Summary
In “The Twins,” Sacks describes meeting an extraordinary set of twins, John and Michael, who live in a state hospital and have been variously diagnosed with autism, psychoticism, and severe retardation. Sacks describes them as “a sort of grotesque Tweedledum and Tweedledee, indistinguishable, mirror images, identical in face, in body movements, in personality, in mind, identical too in their stigmata of brain and tissue damage” (196). John and Michael are famous for their feats of memory and mental calculation. They have been featured on radio and television shows for their ability to almost instantly calculate the day of the week, given any date in the next 80,000 years. Their capacity for memory is enormous, perhaps infinite. Prompted with any day of their lives ranging back to the age of about four, they can call up from memory the weather forecast and the major events of that day. They are also able to listen to and then repeat back three-hundred-digit numbers with the ease of repeating a number of three digits. Despite their uncanny abilities, John and Michael have not grasped how to do basic arithmetic and “cannot even comprehend what multiplication or division means” (197). Their tested IQs are around 60.
One day a box of matches falls to the floor in front of the twins, and John and Michael simultaneously cry out “111.” This proves to be the exact number of matches on the floor. Further, they murmur the number 37 three times after calling out 111. When asked why, they respond in unison: “37, 37, 37, 111.” 37, a prime number, goes into 111 exactly three times. Similar stories of uncanny ability have been told about mental calculators of the past; for example, Zacharias Dase, a German calculator from the 1800s, could instantly identify the number of peas poured out on a table without having to count them. Dase, who also had no grasp on mathematics, drew up tables of factors and prime numbers going past 8 million. Sacks speculates that like Dase, John and Michael share a preternatural “sense” for indivisible quantities. To pass the time, the twins sometimes have entirely numerical conversations -- calling up enormous prime numbers (verified later by Sacks) of six figures or more. They approach each of these numbers with a sense of the utmost reverence.
In 1977 it is decided that the twins should be separated for the sake of their individual development. They move into separate homes and are placed in menial jobs. Although this does help them eventually learn how to care for themselves, Sacks reports that after years, they lose their numerical powers. Other individuals with autism have experienced a similar dulling of their talents as they learn to adjust to society. Lorne Selfe wrote a famous case study about a non-verbal autistic girl named Nadia, who was a phenomenally gifted drawer. After entering intensive therapy, she learned to talk, but she lost her interest in visual art. In the postscript to “Twins,” Sacks adds that some of John and Michael’s mental calculation of calendar days has been shown to be calculable through a relatively simple algorithm using modular division and subtraction. Their ability to reach these dates so quickly seems to be tied to their ability to visualize prime numbers.
“The Autist Artist” opens with an interaction in the clinic between Sacks and José, a young man of about 21 who suffers from violent seizures. He is said to be “hopelessly retarded” (214), unable to speak or understand most words, and constantly in a state of restlessness. During testing, Sacks finds that José is quite compelled by drawing. When asked to draw Sacks’ pocket watch, José focuses on it intently and produces a copy that, while proportionally a bit off, is precisely and strikingly detailed. Sacks marvels at José’s ability to bring out “[t]he general grasp of the thing, its ‘feel’"(215). José proves to be a naturally gifted artist, reproducing photographs from a magazine with subtle twists and enhancements. His drawings are not simple carbon-copies; they have a life and a character that the original pictures do not possess.
Sacks theorizes that this splinter skill is a hold-over from José’s early years when he would draw with his father and older brother. Now he is bolstered by his deep, intense relationship with the particulars of images: “It is a mode of mind at the opposite extreme from the generalising, the scientific, but still ‘real’, equally real, in a quite different way” (229). After years of living in the ward, José becomes the hospital’s artist-in-residence, creating mosaic altarpieces for churches, carving the lettering on tombstones, and hand-printing sundry notices. Sacks laments the fact that despite José’s enormous creative potential, he will likely spend the rest of his life overlooked and unappreciated by the outside world. In the postscript, Sacks writes that artistic gifts are not uncommon among autistic individuals, especially children, although testing for these gifts can prove challenging. Autistic children are often indifferent to outside praise and criticism. While this maintains a beautiful naïvaté in their work, they are almost always untrainable.
Analysis
Underlying “The Twins” is the envy Sacks feels towards John and Michael’s uncanny talents, and the frustration he has at his exclusion from their world. Unlike descriptions of the vast majority of his patients, Sacks uses few kind words when writing about the twins. He says that aside from their special skills, there is “nothing much to them” (195). He calls them grotesque, undersized, and disturbing–“absurd little professors, peering and pointing, with a misplaced, obsessed, and absurd concentration” (196). These remarks are uncharacteristic for Sacks; his descriptions are usually generous and compassionate. When Sacks works with the twins in person, he describes becoming flustered and annoyed by their inexplicable capabilities: “ ‘How did you work that out?’ I said, rather hotly” (200). John and Michael’s abilities are not just uncanny to Sacks–they actively frustrate him.
This frustration, however, moves Sacks to investigate John and Michael more deeply than anybody else had ever thought to. When he overhears them speaking in numbers, passing increasingly large figures back in forth, Sacks begins to obsess over what they might be doing. He describes going home and rifling through his things to find his old printed-out tables of factors, logarithms, and primes, then cross-checking the numbers he recorded that day to decipher the rules of the twins’ game. Sacks is more than just curious; he dearly wants to find a way into John and Michael’s world. When Sacks brings his chart of prime numbers into the clinic and joins their conversation with a number of his own, John and Michael crack huge smiles and scoot apart to make room for Sacks, “a new number playmate, a third in their world” (203). Although this act changes nothing significant for the twins, it constitutes a major success for Sacks.
The last story of this section and of the book, “The Autist Artist” finds Sacks at a happy middle-ground between neurologist and storyteller. At the start of the essay, José’s severe cognitive deficits have foreclosed the possibility for most clinicians to see anything in him at all. A hospital attendant interrupts Sacks’ testing just to say that José is hopeless: “He can’t even talk. They says he’s ‘autistic’, but he’s just an idiot” (215). Although this attendant’s own idiocy provides us with a nice moment of humor, his words highlight the narrative that has controlled José throughout his life. He is a defect with no potential who should be left alone.
After completing the drawing test, Sacks easily could have continued along with this narrative. José’s drawing of the watch is proportionally quite off, and the numbers on the face are crude and childlike. But instead, Sacks finds details and intricacies in the drawing that allows him to formulate a new narrative about who José really is. Sacks does his own research on José’s background and writes at length about his seizures as a child, his family, and his being pulled out of school at a young age. When he returns to test José again, José is visibly excited to see him, eager to have the opportunity to rewrite the opinion of everyone around him. Sacks uses the power of storytelling to transform José’s drawings into proof not just of his technical ability, but of his creativity, his imaginative and perceptive capacities, and his emotional depth. Although the conditions of his life are beyond repairing, José becomes self-actualized as a dedicated artist who works for the hospital. Acting as a neurologist and a storyteller at once, Sacks offers José something that José alone had never been able to demand: a narrative that is true to his potential as a complex human being.
