moved back to Canada. For several years, Josh’s interest in art fizzled, at least as far as Julie and Doug could tell. School occupied much of his day. Sometimes, though, when Julie thought Josh was playing, she would find him up in his room drawing sports logos or sneakers at his desk; when he was watching TV, he would whip out paper and begin sketching. But the long afternoons he had spent on art as a toddler seemed to have been left behind in Russia.

After Josh finished third grade and Zac second, Julie began homeschooling the boys. Josh took to it immediately. He loved the quiet atmosphere and the wide-open afternoons no longer stuffed full of classes and activities.

Zac was a dervish of a student. “We had lots of blood, sweat, and tears that first year trying to get Zac to concentrate,” Julie recalled. “I cried a lot of days.”

One day, frustrated with the boys, Julie gave Josh and Zac paper and pencils and told them to go outside and draw. Zac spent fifteen or twenty minutes sketching something that vaguely resembled a fountain and then abandoned the project. He spent the rest of the afternoon underfoot in the house.

Josh perched himself on the family’s lawn and set about drawing the long, rambling home they lived in at the time. He zeroed in on every brick, every roof shingle, the design on the doors. When he ran out of space, he came back into the house for more paper, eventually taping several pieces together. Julie and Doug had to coax him in for dinner.

When Julie found a book on perspective at a library shared by a group of homeschooling parents, Josh read it, studied it, and incorporated what he learned into his drawings. Zac quickly got bored with the project and moved on, creating havoc in the home classroom.

Julie enrolled both boys in a church arts club to complement her homeschooling lessons. One of the club advisers, Valerie Jones, a British expat in her mid-sixties who crafted animal portraits as a serious hobby, noticed Josh immediately. She watched as the nine-year-old used clean strokes and hard lines to embed his name within a red-and-blue geometric design on a name tag; he was completely engrossed in his work.

Over the next few weeks, she kept an eye on Josh as the group worked on shading and perspective. The other children all produced what Valerie thought of as “kids’ art,” but not Josh. His drawings had incredible precision.

His approach to the projects was different, too. Other kids grew distracted; they couldn’t focus on any one task for too long. The room, filled with ten or so kids, was busy; it sometimes got loud. But Josh shut everything else out. He focused intently on executing his drawings.

Valerie was convinced that this was a talent that needed to be nurtured. She sought out Josh’s parents and raved about their son’s abilities. She later invited Josh and Zac to her studio for lessons, and the boys began spending Wednesday afternoons in Val’s basement studio, working at a table adjacent to her laundry room. Zac continued for six months or so before giving it up. Josh kept at it. He was quiet, respectful, and surprisingly mature—almost like a miniature adult. He soaked in Val’s instructions; he was never distracted.

Soon, Val was ushering Julie down to the laundry room to see Josh’s latest projects. Julie was shocked at what she saw, particularly when Val showed her Josh’s chalk pastel depiction of a lion inspired by Aslan, a Christlike figure from the Narnia series. The lion’s green eyes appear liquid, his mane wild; he possesses a stirring dignity. In a moment reminiscent of Josh’s toddler days with Lena, Val insisted that Josh had done it entirely on his own.

After a few months, Val called Julie to ask if she could arrange an art exhibition for Josh. Julie laughed. Josh was only ten! But Val insisted that the world needed to see his work. Julie relented, and Josh had his first exhibition at eleven and his first sale to a stranger: a nurse purchased one of his photographs, a shot of a child taken during a mission trip to Honduras.

Other exhibitions—and sales—trickled in. Josh displayed his work with other artists at a local business, a church, and a gallery. At fourteen, he had his first solo gallery exhibition when his work was featured on the Community Wall at the Art Gallery of Burlington.

Zac attended every event. He was always a spectator, never a participant. He helped carry canvases and, in exchange for a small commission, sold artist note cards. He never showed anything of his own.

Josh got his big break when he grabbed the attention of Robert Bateman, a prominent Canadian painter. He was Josh’s professional idol—a man who, much like Josh, specialized in detailed, realistic portrayals of nature and animals. Josh had written to him a few months before his Burlington exhibition, attaching images of his paintings. Just a day after Josh took down the last of the works he had hung at the Burlington gallery, he got a response. Robert praised Josh’s work and invited him to a Master Artist Seminar.

The seminar was on Cortes Island, off the coast of British Columbia, more than twenty-five hundred miles from the Tiessens’ home. Money was scarce. Doug had been diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease two years before, a condition his doctors believed he had contracted in Russia, and his health was failing. Julie’s health was declining as well; she would be diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease the following year. Long-term disability payments were the family’s only source of income.

Josh’s aunt and uncle volunteered their frequent-flier miles. Josh and his parents scrambled to find money to pay for the rest of the trip. Through a scholarship from the center hosting the seminar, an unexpected contribution from a family friend, and money donated by the Kiwanis Club in exchange for a painting, the Tiessens pieced together the funds to send Josh and Julie to British Columbia, and Josh attended the seminar.

Infused with the golden endorsement of Robert Bateman, Josh’s career took off, and the media attention increased. His price tags shot up, too. Bateman advised Josh that work of his caliber could sell for much more than he was charging, so the fifteen-year-old upped the asking prices for his originals into the thousands.

Zac had constant exposure to the Josh Tiessen art frenzy, and, as Julie puts it, for years his “nose was kind of out of joint” about the whole thing.

Josh began pouring more and more time into his art. For him, that time was bliss. He prayed before he began and played music or listened to lectures on faith and art while he painted. Everything else was a distraction.

The common ground between Josh and Zac eroded: Josh frequently opted out of their hour-long daily allotment of TV; he lost interest in gaming. The brothers had previously played basketball together, but after they enrolled in a Catholic high school, neither boy made the school team.

At fifteen, Josh set up the Josh Tiessen Studio Gallery in the sunroom. It was a massive upgrade in work conditions. Josh had previously done a stint in the garage. As winter approached, he had moved a series of heaters out to his studio, but none beat back the frigid air. His next move had been to the basement laundry room. It was warmer, but paint splattered the Tiessens’ washer and dryer. As collectors began visiting, Josh felt awkward bringing them down to his makeshift work space.

Just as Josh was turning sixteen, he graduated from high school. Over the next few years, the achievements rolled in. Josh pocketed a series of honors at local art festivals and competitions for teens. He nabbed the second most votes in So You Want to Be an Artist, a national Canadian contest for teens, for his close-up depiction of an intricate doorknob on a weathered door; the painting was then displayed at the National Gallery of Canada in a monthlong exhibition. The famed Canadian conductor Boris Brott invited Josh to create a piece to accompany one of his symphonies, an honor Josh performed twice. He was invited to join Artists for Conservation and the International Guild of Realism. He was one of sixty thousand Canadians to receive a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, an award given to individuals with notable achievements or contributions to their communities.

That contribution included not just his art but also a striking benevolent streak that Josh shared with the other prodigies. He gave a portion of his earnings to charity, frequently donated artwork for fund-raisers, and initiated an annual artists’ event with a charitable purpose. He launched his own foundation, Arts for a Change, to coordinate his philanthropic work.

When others inquired about the source of Josh’s talent, the source of his passion, Julie and Doug, two missionaries who had never considered themselves particularly artistic, always gave the same answer.

He just came this way.

Zac’s childhood looked a bit different.

He was active from birth. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him Houdini for his ability to escape from even their tightest swaddles. While a toddler-age Josh pored over art projects, Zac exasperated Lena by skipping from toy to toy, pushing around cars and trucks. He experimented with Lego bricks while his older brother mastered drawing with perspective. No toy was safe in his hands; playthings that had survived multiple other children broke within weeks.

He was always in motion, always on the verge of catastrophe. He loved to climb, and Lena was constantly rushing to pull him off things—ladders, chairs, tables—trying to grab him before he toppled. At a friend’s apartment, Julie once found Zac perched on the ledge of an open ninth-floor window. Another time, he got his head stuck between the metal bars of a porch railing in Russia and screamed for twenty minutes before Lena, Julie, and Doug wriggled him out. When Julie and the boys joined some of their Russian friends for a picnic near the Black Sea, Zac kept trying to run off a cliff. Julie joked that if she could just keep Zac alive until he turned five, he would be fine.

He was a social creature and craved the company of other children in a way that was foreign to his older brother. Julie ran a one-room schoolhouse for her boys and a couple of other families during their last year in Russia. It was a torment to Josh, who had nightmares about other children destroying his toys, but Zac exalted in the mayhem.

Zac’s parents always suspected he had a talent for music. He hummed when he was playing, eating, and falling asleep; he hummed in the car and in the bathroom. When Julie or Doug asked about the tune, Zac would cite the background music he had heard earlier in a restaurant or store or on a commercial—music Julie and Doug hadn’t even noticed. He had an excellent sense of pitch and a good singing voice. Lena and Josh warbled their way through the Russian songs Lena taught the boys; Zac was the only one to hit the notes. Julie often wrangled Zac into sitting next to Josh and singing into his ears to help him stay on key.

Despite his seemingly natural gift, Julie and Doug could never pin Zac down long enough for him to develop it. Music classes at school repulsed him. As he would later recall, nothing sounded right. The other kids’ singing was erratic; the piano was out of tune. When Julie began homeschooling the boys, she tried to integrate music into the curriculum, but Zac hated it. He fidgeted when sight-reading music or singing from hymnals. He couldn’t be bothered to learn about the history of music or classical composers.

Zac’s lack of interest frustrated Julie and Doug. Music, they felt, was a place Zac could excel—a route for him to develop a talent of his own. Julie and Doug took Zac to a music store before Christmas and tried to entice him into asking for an instrument. No dice. Someone gave him a toy piano, and his parents bought him a toy electric guitar. Neither took.

Zac flitted from activity to activity. If any project or pursuit lasted long, he lost interest. One year, Josh and Zac set out to build a large fort in a ravine, but Zac abandoned the project. Doug occasionally built model cars with Zac, who would help out at first but then leave Doug to finish the models alone. Zac and Josh joined a Bible quiz group, and Josh diligently memorized verses while Zac struggled to put in five to ten minutes a day. When Josh began devoting hundreds of hours to more complex pieces of art as a teenager, Zac watched TV and played video games. His parents suspected he had at least a borderline case of ADHD.

If there was fun to be had, though, Zac was in the thick of it. He was at the heart of every group; he emerged from every activity with a new best friend. He passed long afternoons gaming or playing Ping-Pong with friends, and he issued a constant stream of invitations to the Tiessen home, always looking for someone to hang out with.

Until the day Zac slammed his head against a church floor. After that, he was different.

It happened when Zac was thirteen.

Zac’s church youth group meeting ended, and most of the kids headed out to the foyer to wait for their rides. Zac and some of the others tracked down a few empty appliance boxes they had used as part of a game during the meeting. He and his buddies flattened one out. They took turns lifting it and jumping over it, raising the makeshift hurdle a bit higher each time.

On Zac’s turn, he dove headfirst over the box. He cracked his head against the thinly carpeted concrete floor. For a minute, maybe a minute and a half, Zac blacked out.

When he regained consciousness, the youth group leaders helped him to the side of the room and leaned him against the wall. Someone brought him a glass of water and placed it next to him on the floor. Zac, still dazed, reached for it. He knocked it over. Someone ran outside to get Doug, who was waiting in the parking lot.

Doug had been through this before with Zac; the kid couldn’t play Ping-Pong without making it look like an extreme sport. His stunts often landed him in the hospital, and he’d already had multiple head injuries and concussions (his parents joked that he had a “club card” for the emergency room). Doug trotted out his familiar list of questions. Zac didn’t know his name. He didn’t know his birth date or address. He insisted that five plus five was twelve. He was worse than Doug had ever seen him. Doug and Josh helped Zac out to the car. Zac felt overwhelmed with fatigue; all he wanted to do was sleep, but Doug made him stay awake for the drive back home.

Julie knew the drill. She checked the head-injury guidelines that the family had posted inside the medicine cabinet after Zac’s previous concussion, a tobogganing injury that led to an overnight hospital stay. Zac’s pupils were still dilated, and he was still nauseated. But he was a bit more coherent than he had been right after the accident. Julie and Doug decided to skip the trip to the emergency room. They woke Zac every couple of hours and observed him through the night. He woke easily enough, and Julie and Doug assumed that all was well.

The next morning, Zac seemed more low-key than usual. Julie and Doug wrote it off as the aftermath of interrupted sleep. They let him stay home from school for a couple of days.

When he went back, he was reclusive. Before the accident, he had always been friendly with his classmates. Afterward, he just wanted to be alone. Over the next couple of weeks, Julie noticed that Zac was quieter than usual; he went out less. At his youth group meetings, he wasn’t as wound up, not so much the life of the party. Maybe this injury finally got through to him, Julie thought. Maybe Zac realized how serious a concussion could be.

A few weeks after Zac’s accident, the family had Valerie, Josh’s painting mentor, over for dinner. Valerie knew that Zac hadn’t made the high school basketball team—the one activity he had stuck with for more than a short period—and she imagined it had to be difficult watching Josh’s achievements from the sidelines. Hoping to raise his spirits, she had picked up a guitar for him at a flea market. “Maybe it’ll be something for him to tinker on,” she had said to her husband.

When she gave it to Zac, he was intrigued. He took the guitar out into the living room and began strumming. He worked his way across the notes slowly, as if he were exploring the instrument. He kept at it all evening. “We were all laughing,” Julie said. “We had never seen him do anything this long.”

After dinner, Zac ran right back to the guitar. He harassed Julie, who had played as a teenager, for her old guitar books. When Julie couldn’t find them, Zac searched for instructions online. After Val left, Julie showed him some chords. Zac soaked up every movement. Hours passed; eventually, all the other lights went off in the house, and Julie told Zac to go to bed. The next day, Zac went straight back to the guitar. Julie was pleasantly perplexed by Zac’s sudden diligence.

For a couple of months, Zac practiced for an hour or two a day.

He pestered his parents to let him use the money he made doing yard work to buy an electric guitar. Doug and Julie were skeptical. They had been through a laundry list of activities with Zac. They didn’t want him to buy an expensive instrument that he would discard after a few weeks. But when Zac’s interest didn’t waver after three months, they relented. Doug helped Zac find an electric guitar and amp on a used-goods Web site. The next week, Zac bought the levels one and two FastTrack guitar instruction books at a used-books sale.

Julie helped him work through most of the level-one book; she still knew a dozen or so chords. But Zac quickly surpassed Julie’s abilities. He raced through the second book on his own. “I felt really connected with the music and the instrument,” he recalled. “It just kind of naturally happened.”

He started practicing at least three or four hours a day.

As his technical skills improved, he sought out tough, complicated songs. He grew infatuated with heavy metal bands (“screamo” groups, as Julie calls them). But Zac, who by this point wore dark-framed glasses and kept his dark hair long, was drawn to the fast, demanding guitar solos.

A drive for perfection, a quality the Tiessens had never before thought of as very Zac-like, kicked in. Zac set his sights on recording a complicated, lightning-fast classical piece. He cranked up the tempo for his performance, then posted the video on YouTube. Zac quickly grew dissatisfied with it. His performance wasn’t clean enough. The sound quality of his equipment wasn’t good enough. He took the video down.

Zac zoomed in on music until there was little else left in his field of vision. Julie and Doug insisted that he go to church and attend youth group, so he did, but other activities vanished. Gaming fell by the wayside; skateboarding disappeared from his routine. It became a fight to get him out of his room for dinner. Julie and Doug would find him at 3:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m. still awake, still playing guitar.

He stopped inviting friends over, and he stopped seeking out social activities. He had other kids over to jam a couple of times, but it was a bust. The other kids weren’t serious enough; they just wanted to fool around. He joined a youth band at church, but that was no better. The other kids skipped practice or missed their notes. He switched to the adult worship band that performed during church services, but his role was restricted to quietly strumming in the background. When he grew frustrated with his inability to perform the fast—sometimes frantically paced—pieces he loved, he persuaded his family to switch to a more arts-focused congregation.

He started practicing four to six hours a day.

About a year after Zac first picked up a guitar, he turned to composing. He borrowed stacks of guitar and music theory books from the library. When Julie peeked into his room, she found Zac, a boy who had never before shown any interest in books, poring over the thick volumes. In disbelief, she watched him turn the pages. At fourteen, he began studying music theory through ABRSM, a UK-based organization that provides music-learning resources and exams. He worked through the first six grade levels in a year.

When he tried his own hand at composing, he started with metal and classical music, then gravitated toward a more progressive style, a type of music he describes as “anywhere from metal to jazz, and classical to flamenco, all combined.” He was obsessed with creating music. He stayed up late. He skipped meals. The family took a road trip through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and Zac barely left the car; he played and composed the entire trip.

Ideas came to him all the time. If he was out of the house, he stopped what he was doing to scribble notes to himself. As soon as he got home, he went directly to his room to work out his new idea. He woke in the middle of the night, seized by the need to change one or two notes in a composition.

At the Christian bookstore where he worked, Zac was still polite. But at home, he grew moody. He suffered from headaches and confusion. If his parents tried to enforce breaks from music, he could even become combative. It might have been a product of all his concussions (his family has lost track of the total count, but they estimate that he’s had at least ten). It might have been too much working without a break. It might have been a symptom of the Lyme disease that the family had recently learned that Josh and Zac, too, had contracted. During the worst bouts of behavior, Doug and Julie insisted that Zac hand his laptop over at midnight. They forced him to rest. When his mood improved, they would ease some of the restrictions, and Zac would again immerse himself in music.

By the time Joanne met Zac, it had been just over three years since his youth group concussion and since Val had given him his first guitar. In the interim, he had taught himself to play the six-string electric guitar, the balalaika, and the baritone ukulele. He had recently gotten an eight-string electric guitar, and it was becoming his primary instrument. He had enrolled in the Berklee College of Music distance-education program and snagged a scholarship from the Kiwanis Club to attend a musicians’ workshop taught in part by Tosin Abasi and Javier Reyes, master eight-string guitarists. He had crafted sixteen full-length songs. He composed for the instruments he played and for those he had never learned—drums, French horn, cello, and alto sax.

The boy whose behavior had seemed touched with ADHD for the first thirteen years of his life was engrossed in music six, eight, or even twelve hours a day. His parents had no idea what had happened.

The link between Zac’s concussion and his altered behavior may seem clear in hindsight. But the Tiessens had been through other concussions with Zac, and those hadn’t had any long-term impact. At the time, Julie and Doug didn’t see Zac’s head injury as a potential cause of the changes in their son. It wasn’t until Joanne connected the dots between Zac’s concussion and the dramatic unleashing of his music that the Tiessens realized that Zac’s injury might have triggered his altered behavior.

This realization prompted soul-searching about the source of Josh’s prodigiousness. Could Josh, too, have suffered an injury? Retracing Josh’s childhood left the Tiessens empty-handed. There were no notable injuries to report. But his days in utero were a different story.

Julie had endured bleeding and extensive preterm labor with Josh, including excruciating contractions. Medical care in Krasnodar, the city in southwest Russia where she and Doug were stationed on their mission, was limited. Several times she flew to a hospital in Moscow for care. She was pumped full of unfamiliar drugs—drugs to stop the contractions, drugs to stop her bleeding, drugs to help her sleep. For months, a miscarriage seemed imminent.

Then there was Julie’s terrible fall ten days before Josh was born. During Julie’s fourth prenatal trip to Moscow, the doctors insisted that she stay in town until she gave birth. The Tiessens holed up at their mission’s Moscow guest apartment and settled in to wait for their baby’s arrival.

From the beginning, there had been unusual activity at the apartment. Every couple of days, someone called. It was usually a man and always a Russian speaker. The person would refuse to give his or her name. He always demanded the address of the apartment.

Once, while Julie was home alone, a man repeatedly rang the doorbell. When she refused to let him in, he finally left. Half an hour later, the phone rang. Julie answered and heard heavy breathing before the line went dead. A few minutes later, the phone rang again. This time, a man said that he was a friend from Krasnodar who had brought her presents and souvenirs and asked why she hadn’t let him inside her apartment. He rattled off Julie’s address. Julie told him not to call back, and she hung up the phone.

Two days later, Julie was at home with Doug and his mother, who had come from Canada to help the couple prepare for the baby. Doug and his mother had been planning to run errands, but at the last minute both stayed home to wait for a courier delivery for another missionary. When the doorbell rang, Doug answered.

A black-gloved hand shot through the opening and grabbed Doug by the neck. The intruder tried to push his way in. His head was wrapped in white cloth, completely covered except for small slits cut out around his eyes. Doug shoved back against the door. Julie sprang up from the kitchen bench to help him, but she tripped and fell on the rug that ran the length of the hallway, landing on her stomach.

Doug slammed the door shut. The intruder screamed. Julie pulled herself up and ran to the window. She saw a large man clutching a white bundle rush outside to a car. It was too far away to make out the license plate number.

A detective came to talk to the Tiessens. The Tiessens knew enough Russian at that point to chitchat with a neighbor, but police lingo was beyond their reach. They caught the word “ring” and inferred that the detective was describing some sort of crime ring.

The mission paid to have a stronger door installed in the apartment complex. There were more disturbing calls, and Julie panicked every time the doorbell rang. But they never saw the attacker again, and Julie was relieved that at least her fall hadn’t induced labor.

When Josh finally emerged a little over a week later, he was a bit lethargic, a bit jaundiced, but otherwise seemed no worse for wear. But could he have been different for the wear? Could all of that in utero trauma have altered something in his brain?

The mystery of Josh and Zac Tiessen’s prodigious abilities cries out for a brain scan.

Less than a year before Joanne met the Tiessens, David Feldman closed a talk he gave at New York University with a plea for someone to take up the baton and run a brain imaging study on child prodigies; there had not yet been any done. “Please fix that,” he requested.

There were murmurs of interest from the crowd, but Feldman heard a lot about the obstacles. The machines were expensive to run. It was hard to get funding to study prodigies: there was nothing wrong with them, they didn’t need help.

Feldman made the argument, based on Joanne’s work, that studying prodigies might lead to advances in autism research, but nothing ever came of it. Feldman and a collaborator applied for a grant to do the work themselves, but their application was turned down. The inner workings of the prodigy brain remain a black box.

Once again, there is something to be learned from savants, those individuals whose skills—sometimes prodigious in nature—coexist with disability. In savants, the appearance of spectacular skills following an environmental trigger, like an illness or an injury, is well documented. These individuals are known as acquired savants, and Darold Treffert, the Wisconsin savant expert, estimates that they make up more than 10 percent of the savant population.

Their stories feel ripped from the headlines. A normal life. An injury or illness. The spontaneous eruption of a new ability and passion.

Jason Padgett was jumped after walking out of a karaoke bar and took multiple blows to the head. Prior to the attack, Jason had never been interested in math. He was a college dropout whose math studies had gone no further than pre-algebra. Afterward, he rattled off prime numbers in his sleep and couldn’t stop counting. He envisioned pi and mathematical equations as fractals, and he drew the highly complex images they evoked for him.

Alonzo Clemons fell and hit his head while jumping from the toilet to the bathtub as a toddler, an injury that left him unable to read or write. Soon thereafter, he developed an insatiable need to sculpt. He used whatever he could find around the house—including soap and shortening—as his modeling clay, and he crafted incredibly detailed, lifelike animals. He sculpted through an interview with Morley Safer for 60 Minutes and while waiting in the greenroom to appear on The Morning Show with Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee. Once, while Alonzo was living in a state training school in Colorado, staff members took away his clay, planning to return it to him as a reward for conquering activities that were much more difficult for him, such as speech, combing his hair, and tying his shoes. Soon after, school staff members found tar streaked across Alonzo’s bedding. They inspected his room and discovered a host of small, sticky black animals beneath his bed. Stripped of his clay, Alonzo had scraped tar from the pavement and the edges of windows to make these figurines. He had to sculpt, and he had to do it all the time.

Tommy McHugh never showed any interest in the arts until, at fifty-one, he had brain aneurysms that led to a stroke. When he awoke, he spoke in rhyme and began writing poetry. He generated hundreds of sketches and drawings and began painting anywhere he could find a surface: on canvases and on the walls, floor, and ceiling of his house. He often painted faces, images he once described “as his personality crying for help to save him from his obsession.”

Acquired savants have been the subject of much more research than prodigies. By examining their cases, scientists have begun to piece together just how an injury—an event usually tied to a decrease in functionality—could lead to improved abilities.

At least as early as 1980, researchers began theorizing that perhaps these sudden outbursts of talent have something to do with injury to the brain’s left hemisphere. One case prompting such speculation was that of Mr. Z., a man who had been shot in the left side of his head as a child during a robbery of his home in rural Mexico. The injury initially left him mute, deaf, and partially paralyzed. A couple of years later, he regained his hearing and the ability to walk, though his speech remained impaired; he also displayed impressive mechanical skills, including dismantling and reassembling bicycles, designing a punching bag that mimicked the actions of a human opponent, and reproducing pictures with impressive accuracy.

Others had already observed that many savant skills were rooted in the nondominant hemisphere of the brain—typically the right hemisphere. A psychologist examining Mr. Z.’s case suggested that perhaps his left-hemisphere injury had resulted in right-hemisphere “overcompensation”—an overdevelopment, of sorts, that led to the emergence of his spectacular skills.

It was a line of thought that gained traction when, beginning in the mid-1990s, the neurologist Bruce Miller and his colleagues documented surprising skills in dementia patients. One such individual, a former businessman, lost much of his memory and verbal skills; he changed clothes in public, scoured the sidewalk for coins, and shoplifted. He had no previous interest in art—he had never even visited a museum—but he quit his job to take up painting. His work evolved from colorful ellipses to increasingly detailed portrayals of animals. He won awards at local art shows.

This former businessman had a specific type of dementia—frontotemporal—that attacks certain parts of the brain while leaving other areas relatively intact. Miller and his colleagues eventually calculated that 17 percent of their frontotemporal dementia patients demonstrated new abilities or preserved preexisting artistic or visual abilities despite their worsening conditions.

It was a shocking phenomenon. Miller noted to a reporter for the Washington Post that it had never occurred to him “that somehow a disease could release an unknown talent.”

These findings, moreover, dovetailed with the left-brain injury, right-brain compensation theory. Miller and his colleagues discovered that among their talented frontotemporal dementia patients, the disease had generally attacked their temporal lobe but spared their frontal lobe, and that most such patients showed greater deterioration of their left hemisphere than their right.

Researchers put forward a flurry of theories to explain how left-hemisphere brain damage might result in savant-like abilities. Some proposed that damage to the left hemisphere might lead to increased development of the right. Others thought that left-hemisphere damage merely unleashed latent right-hemisphere abilities previously held in check by the dominant left hemisphere.

Whatever the precise mechanism, the left-brain injury, right-brain compensation theory suggested that savants weren’t as dissimilar from other people—their talents might not be quite so inimitable—as it seemed. This raised an intriguing question: If scientists could simulate the left-hemisphere damage found in many of the talented dementia patients and some savants, could they expose the inner savant within us all?

Allan W. Snyder, the founder of the University of Sydney’s Centre for the Mind, gave it a try. Snyder and his colleagues ran a series of experiments in which participants—typical, non-savant individuals—donned a “creativity cap” of sorts. The experimenters attached electrodes to the participants’ brains and zapped them with a weak electrical current targeted at inhibiting part of the left temporal lobe, an attempt to mimic the left-hemisphere injuries of the acquired savants.

With part of the left hemisphere inhibited, at least some participants in each study showed an improved ability to proofread and differentiate true memories from false memories. Some showed stylistic changes in their drawing; some demonstrated improved numerosity, the ability to gauge the number of items in a group (the classic example of this was documented by Oliver Sacks when a pack of matches spilled and twin savants immediately cried out “111”—the number of matches on the ground). In a slightly different experimental design in which the researchers not only inhibited part of the left hemisphere but also stimulated part of the right, more than 40 percent of participants were able to solve a difficult puzzle that had previously stumped them.

But not everyone who sported the creativity cap showed improvement. Many people still couldn’t solve the difficult puzzle, more than a third showed no reduction in false memories, a majority showed no change in drawing style, and a couple of people showed no improvement in numerosity. Similarly, not all patients with frontotemporal dementia develop or preserve special skills. Nor, certainly, does everyone who suffers a left-hemisphere brain injury or illness emerge a savant.

There are at least a few ways to explain these inconsistencies. Perhaps the focal point of the electric shock Snyder and his colleagues administered landed off target and failed to inhibit the relevant part of the left temporal lobe. Perhaps not every head injury exposes savant skills because such transformation requires an extremely precise—and rare—type of injury. Perhaps there is another factor that prevents some individuals with frontotemporal dementia from exploding with artistic or musical interest.

But it seems at least as plausible that the premise is wrong; maybe not everyone has an inner savant. Or maybe that inner savant is much more difficult to expose—for potentially interesting reasons—in some people than in others. Just as not every child with prenatal exposure to valproate or thalidomide is born with autism, it seems that not everyone who incurs a head injury (or dons the creativity cap) will develop prodigious skills. If true, that would suggest that some people are more susceptible to savantism than others. The interesting question then is why.

There’s a very limited number of studies in which scientists have attempted to induce savant skills, and those studies that have been done are quite small, making it difficult to identify any characteristics that might distinguish those who demonstrate such skills from those who do not. But a 2004 study in which a trio of researchers in Australia applied the brain-zapping protocol and then looked for savant skills to emerge across a variety of areas identified one potentially important factor—gender. The male participants, the authors found, generally performed better under stimulation than the female participants.

This finding hasn’t been replicated, and in one other small study, gender wasn’t predictive of the impact of the creativity cap. But while it’s certainly possible that the 2004 finding was a fluke, it seems worth contemplating whether gender impacts the ease with which savant skills can be induced. After all, the ratio of male to female savants is similarly skewed, possibly as lopsided as six to one. There’s a similar gender breakdown in Miller’s skilled dementia patients, among autists, and among prodigies. It seems that men may be more vulnerable than women to each of these conditions.

There’s at least one theory as to why this might be the case. Studies have found that elevated levels of testosterone and other hormones in utero are associated with an increased risk of autism, and that boys naturally have more such exposure. Could this type of exposure also leave the brain primed for savantism and prodigiousness?

There was something odd about Jason Padgett’s brain scan. When Padgett was presented with mathematical formulas during an fMRI, his results showed left-hemisphere activation—the opposite of what the left-brain damage, right-brain compensation theory would predict. As the authors of that study noted, his results were “perhaps surprising.”

There have been similarly puzzling results in a couple of other cases: A PET (positron-emission tomography) scan of an autistic savant taken while he was calendar calculating revealed left-hemisphere activation. An fMRI of George Widener, a savant calendar calculator and artist, showed heavily concentrated left-hemisphere activity and “sparse” right-hemisphere activity when he was calendar calculating.

These findings stand out among the large number of cases in which savant skills emerged following a left-brain injury. But they don’t necessarily mean that the left-brain injury, right-brain compensation theory is incorrect, at least not in all cases.

Perhaps not all savant skills are the product of the same underlying mechanisms. The savants who demonstrated left-hemisphere activation were all calendar calculating or working on mathematical problems during their brain scans. Perhaps some calculating savants rely on different areas of the brain than savants who are skilled in art, music, or other fields. That could mean that the external similarities among savants conceal cognitive differences between those with different specialties.

Do child prodigies, too, have notable underlying differences? As demonstrated by the story of Autumn de Forest, it seems that they do.