Steve Silberman, who wrote a brilliant piece on geeks and autism in Wired a couple years back, has a great long feature in the current issue about autistic “savants” — people who have an instinctive, brilliant grasp of some abstruse task, such as music or math. There’s some very good stuff about this in Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, particularily when he discusses very “low-functioning” people who have an intuitive understanding of music and numbers that is almost spiritual in nature.
When Matt was 6, he confided to his mother, “My mind is made of math problems.” Diane started buying him math workbooks for kids twice his age. He zipped through them so quickly, she learned to hide a few in a drawer so he’d have something to work on the following day.
Then one night, Diane and Larry heard a melody coming from downstairs. It was their son, playing “London Bridge” on a toy keyboard. Diane brought Matt into the family room and introduced him to the middle C on the piano. Within a day, he was devouring music books as hungrily as he had math books.
Matt took classical lessons for a year, then Diane enrolled him in the jazz program at the New England Conservatory of Music. Upon meeting his first jazz instructor there, a bearish Israeli whose last name is Katsenelenbogen, Matt cried out, “Six syllables!”