The story of Virginia and Grace Kennedy, discussed in Dan Visel’s last post, is truly fascinating and I wish the complete film were available on DVD. I’ve since learned that “idioglossia,” the technical term for a naturally occurring invented language shared by an extremely small community, is not all that uncommon: up to 40% of twins develop a kind of “private language” in their first few years, only to abandon it as they mature. The theory is that as the siblings acquire the language of their parents, they mimic one another’s vocalizations—often incorrectly—and the resulting sounds (which appear nonsensical to everyone else) eventually develop into a grammatically and lexically consistent language of its own. I brought this up with my cousin, a linguist who studies deaf autistic children, and he cited a few cases where kids had been completely ignored by their parents, and yet had managed to acquire a crude, garbled version of their native tongue simply by watching television. In fact, there are whole cultures where young people are not addressed or spoken to at all because they aren’t deemed appropriate conversation partners. Despite their exclusion, however, the children are able to construct a sort of ersatz “proto-language” amongst themselves based on the decontextualized fragments they overhear from the adults, plus whatever else they happen to come into contact with—TV, radio, movies, video games, etc.
These astonishing cases remind me of one of the “clinical tales” from Oliver Sacks‘ classic collection, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In 1966, Dr. Sacks was treating a set of severely autistic, 26 year-old twins with astonishing arithmetic and mnemonic abilities—so called “idiot savants”—when he noticed they would sometimes communicate with one another using numbers alone. Which was curious, because neither possessed the slightest competence with mathematics as such; they could calculate outrageous sums effortlessly, but could not reason with numbers even at the most rudimentary level.
It would happen like this: one brother would call out a very large number and the other would respond with a look of intense concentration. After several moments, he’d smile and nod and both would appear deeply contented. And then they’d do it again in reverse—the second brother would purse his lips and scrunch his forehead and eventually call out another astronomical sum, and the first would respond in the same manner, as though he were trying to decipher some hidden meaning, until he’d finally look up beaming and the two would begin again. It seemed to be a kind of secret game, one which satisfied both its players in a profound and mysterious way. “[I]t had a gravity and intensity,” wrote Dr. Sacks, “which I had never seen before in the usually agitated and distracted twins.” But while everyone else was baffled by their inexplicable number-swapping, the neurologist suspected there was method in their apparent madness.
Having grown up a bit of a math geek himself, Dr. Sacks knew something about the seductive power of numbers. Indeed, great mathematicians throughout history have been transfixed, in particular, by prime numbers, seeing them as the ‘atomic’ units of arithmetic. By definition, primes are not divisible by anything except themselves and 1, a trait that distinguishes them from composites and allows them to behave in certain bizarre, marvelous, and sometimes maddeningly unpredictable ways. Such qualities have granted them a near-mystical status in the minds of thinkers from Euclid, to Augustine, through Fermat, Gauss, and Riemann, and continues to captivate mathematicians today. (The book to read is The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy.) Yet no one has discovered any algorithm or special formula for generating individual primes—our only dependable method is the painstaking, old-fashioned process of randomly selecting a group of odd numbers and testing them through factorization, one by one.
Dr. Sacks was aware well aware of all this and began to wonder if perhaps the autistic twins were communicating through primes. He went home one day after work to rifle through some of his old math tomes full of dense logarithmic tables and lists of square roots and powers and discovered that, sure enough, the gargantuan numbers the savants had been exchanging were primes. The next day, Dr. Sacks tried an experiment. He brought one of the math books to work with him and, after a period of silent observation while the twins swapped eight-figure primes, ventured, somewhat apprehensively, to participate. Consulting the text, he called out a large prime of his own. The twins instantly looked at him, smiled, and made room on the floor as if to invite their new “playmate” to join the game. Soon, all three of them were trading prime numbers, each higher than the next. They continued taking turns until the numbers were so high that Dr. Sacks could no longer confirm their primality or contribute his own. But the twins kept going, and within an hour, they were calling out twenty-five figure primes, a feat almost anyone would consider impossible without the aid of a computer.
How were they able to do such a thing?
One theory was that they might have come across a list of primes at some point in their past and, given their prodigious talent for recall, were simply “quizzing” each other by playing a sort of personalized game of Memory. But this naturally begs the question of why they would choose to play a mnemonic game with numbers, of all things, and why these particular numbers—primes—rather than something else. What was their significance? Another theory was that they were actually calculating these absurd sums in their heads, but this seems extremely unlikely, considering their total incompetence with algorithms. A third was that their extraordinary abilities had little to do with memory storage or arithmetic at all, but were in fact the byproducts of a certain type of visual cognition: they did not “perform” mathematical functions so much as locate in their minds’ eye a set of pre-existing, quantitative relationships, the same way musicians with perfect pitch are able to “hear” the entire harmonic system as a naturally occurring family of tones.
A brief elaboration. We are all born with an elementary “number sense”—an innate cognitive capacity to understand simple quantities, much like the ability to use grammar. (For an engaging study of this phenomenon, see The Math Gene by Keith Devlin.) To wit: if we see two or three apples on a table, we don’t have to count them to know how many are there—we just see their “two-ness” or “three-ness” as immediately identifiable, free-standing conditions. But some of us are born with a deeper, broader aptitude for numbers, and may intuitively grasp their quality the way the rest of us are able to recognize familiar faces. (This analogy was originally made by the great 19th century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in his masterpiece, On the Sensations of Tone.) Indeed, we don’t methodically add up the attributes of a face in order to identify it (brown eyes + thin lips + high cheekbones + pale skin with freckles = Mom); rather, we sense it all at once: we grasp the aggregate as a dynamic whole.
Interestingly, though, people may become deprived of this ability following a stroke. The term “visual agnosia” describes a neurological condition whereby subjects are unable to recognize otherwise familiar objects such as faces. There may be nothing wrong with their eyes or their vision—in fact, they are often perfectly capable of describing everything in their visual field in precise detail—though they have great difficulty identifying what things actually are. (This does not mean that they’re in any way psychotic or delusional; the damage is physiological, not psychological.) Agnosiacs, in a very literal sense, see the trees but not the forest; they lack the ordinary ability to assemble parts into cohesive, meaningful units. As a result, they frequently reach for one thing, thinking it’s something else because it shares certain abstract features—hence “the man who mistook his wife for a hat.”
But as we’ve seen, some subjects have excesses where others have deficits. Assuming Dr. Sacks was correct in his interpretation, the autistic twins were imbued with a special ability, almost an additional sense—something the philosopher Richard Wollheim dubbed an “iconic mental state“—and this enabled them, like the Kennedy twins, to communicate through a private language no one else could appreciate or understand. Of course, that ability came at the expense of social engagement, something you and I can’t help but take for granted.
It could be argued, however, that the real sacrifice lay in their treatment. In an effort to socialize them “for their own good,” their caretakers ultimately decided that the twins be separated. The result for both brothers was a life of halfway houses, menial jobs and public transportation—again, not at all dissimilar to the fate of Virginia and Grace Kennedy.
Dr. Sacks concludes:
“Deprived of their numerical ‘communion’ with each other, and of time and opportunity for any ‘contemplation’ or ‘communion’ at all—they are always being hurried and jostled from one job to another—they seem to have lost their strange numerical power, and with this the chief joy and sense of their lives.”
Few clichés are as tired as the correlation between pathos and genius—and its facile corollary: cure the illness, kill the gift—exploited through the ages from Aristotle to Ron Howard. Even so, as with so many truisms, browbeaten into banality, its real world consequences can be far more dramatic, if less glamorous, than the films that depict them.
