Watch Beautiful MInds A Voyage into the Brain online: Episode 2 The Einstein Effect

Matt Savage was strange as a child. Until he was 4 his mother wasn't allowed to touch him and at the slightest noise he got a screaming fit. Matt´s parents soon got the diagnosis: Matt was said to be an autistic child. One had to accept the disconnections of his brain that led to extreme behavior, the pediatrician said. When he was 6, Matt Savage learned to play piano nearly overnight. By 7 he began composing jazz and in the same year his first CD with his own composition was released. A day before his 13th birthday he had a gig in New York´s most famous jazz club, the Birdland. Famous jazz-players like Chick Corea call him a musical talent of the century. “But where,” asks Dr. Darold Treffert, (awarded to be one of the hundred best physicians of the USA and one of the most important Savant-experts worldwide), “does Matt Savage take his knowledge about music from? Is there a musical chip in our brains, which already knows everything about music? That we just don´t have access to? How can Matt know all these things about music when he never learned them?” The abilities of Stephen Wiltshire are just as tremendous. The man from London, diagnosed as an autistic child by the age of 3, flies in a helicopter over Rome for "Beautiful Minds - A Voyage Into The Brain" for 45 minutes. After that he is supposed to draw a 5 meter long aerial panoramic picture of the Eternal City - from memory. Because he is a drawing-savant, (who was able to fulfill a similar feat in his hometown London), he was even able to remember the exact number of windows of important buildings. The brain researcher Prof. Michael Fitzgerald from Dublin draws upon the theory that there is a interrelation between the extraordinary creativity and the disconnections in the autistic brains. Einstein, Newton, Mozart and Beethoven, says Fitzgerald, were such extreme gifted people, because their brains weren't wired appropriate! - like the brains of Matt Savage and Stephen Wiltshire. At the university of Sydney, Prof. Allan Snyder tries to disable parts of the brains of his probands for a short time to get more creativity out of them: “It´s fascinating,” Snyder says, “that you have to switch of some parts of our brains to unfurl our inventive powers”. But Snyders experiments are highly contended.

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