Autistic Prodigies Since “Rain Man”
The list of off-the-charts young achievers associated, in retrospect, with Asperger’s syndrome extends a long way back. You may have heard that Bill Gates has been informally diagnosed with it. So, after the fact, has Bobby Fischer, obsessive and unable to look anybody in the eye. The label has been applied to Newton, Mozart, Yeats, and Wittgenstein, too. All of these recruits, of course, grew up well before the autism spectrum disorder—called by some “the engineers’ disease”—claimed a place in the 1994 revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s authoritative guide. Nearly 20 years later, in 2013, the Asperger’s label was officially dropped. But high-functioning autism had come trailing an aura of precocious genius, along with painful social cluelessness, and that aura was here to stay. The very bright yet remote “little professor” profile has become, as a journalist put it, “a signature disorder of the high-tech information age.” Unofficially the diagnosis, rooted in descriptions published in 1944 by the Viennese pediatrician Hans Asperger, is still with us—a portent of struggle, surely, yet also perhaps of unusual potential. Hadn’t Asperger said that “for success in science and art a dash of autism is essential”?
An unsettling experience, or some version of it, no longer belongs to obscure lore: A wriggly toddler, obsessed with numbers and letters, is already spelling out words—when he isn’t intently lining up his toy cars or melting down at loud noises. Perhaps he begins to seem even harder to engage than usual. Or a teacher or relative remarks that he isn’t really interacting with other kids. A parent’s something-isn’t-quite-right feeling intensifies. It is time to turn to, where else, the Internet. Venture beyond Urban Baby and there, awaiting discovery, is a new term that might help explain an avid, and cuddle-averse, code-breaker: “Is my child an autistic savant?” Darold A. Treffert, a soft-spoken Wisconsin psychiatrist in his 80s who has been called the “godfather of savant research,” was surprised by how often visitors to his website sent that question to his inbox as the new millennium got under way. Hopes and fears about what a child will grow into, or out of, can take sudden swerves.
An expert consultant on the multi-Oscar-winning (1988), Treffert had banished the old idiot prefix and helped spread an awareness of a disorienting phenomenon: remarkable gifts emerging in tandem with profound neurological problems—and “without lessons or training,” he marveled. In the film, Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond Babbitt, fidgety and uncommunicative, could count spilled toothpicks at
