The Prodigy's Cousin

by Joanne Ruthsatz

  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 ti
me 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 fro
m 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.