Knowing I had a brain injury was pretty frightening. But sensing that I might have acquired synesthesia and savantism as a result was oddly exciting. Except I had no idea what those things were. After three years out of work, I definitely couldn’t afford the required testing and medical advice, nor did I want to emerge from my house, so I set out to learn all I could on my own. I continued to mine that mother lode of all knowledge, the Internet.
I learned that at that time, there were only thirty documented cases of acquired savant syndrome on the entire planet, and none of the savants also had synesthesia. Could I be the only one in the world? I’d felt such pangs of recognition in seeing Tammet describe his own naturally occurring synesthesia and savantism, I was sure I must be right in thinking I had these syndromes. But I was not sure I wanted to be this new self, regardless of its rarity and its attractions.
Fortunately, I found I was living in a time of unprecedented research into both conditions. I had plenty of reading to do, as one Internet search led to another and then another. I discovered some very good journals and magazines reporting on both savantism and synesthesia, and I even found some YouTube interviews with savants and synesthetes. I watched video after video of people with one or the other of my two not-yet-diagnosed traits. I viewed them over and over, staring into the subjects’ eyes, wondering what it was like to be them. To be me.
A few decades ago, if someone reported seeing synesthetic shapes for numbers and equations, doctors probably would have thought that person was hallucinating. But my injury and subsequent acquired synesthesia happened in the beginning of the twenty-first century and coincided with a surge of interest in this neurological topic. This newfound fascination was fueled by state-of-the-art brain-imaging technology, which, for the first time in history, allowed researchers to see various areas of the brain light up as it worked. When a person with synesthesia was shown numbers or letters while his brain was being scanned, scientists reported that two parts of the brain lit up; in a neurotypical subject, there was usually just a single area of response. That synesthesia was real and provable inspired many people to come out and be open about their odd abilities, even using them creatively. I discovered that many synesthetes were no longer afraid to explain and describe their experiences and were now employing various artistic media to express the sensations. As I sat at my computer desk in a corner of my living room, Google Images returned caches of their work. I stared at the paintings, sculptures, and collages, feeling waves of recognition at each form and color. I listened to music composed by synesthetes and read their poetry and prose. I took comfort in the fact that there were others out there expressing what they sensed synesthetically, though I’d yet to pick up a pencil and try it myself.
I learned that there are two types of synesthesia. The more common type, in which people see colors when they look at numbers or letters, is called perceptual, or lower, synesthesia. The type I suspected that I might have is less common and is known as conceptual, or higher, synesthesia. When I read or write a number, instead of seeing that number alone, in my mind’s eye, I see a shape superimposed over it. Experts say that this type of conceptual synesthesia may involve areas within the parietal lobe, which is located near the top of the brain and is associated with a number of abilities related to language and math as well as with spatial cognition; that is, knowing where one is in space. People with injuries to the parietal lobe often have difficulty with math. My experience was quite the opposite—I felt these areas in my parietal lobe must be key to what was happening to me in a major way, as I was both synesthetic and adept at math, a subject about which I had previously known nothing. I learned that this area of the brain is also believed to be central to retrieving memories, which I found fascinating. I have always had a very good memory, and though my isolation skewed my sense of time, making it hard for me to keep track of dates and sequences of events, my recall for new facts and concepts had become better and more sharply focused since my injury.
I was pleased to learn that synesthesia is not always the result of an injury. Most people who have it are born with it, and many of them go on to become highly accomplished. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist and professor Richard Feynman was a synesthete; he saw colored letters. In his book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, he wrote: “When I see equations, I see the letters in colors—I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.”
As I pored over all the descriptions of synesthesia I could find, I discovered that most of the definitions I came across referred to it as a condition, as if it were some sort of a medical ailment, mental-health problem, or disability. In fact, most synnies, as they call themselves, reject the word condition, or any other word with a negative connotation, to describe synesthesia. It certainly didn’t feel like a disability to me. It was not only very beautiful but also helpful for my memory. I found I could remember numbers more easily due to the additional visuals.
I might not have had a blue Monday like Daniel Tammet or a dark brown X like Richard Feynman, but my brain was still doing backflips to come up with these shapes I saw when I thought of or looked at numbers.
The most interesting form of the phenomenon I read about was mirror-touch synesthesia. A person with mirror-touch synesthesia actually feels a physical sensation when he or she sees someone else being touched. The mechanism is related to the actions of mirror neurons, which we all have—they’re the ones that make you flinch when you see someone get hit. Mirror-touch synesthesia might just be an exaggeration of that. Still, I was grateful I didn’t have quite that much neurological activity. I thought it would be tiring to physically feel so much. But there was some research that showed that those mirror neurons activate the empathy response, and I recognized an increase in this in myself.
In my case, I felt more in touch with other people’s emotions after my injury than I ever had before. Just being around other people, on the rare occasions I was, was overwhelming for me because I felt everything I felt plus what they felt too. If I spoke with someone who was having a bad day, I felt the anxiety of the person in my own stomach. The benefit of this was that I began to read people extremely well and I was much more compassionate than I had been. I noticed that people’s body language really did reflect their inner thoughts and predict their behavior. I not only sensed what they were thinking but also began to feel their feelings. If they were happy, so was I. Their discomfort became my own. Occasionally, after spending time with others, I had to retreat and go somewhere quiet and dark so I could rest from human encounters for a while.
I learned that the new era of synesthesia research had begun despite the doubts of many medical researchers. Lawrence Marks, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at the Yale School of Public Health, pioneered some of the earliest modern research in synesthesia in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Richard Cytowic, a professor of neurology at George Washington University, in Washington, DC, looked into it using emerging brain-imaging technology. Both of them mentioned in interviews that they had to persevere despite the misgivings of their peers, who initially found the topic too far out. The doctors ultimately found enough hard evidence in case studies to continue, and they are now considered the fathers of modern synesthesia research. They launched a new era of scientific inquiry into the phenomenon, and it continues in dozens of learning institutions and labs around the world.
Before neuroimaging was widely available, Dr. Cytowic created several criteria to test people who claimed to have synesthesia. I read through the criteria and checked them against my own experiences. First, the ability must be automatic and involuntary. Check. Second, the images must be spatially extended, meaning perceived outside the body. That was certainly the case with mine. Third, the experiences must be consistent and simple. Well, mine were at least consistent. Fourth,
the sensations needed to be vivid and memorable, even when recalled months later. That was also true for me, as I saw the same visions over years, not just months. And fifth, the perceptions needed to be experienced as real and undeniably true, causing an emotional response in the person experiencing them. If euphoria was an emotion, I could cross that element off the list with ease, I thought.
I felt all of these points matched my own reality, yet I could not find any examples of synesthetes who saw the things I did.
I kept searching for ways to verify and validate my self-diagnosis of synesthesia and eventually came across something called the Test of Genuineness (TOG). Developed in 1987 by a team of researchers including Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University in England, the TOG was designed to gauge how consistent a synesthete’s response to a specific stimulus was. For example, does someone who sees an A as red always see it as red? Or is it sometimes purple or navy blue? Does a person who sees emerald green when she hears an F-sharp always see emerald green with that note? Or does it change? To find out, people took the TOG and then retook it several months later. The researchers found that people who had synesthesia typically scored from 70 to 90 percent in consistency. Among the nonsynesthetes, consistency was usually between 20 to 38 percent. I knew the images I saw in response to numbers or equations were consistent over time but I didn’t seek out official testing.
Another really interesting test I learned about came from V. S. Ramachandran, a director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and Edward M. Hubbard, a former graduate student at UCSD and currently an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Their test to help identify people with synesthesia relied on the Stroop effect. I had never heard of the Stroop effect, but I found out that it’s named for John Ridley Stroop, a psychologist who wrote about it way back in 1935. Stroop’s test was simple: He would show people the name of a color written in either that same color or in a different color. (For example, the color yellow might be written in yellow ink or in red ink.) Then he would ask them to say the name of the written word. Stroop found that it took people longer to respond when the color of the ink didn’t match the name of the color.
When Dr. Ramachandran and Dr. Hubbard used this method to test synesthetes and nonsynesthetes, they found that it typically took nonsynesthetes longer to respond. Reaction times were faster for synesthetes, and much faster if the color of the ink matched the synesthetes’ particular color associations for that word.
These same two doctors devised yet another simple way to test for synesthesia, this time using numbers. They created a field of 5s and inserted several 2s among them. They showed it to people and asked them to find the 2s. The researchers found that synesthetes completed the task much more quickly than nonsynesthetes. Why was it so much easier for the synesthetes? Because they saw numbers in colors, and since the 2s were a different color than the 5s, they stood out. I loved this diagnostic because it showed how synesthetes saw the hidden aspects of things just as I felt I did (although I don’t have the number-and-color association).
How fast can you spot the 2s?
As interesting as acquired synesthesia was, I found just as much to be fascinated by in the world of acquired savants, and I shifted my focus to this aspect of my new self. I recalled that in the television program I had seen on the savant Tammet, a psychiatrist named Darold Treffert had been featured. I did a Google search and discovered that Dr. Treffert was considered the world’s leading authority on savants; some even referred to him as the dean of American savants. He’d written extensively on the subject in scientific journals, in popular media, on websites, and in his own books.
In his fifty years of practice at that point, Dr. Treffert had documented more than four hundred savant cases. Among these, he’d found only thirty cases of acquired savant syndrome. That’s what I suspected I had, and I was shocked to think I might be one of only thirty people in the world to go through this.
In writing about acquired, or sudden-onset, savant syndrome, Dr. Treffert said that the ability to know or remember things that had never been learned was due to what he called genetic memory. This is knowledge that is encoded in human DNA but that remains inaccessible to most people. “The only way such embedded skills and knowledge can be there innately,” Dr. Treffert claimed, “is through the genetic transfer of such knowledge and abilities. They come ‘factory installed’ and remain dormant, in all of us, until tapped by some central nervous system illness or catastrophe, perhaps as a back-up system.” Dr. Treffert noted that people don’t question how birds instinctively know migration patterns that they have never been taught. Monarch butterflies travel to the same twenty-three-acre spot in Mexico, though it takes them three generations to do it. Why isn’t it possible for humans to have innate, instinctive abilities?
Dr. Treffert wasn’t the only expert to propose this theory. Far across the globe, in Australia, Allan Snyder, the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, had been doing research on savants since the 1990s, and he had also come to the conclusion that savant skills are innate. In a 2010 interview with Psychology Today, Dr. Snyder said that savants “can tap into information that exists in all our brains.”
This concept made a great deal of sense to me, since I was certain that nothing I was currently thinking came from my memory. I just had not been exposed to the topics that now interested me, and I’d never learned how to do the things I could now do. The thought that this was some sort of hidden instinct, passed down through the ages, was thrilling.
What wasn’t so thrilling was the fact that so many of the savants I was reading about had numerous mental challenges despite their “islands of genius,” as Dr. Treffert described their extraordinary abilities. I didn’t feel as disadvantaged as they were, but it did make me worry I might lose some of my normal faculties if this savant syndrome progressed somehow. I had heard the unfortunate term idiot savant before, and in my research I learned that it was coined in 1887 by the same man who first described the disorder we know as Down syndrome: British physician John Langdon Down. Idiot was not as pejorative back then, and the word savant came from the French word savoir, “to know.” (Today, the constellation of symptoms is referred to as savant syndrome; it’s best not to use the term autistic savant, since only about 50 percent of people with savant syndrome are autistic.) In his three decades of work at an asylum, Down identified ten people who had both significant mental challenges and remarkable skills in specific areas. The people he studied had extraordinary musical, artistic, mathematical, or mechanical skills as well as astounding memories; they were not allowed in mainstream society due to their mental deficits apart from these skills. My throat tightened as I thought about a time when people with savant syndrome were institutionalized.
The first textbook to include descriptions of savants was written in 1914 by A. F. Tredgold. It had a title that stung: Mental Deficiency. I found a scanned copy of the original book in an online database and pored over the yellowed pages. Tredgold dedicated the book “To all those persons of sound mind who are interested in the welfare of their less fortunate fellow-creatures,” and included a chapter called “Idiot Savants.” In it, he reviewed everything that had been written on the subject so far. I cringed when I read his assertion that savants weren’t really idiots but rather “imbeciles or merely feeble-minded.” It was painful to see people described this way. But when I read that Tredgold believed that a savant’s talent must be due to “constant exercise,” or practice, I knew he was dead wrong. I had never practiced any of my new talents; they just appeared. Seeing how off base he was about this aspect of savantism made it easier for me to disregard his other hurtful comments.
In all my research on savant syndrome, I’ve been most drawn to the stories of those people who, like me, suddenly acquired this gift. One of them was Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon from New
York. In 1994, at the age of forty-two, he was using a pay phone during a rainstorm and was struck by lightning. When the bolt coursed through his body, he had the experience of being outside of himself. “I saw my own body on the ground,” he told Oliver Sacks in an interview for The New Yorker. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, shit, I’m dead.’ . . . Then—slam! I was back.”
Aside from feeling tired and having a few problems with memory, Dr. Cicoria was okay. Like me, he had a neurological evaluation that didn’t indicate any permanent brain damage. But also like me, he found his life changing in very unexpected ways. Lucky for him, his memory problems went away. In their place, he told Sacks, “Suddenly over two or three days, there was this insatiable desire to listen to piano music.” Nobody was more surprised about this new affinity for music than Cicoria. He’d never really been interested in piano music until that point. This made me think about my own newfound interest in math and fractals after a lifetime of hating math.
What’s more, Dr. Cicoria soon felt it wasn’t enough just to listen to the piano; he had an urge to play. He then started hearing original music in his head and had a desire to compose. So he began to study music. He still worked full-time as a surgeon and was unchanged in every other regard, but soon he was rising at 4:00 a.m. to practice, and after work, he played well into the night. It was a miraculously happy story, I thought, until I read that he and his wife divorced in 2004. When I learned that, I was so grateful that I hadn’t been married before my injury. Can you imagine your spouse waking up to a stranger every day? I don’t know how any of my former girlfriends would have reacted to having to sit with me, housebound, while I stared off into space pondering my visions or sat for hours doing research. I began to wonder if I’d ever find anyone who could tolerate me as I was now.
Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel Page 7
