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Mind: Musical Savants, Synaesthetes & Pitch-perfectionists
Young Matt Savage is a rare case. He was diagnosed at age 3 with a form of autism, pervasive development disorder. He also exhibits savant syndrome, of the unusual "prodigious savant" type. Rarer still, Matt is highly intelligent, unlike most savants, who have IQs below 70. There may be only 50 people in a world of 6 billion who are like him. According to a recent issue of WIRED magazine, combining the "precocious abilities of a savant and the melodic imagination of a seasoned musician, [Matt] has dual citizenship in two countries of the mind," making him both a "prolific composer and skilled improviser." The autism that has provided non-standard wiring for Matt's entire brain leaves him distractible, "at the mercy of a flood of incoming sensory impressions and conflicting impulses." Soon after he was born, his family concluded that in particular, "his acute sense of hearing was overwhelming him." Unusually bright (reading and counting before age one), Matt's use of language was unusual, and he was unable to follow the usual rules for pre-school behavior. But his musical appetite -- and skill -- was also unusual. A day after being shown middle C on the family's piano, he was "devouring" music books at a rapid rate, later mastering a dozen pieces in each lesson at New England Conservatory. (His teacher: "Matt has an amazing ability to calculate relationships between chords and lines, which can all be expressed as numbers.") Other innovative thinkers whose genius might have been colored by autism and related disorders include musicians Thelonious Monk (Tourette's Syndrome) and Glenn Gould (Asperger's Syndrome), as well as Carl Friedrich Gauss, Samuel Johnson, and Andre-Marie Ampere. The extensive WIRED article focuses on Matt, but it also reviews major research insights about various forms of autism (including Williams Syndrome), a "battle of the bands" between musical savants and trained professional musicians, and current thinking about how the brain works. A recommended read! Read the Dec. 2003 WIRED magazine article Visit Matt Savage's official home page, which includes audio clips and pictures from recent appearances and news coverage.
When neuroscientist Julian Asher was a child, he thought the lights were lowered at symphony concerts so that people could "see the colors better." Now he knows that the colors he always sees when he hears music are a result of his synaesthesia, a rare condition in which two senses are inextricably combined. Asher now studies synaesthesia, the topic of a recent Newsweek article. It is a real perceptual phenomenon, not at all the "product of overactive imaginations" that it was long thought to be. Depending on which senses are cross-wired, images can have sounds, sounds can have tastes, numbers can have colors, etc. Even people who have lost their eyesight can "see" colors associated with the various spoken words they hear. Scientists are still unsure of the cause of synaesthesia. Some researchers are on the hunt for genetic markers, while others are using advanced scanning technologies to look at patterns of neural activity. Among the noteworthy synaesthetes: physicist Richard Feynman, artist David Hockney, and composer Franz Liszt (recorded quotes from his directing days: "O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!," and "That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!") Artist Carol Steen, who like Hockney sometimes paints what she sees when she hears music, was asked the musical equivalent of the boxers-or-briefs question: Do vinyl LPs or digital CDs sound/look better? She prefers old-fashioned vinyl: "The colors are more beautiful, as if someone gave them an extra shine." Read "Real Rhapsody in Blue" in the Dec. 1, 2003 Newsweek [fee for archives] Read an informative overview of synaesthesia by Julian Asher See a profile of David Hockney (with art images)
They weren't synaesthetes, so what do these folks have in common: Beethoven, Hendrix, Mozart & Nat King Cole? What if we add Bartok, Chopin, Stevie Wonder, Yo-Yo Ma, and Barbra Streisand to the list? Most people just hear music when they hear music, but some -- including the above list -- can do it with such fine-tuned accuracy that they can identify musical notes from their sound alone. Such people are said to have "perfect pitch" or "absolute pitch" (AP), as opposed to the "relative pitch" that most musicians develop (i.e. the ability to name a note when given a named reference note). Recent articles in the New York Times and Yale magazine reported on recent research into AP. The source of absolute pitch, an ability found in only about one in ten thousand people, is still mysterious. AP often becomes apparent when young children start naming the specific notes made by their household appliances, although it may be present from birth. AP may be genetically caused, as hinted by sibling studies (it tends to run in families) and the higher incidence among Asians (both in Asia and in the West, and speakers of both tonal and non-tonal languages). Most studies indicate that once a child is beyond 9-12 years of age, AP cannot be learned, despite claims to the contrary by perfect-pitch training companies. Recent studies are using scanning instruments to track brain activity among people (both musicians and non-musicians) with absolute pitch and without the ability. Early results hint that some fundamentally different approaches to neural signal processing may be taking place in the two groups. Read Robert Zatorre's article on possible genetic factors in the July, 2003 special issue of Nature Neuroscience, "Focus on Music," or browse the entire table of contents of that issue Read the article in the Yale Alumni Magazine (Sept./Oct. 2003) Read an overview of absolute pitch |
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