Wired 11.12: The Key to Genius: "Geneticists are starting to pinpoint the DNA anomalies found in kids like Matt who are savants from birth. Still, a single savant gene will probably never be found. More than a dozen genes may contribute to autism. Several other forms of mental impairment also produce islands of startling ability - known as splinter skills - as if fragments of savant code are scattered throughout the genetic database."

The nerve cells in a fetal brain proliferate at an astonishing rate, with 250,000 neurons born every minute. These cells are engaged in a fierce Darwinian contest. The goal: interconnectedness.

In a fetus that is developing normally, those neurons that do not form synaptic links with the other cells are killed off before birth

The brains of typical children grow in response to lessons learned from the environment - that was one of the significant upgrades in the evolution of Homo sapiens. As new stimuli are absorbed, the neurons in the cortex adapt gradually, and synaptic connections are forged or eliminated. Our brains are cast in the image of our experience.

The overgrowth of the brain tissue of autistic kids, however, is random and automatic, a reaction to an unknown stimulus - perhaps testosterone or some toxic agent in the environment. The result, says Courchesne, is an onslaught of neural noise that makes the infant lose the ability to make sense of its world.

dementia does not create artistic powers in these patients, it uncovers them. The disorder switches off inhibitory signals from the left temporal lobes, enabling suppressed talents in the right hemisphere to flourish.

neuroscientists are discovering that the processing centers in our heads swap resources all the time.

autistic savants have "privileged access" to the mind's raw data before it's parsed and filtered by the brain's executive functions.


in many cases, their gifts fail to develop at all. The artistic powers of a celebrated savant named Nadia - a British girl who began drawing at age 3 with more accuracy and subtlety than many adult artists - ebbed at age 9, when she learned to speak. The brilliant careers of many musical prodigies are cut short in adolescence, when innate talent must become a craft and a left-hemisphere routine. Many savant life stories follow a difficult trajectory from an astonishing debut to an anonymous fate.

The mark of real genius is that it leaves its own domain permanently changed. After a century of dissecting the cortex into smaller and smaller bits, we're learning that the highest functions of the mind - creativity and imagination - are emergent properties of a brain working as a whole.

GrEAtNess DiAgNosEd
Are certain forms of creativity enhanced by brain damage? Do the same genetic traits that produce disorders like savant syndrome, autism, and Tourette's contribute to genius? Hans Asperger, who in the early 1940s pioneered the study of autism, believed the answer was yes. "For success in science and art," he wrote, "a dash of autism is essential." The biographies of many innovative thinkers bear him out. - S.S.