The Mysterious Gift Of Musical Savants

Lesley Stahl Checks In On A Boy With An Extraordinary Musical Talent

(CBS) 
David introduced Stahl to another of his students, 11-year-old Rachel Flowers. Rachel is also blind and a musical prodigy.

David teaches Rachel piano. The flute, she is teaching herself.

“She picked up the flute five, six months ago. And now she can play in a nightclub as a jazz flautist. She's just amazing,” says David.

And she's improvising. Intellectually, Rachel performs at grade level, but she lags in social skills, focusing almost obsessively on music.

“There is this intriguing triangle of blindness, mental impairment of some kind, and it doesn't have to be the same, and musical genius,” Stahl remarked.

“I think that gives us a clue about ourselves. A child who has a limitation has a direct access to parts of themselves that we have in us, but we don't have access to it,” Pinto replied.

"So it's all buried with us?" Stahl asked.

"How often have we had dreams where we did, maybe spoke very eloquently?" asks Pinto. "As a composer I've had dreams where I went through a complete concerto that was impeccable, and it just rolled off, as a dream. Obviously, that means that it's inside of us. Well, these kids can do that dream. There's just nothing in between it," he said with a snap of his fingers.

Sometimes Pinto teaches Rachel and Rex together, working on rhythm and movement – crucial, he says, for blind children who have no visual models for how to move their bodies. And at the piano, they have the musical equivalent of a conversation -- each one building on the other.

"When I first saw them the first day that they crossed paths in their lessons they had a little overlay and I was just hoping that they would be able to do something together," Rex's mom Cathleen remembers. "And Rex had never played at a piano with another child. It was hard for him to play with an adult at one piano, let alone a child."

But outside of the music, Rex and Rachel have no interaction. Rex’s mother explains her son is not interested in Rachel, the person – just the music. “Maybe down the road, it'll be Rachel the person,” she added, with a hopeful chuckle.

As Rex and Rachel head toward adolescence and young adulthood, there are many questions. Will their remarkable talents continue to develop, or will disability at some point get in the way? How far can someone with profound limitations like Rex’s really go?

Scientists have never done comprehensive studies of the brains of musical savants. No one can explain the triangle of blindness, brain impairment, and musical genius they share.

That means what Rex may face as he gets older is anybody’s guess. But 60 Minutes got a tantalizing glimpse – both of where Rex might end up, and of the nature of the savant gift itself – when Stahl traveled to London to meet 26-year-old Derek Paravicini.