The Mysterious Gift Of Musical Savants

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

(CBS) 
Derek is blind, severely mentally impaired and one of the most astonishing musicians Stahl had ever heard.

And yet a conversation with him goes something like this:

"Do you know that I come from New York, in America?" Stahl asked.

"You do," Derek noted.

"Have you ever been there?" Stahl asked.

"I have," he replied.

"You've been to New York?" she asked him.

"Not really," he answered.

It’s hard to trust Derek’s answers to "yes" or "no" questions, so Stahl tried what she thought would be an easy one for a pianist.

"Show me your left hand," Stahl asked Derek.

In response, he held up his right hand.

Derek was born extremely premature, weighing just a pound and a half. The oxygen that kept him alive blinded him, and he suffered massive brain damage. Like Rex, Derek started playing the piano at age two, and began lessons at age five. His teacher was Adam Ockelford, who worked with Derek daily for more than ten years.

Ockelford compares Derek’s intelligence to that of a two and a half year old. Derek does not dress himself, cannot do a button and needs assistance going to the bathroom.

With all his disabilities, though, Derek remembers every piece of music he has ever heard, he’s like a living iPod.

He retains popular songs as easily as classical masterpieces, playing "The Girl From Ipanema" and Beethoven’s "Für Elise" upon Stahl’s request.

And he doesn't just remember the music. He can transform it, instantly, and seemingly without conscious thought.

Stahl asked Derek if he could play "Für Elise" as if Mozart had written it and Derek performed the piece "a la Mozart" with a smile. Next, he played the same composition as if it was a Russian dance.

Derek can't explain how he does what he does, but that sure doesn't stop him. Stahl came up with an unusual impromptu challenge. Anyone who's ever played the piano knows that the right hand typically plays the melody, but when Stahl asked Derek to take his right hand off the keyboard, he was able to keep right on playing using only his left hand.

"I've never seen that before. I mean he wasn't just playing the melody of course, being Derek. He was playing the baseline with his little finger and the tune with his thumb and still doing the accompaniment with the middle three fingers," Ockelford said. "It also shows how flexible his brain is, because normally his brain is sending the messages for the tune to his right hand, but it instantly rewired to make it fit with his left hand. That was fantastic."

Derek lives at a school outside London where young adults who are blind and learning disabled study music. The school provides housing, and takes care of all their needs. No such place exists in the United States for kids like Rex. His mother, Cathleen, has had to devote her life to him.

A Stanford graduate who became a high-fashion model in Paris, and then a currency options trader, she was on the fast-track. Now divorced, Cathleen takes care of Rex on her own.

With a chuckle, Cathleen admitted that by nature, she is not a patient person. "I am the opposite of a patient person. I am not patient at all," she said. "When you’ve given something that – if you don’t do it, it’s not going to happen … I mean he’s changed you know, the way I think, the way I react. Everything."