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The surprising genetic link between autism and prodigy By Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens

In 1998, on the back roads of a swampy Louisiana town, a young couple were raising their six- year- old son, a child with round cheeks, thin lips, and a peculiar knowledge of jazz musicians.

That spring, Joanne Ruthsatz, then a psychology graduate student, took a 30- some- hour train ride from Sandusky, Ohio, to New Orleans, rented a car, and drove through the bayou to the couple’s small clapboard home.

She’d come all that way to see the boy — Garrett James ( a pseudonym). He looked like a typical little kid — medium build, towheaded, and light-eyed. He loved trucks, spoke with a southern drawl, and listened politely when his parents introduced him to “Miss Joanne.”

But he was definitely not typical. As a toddler, Garrett had crafted musical instruments out of household goods — spoons, keys, the vent in the wall — anything he could get his tiny hands on. His aunt gave him a toy guitar for his second birthday, and he stunned his parents when he used it to recreate songs he heard on the radio.

Garrett’s love for music — his need for music — exploded from somewhere within him, charged through his fingertips, and burst into the world. At four years old, he performed in the family’s yard, fronted a local band, and fielded invitations to play at music festivals and fairs. At one of these festivals, Garrett played in front of tens of thousands of fans. Physically, he was a speck on a sweeping stage; his famous adult co-star had to crouch down to approach eye level. When he played, though, he swallowed up the empty space. Little boy became music powerhouse.

Over the next two years, Garrett performed on a jazz album, in a movie, and on TV talk shows. All without ever having taken a formal music lesson, and all before his seventh birthday.

For most of Joanne’s graduate school career, she’d been studying exceptional adult and teenage performers, trying to parse out what separates the successful from the less so. The nature versus nurture debate rubbed her the wrong way; surely both have a role to play in expertise. She had been working on a new theory, one based on the idea that at least three factors have a role in success: general intelligence, practice time, and skills specific to a particular field. Others had argued for the importance of each of these factors; it was the combination of the three that was novel.

But could her theory account for the abilities of a child prodigy — one of those rare, preternaturally skilled, scientifically befuddling children who often outperform grownup musicians, artists, and mathematicians? Joanne thought Garrett, an earnest, wideeyed guitar phenom, would need an outlandish IQ and a masterful ear for music to make up for his relatively few years of practice.

Over the course of two days, Joanne gave Garrett an IQ test and a music aptitude test. He was even more of a mystery than she had realized. Garrett scored in the upper echelons of the music aptitude test, detecting changes in tone and rhythm with more accuracy than almost all of his age- mates, just as she had predicted he would. And he knocked the socks off the memory portion of the IQ test. He thundered through digit repetitions on his way to scoring in the 99th percentile for this section, despite having gotten tired of the testing and wrapping up early.

But the rest of Garrett’s IQ- test results weren’t exactly what Joanne had expected. He did well, to be sure; there was no question that Garrett’s general intelligence score was well above average. But it wasn’t one in a million. He had a very high IQ, but it was nowhere near as exceptional as his abilities on the guitar.

Without a truly explosive IQ, how was he mastering music with such unbelievable speed?

A chance encounter with Garrett’s cousin — a teenager with autism — provided a startling clue: Could Garrett’s talent have some- thing to do with his cousin’s autism?

Fast forward to the end of 2011, and Joanne had investigated nine prodigies. It wasn’t much of a research sample by typical scientific standards, but for a child prodigy study it was a strikingly large group. At that point, Joanne took stock of what she had seen so far.

Every prodigy she had met had an astounding working memory — a trait the prodigies share with autistic savants. Each of the prodigies had an unquenchable passion for his or her field, a trait similar to autists’ tendency toward obsession. But those traits were only the beginning of the connection between prodigy and autism.

Autism is highly prevalent in the prodigies’ families. Five of the first nine prodigies Joanne worked with had at least one close family member with autism. Three of the families combined to have 11 close autistic relatives, and one prodigy had five family members with an autism spectrum disorder. When these children look around at their relatives, it can seem that autism is everywhere.

Autism is more common among men than women, with boys landing on the spectrum about four times as often as girls. Though her sample was small, Joanne saw this same gender skew in her initial population of prodigies: with seven boys and two girls, the breakdown was 3.5 boys to every girl, a ratio nearly identical to that for autism. It was another clue that underneath their surface differences, the two might have common biological roots.

Attention to detail is another link between prodigy and autism. This characteristic, the ability to notice and remember small things that others ignore or forget, has been described as “a universal feature of the autistic brain.”

In one highly publicized 1996 incident, army rangers, Green Berets, Marines, sheriff ’s deputies, and a host of other volunteers spent four days scouring the murky waters of a Florida swamp, searching for Taylor Touchstone, an autistic 10-year-old boy who had ventured out of sight while swimming. So treacherous was the swamp into which the boy had nonchalantly ventured that it had claimed the lives of four army rangers the previous year. On the fourth day of the search, a man fishing for bass found Taylor floating naked in a river, bloody and scratched but otherwise unharmed, 14 miles from the spot where he disappeared.

Taylor’s family believed his autism saved his life. Because Taylor often focused on tiny details, such as the knot in his bathing suit string, he travelled without panicking through a swamp teeming with alligators and poisonous snakes.

Extreme attention to detail is mirrored in the prodigies. Joanne administered the Autism — Spectrum Quotient (a test that measured a handful of traits associated with autism) to eight of the nine prodigies in her initial sample and found that they, too, demonstrated excellent attention to detail. They outscored those without any sort of autism diagnosis and even exhibited a greater attention to detail than those with Asperger’s disorder.

The prodigies’ lives were rife with tantalizing hints that their precocious abilities were somehow linked to autism. Joanne and her colleagues at Ohio State University have even found preliminary evidence that prodigies and autists may have a genetic link in common, a mutation on chromosome 1 that some prodigies and autists ( but not their non-prodigious, non-autistic relatives) share.

This connection poses a tantalizing possibility: If a family link with autism partially explains child prodigies’ extraordinary abilities, could studying child prodigies similarly unlock a piece of autism’s infamously complex genetic architecture?

Excerpted from The Prodigy’s Cousin: The Family Link Between Autism and Extraordinary Talent

by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens. Copyright © 2016 Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens. Published by CURRENT, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House of

Canada Limited. All rights reserved.

PRODIGIES HAD A PASSION SIMILAR TO AUTISTS’ TENDENCY TOWARD OBSESSION