2

The Boy Who Changed Everything

If Henry had just been a scientist,

even a great one,

he would have failed.

Kai is different. Kai, the doctors would eventually realize, is autistic. Of course, like everyone on the spectrum, Kai isn’t just autistic—he’s so much more than that. Kai is Kai.

Doctors used to find one case of autism among every five thousand people. Today, according to a study by the US Department of Health & Human Services, the ratio is one in fifty-nine. Scientists speak of an epidemic. Kai may be different, but he is not alone.

Henry is one of the world’s most famous neuroscientists, but when Kai began withdrawing, he was as helpless as all the other parents of autistic children. He asked himself the same questions they did: What is autism? How can I help my child?

He researched for fifteen years. His findings would upend everything we thought we knew about autism, and offer us a new way of thinking about a number of conditions.

If Henry had just been a scientist, even a great one, he would have failed. He only succeeded thanks to Kai, the boy who changed everything.

It’s 4:00 a.m. Henry throws off the bedcovers. He tiptoes out of the bedroom, across the hallway into the kitchen and makes coffee. Quietly. Everyone is sleeping. He opens his laptop. The bluish light of the screen shines on his face. His eyes are smaller than usual, his hair messy. He is thin. Only a few weeks ago, he was in Portugal on a fasting retreat. He slurps his coffee and reads e-mails.

“Dear Henry,” a lady called Sandra writes to him. “I am autistic. Reading your story, I was overcome by emotion. For the first time in my life, someone was describing my experience. My family doesn’t support me.”

“Dear Sandra,” Henry types. “I know what you’re going through.”

He reads more e-mails from autistic people, their families, his colleagues. He reviews the data—rows of numbers that only a scientist can understand. Finally, he opens a lecture he was working on until midnight. “We think we see with our eyes,” it says, channeling Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Unlike the Little Prince, however, Henry doesn’t believe we see with our hearts: our brains shape our view of the world.

“The pathways in your brain are so extensive, you could stretch them once around the whole moon: a hundred billion brain cells, a hundred billion synapses, a wonderful system, and six hundred ways to disturb it. Autism, ADHD, depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia. How are they all related?”

This question drives Henry out of bed every morning at 4:00 a.m. He is certain it will be answered in our lifetime. Humanity will decode the brain. And then rebuild it. Henry plans to do the rebuilding himself. He kicked off that project ten years ago. The European Union earmarked it with a billion-euro grant. It may lead to the greatest scientific achievement in history, greater than the decoding of the genome, greater than the moon landing. Humankind would finally understand itself.

Will he, the guy from the Kalahari Desert, be one of those scientists who make history?

Henry grew up in South Africa, spending his childhood on his grandfather’s farm. His family was well-off. They had settled in the Kalahari generations ago, but life was hard. “Nothing comes easily in the desert,” his grandfather would say. “You have to work hard for everything.” Henry was put to work as soon as he could walk, doing household chores, milking cows. If he wasn’t up before sunrise, his grandfather stormed into his room with a whip and threw him out of the house, whipping him out the door.

His grandfather was a Boer. At ninety-five, he could still be seen galloping across the desert with a straight back. He didn’t talk much and was hard on everyone, especially himself. Henry’s five uncles, who also lived on the farm, hunted with their bare hands. “C’mon Henry,” they would summon him and jump into the Jeep. Once Henry was a bit older, ten or eleven, he became their driver. He sat behind the wheel, barefoot, the sun stinging, the dust rising, his uncles peering out toward the horizon.

“There! You see that kudu?”

Henry put the pedal to the metal. Grass and bushes flew by, the wind burned his eyes, the speedometer hit 30 miles per hour. He skidded to a halt alongside the kudu, and one of his uncles jumped on the creature, grabbing it by the horns. A kudu weighs up to 800 pounds, but with all that thrust and grip, its neck was swiftly broken. As the dust settled, his uncles strung up their catch on the Jeep’s roof and slaughtered it right there. They drank whiskey as they worked, offering Henry a swig, which he refused.

Today, that feels like someone else’s life, Henry says, though he still rises early.

Henry’s mother was British. She didn’t feel at home in the Kalahari but still saw the good in their lives there. The desert had given her son a childhood in nature: the vast expanses during the day, the stars so very close at night. But as Henry got older and his voice deepened, his mother sensed that he was outgrowing the place. “This world has nothing to offer him anymore,” she said. “He will not become a farmer.” She sent him off to a private school near Durban on the other side of South Africa. Leaving home was hard on Henry. He missed his family, the landscape, the farm. In time, however, he discovered a love of learning that was just as strong. His visits home became ever more rare.

Henry had another uncle, who didn’t live on the farm. Uncle John was sensitive. He read books. And Henry loved him. On some days, however, John wasn’t himself. He hardly spoke, and the look in his eyes was somber and heavy. One day, when Henry was fifteen, his mother took him aside. “Uncle John is dead,” she said. “He took his own life.” Henry cried. He didn’t understand depression, the monster that had taken hold in his uncle’s head. He went to the library in search of answers.

The human brain, he read, weighs three pounds. Its texture is soft, like those slabs of liver you can buy at the butcher shop. It’s pink and shiny and only turns gray when you die and the cells start to rot. The brain is covered in folds or wrinkles and lined with fine capillaries. It looks so neat and tidy.

The brain runs on electric current. A computer that could perform its tasks would require billions of dollars in electricity. Electric current flickers through your brain nonstop. When you see a rose, it isn’t your eyes formulating the image. Your optic nerves fire electric signals, and your brain compiles the information: red, petals, a stem, thorns = a rose. Once the image is complete, you evaluate it. It is beautiful. It smells good. Watch out or it might prick you! Your brain allows you to see, think, and also feel. Henry wanted to know all about this. Why had his uncle been so sad? What makes people feel emotions in the first place?

When Henry asked himself that question at the age of fifteen, he had no way of knowing it would come to define his whole life. Or that this same question would not only determine his uncle’s fate but also shape the destiny of his unborn son.

Our feelings develop in two parts of the brain, the amygdala and the cerebral cortex. It’s simple, really: You see a snake. Your eyes send a signal to the amygdala and it sounds the alarm. Your heart starts beating faster, your blood gets warmer, and your body prepares to fight or take flight. You don’t even know you’re afraid yet.

Those feelings arise when the signals reach your cerebral cortex, farther down the chain of command. Your sense of reason chimes in. Your cerebral cortex collects the details and evaluates them: Does the snake have fangs? Is it threatening you? The cerebral cortex summons memories. Have you experienced something like this before? Then it sends its verdict to the amygdala: it’s just a snake charmer. You’ve seen one on television. Your pulse slows. You relax.

If the pathways between the cerebral cortex and amygdala are disturbed, your feelings will be disturbed as well. For example, experiments have shown that cats become reclusive if you remove their cerebral cortex. If you stroke such a cat, it will hiss at you, and it will have no idea why. It has no feelings. The hissing is just a reflex. Scientists call this sham rage.

In the human realm, we have the famous case of Phineas Gage. A construction foreman, Gage worked on the railroads as they expanded across the United States. He loaded blast holes, covered them with sand, and lit the fuse. On one occasion, however, he forgot the sand. As he tried to fasten the charge with his hammer, it exploded in his face, driving a three-foot iron rod through his skull. Dr. John D. Harlow removed the rod, which was sticking out of the top of his patient’s head. Gage remained conscious throughout. A few weeks later, he returned to work. He spoke normally. He could still smell, hear, walk, and remember everything. But his personality had changed. The once popular and even-keeled worker had become choleric. He insulted people; he could hardly restrain himself. The rod had penetrated his cerebral cortex. “It has destroyed the area of the brain that produces empathy,” Dr. Harlow suggested. Scientists have since confirmed this. Feelings come from our cerebral cortex and amygdala. They contain our very character. Even minor flaws can disturb their equilibrium.

Hiding away in his growing fortress of books, Henry started to understand that there were reasons for Uncle John’s sadness. Rational reasons. The world hadn’t made him sad; the feeling was coming from inside his head. Henry found this comforting. There had to be a way to help such people. If only he had known this while his uncle was still alive. He would have told him there was hope. Henry decided to become a doctor, a neurologist. He wanted to understand the electricity and chemistry that determines whether we are happy or sad, and even, sometimes, whether we live or die.

Before long, he was at the top of his class in the natural sciences, and, after graduating from high school, he enrolled at the University of Cape Town, majoring in medicine and psychiatry.