The Mysterious Gift Of Musical Savants

This story originally aired on Oct. 23, 2005.

The human mind can be mystifying in its capacity to accommodate both disability and genius in the same person, as we found in a little boy named Rex.

Rex was born blind, with brain damage so severe it looked as though he would never walk, talk, or do much of anything. And yet he has a talent few of us can imagine. To understand Rex's brain would be to unlock mysteries of language, memory, and music.

Correspondent Lesley Stahl first met Rex and his mother Cathleen three years ago.

But with everything Rex can't do, he can instantly identify any note that is played for him. It's a talent only one in 10,000 people have.

But that was just the beginning of Rex's gifts at the piano.

Stahl played Rex a song he had never heard – "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" – with Rex's piano teacher singing along. Despite not being able to see the keys, Rex was able to play the song himself after a single hearing.

Rex is a musical savant, one of a handful of people in the world who share a mysterious combination of blindness, mental disability, and musical genius.

But away from the piano, Rex was a different child, easily upset and confused by basic concepts. Despite his agility at the piano, he still got lost in his small apartment.

"He basically gets lost in space," his mother, Cathleen Lewis explained. "Even when I'm directing him, he often turns the wrong way."

Does damage in one part of the brain somehow enable brilliance to develop in another part of the brain? Do these abilities lie dormant somewhere within all of us?

The savant gift remains a mystery, which drew 60 Minutes back to Rex, two years later, to see how he had progressed.

Last spring, just shy of his 10th birthday, Rex was as charming and excitable as ever and just as hard to fathom, as when Stahl asked him what he likes to do.

When asked if he had ever been in a swimming pool, Rex said no.

"Oh, we have a swimming pool at home, Rex," his mother said. "You swim a lot."

"So, you do swim?" Stahl asked. "Yes," Rex replied.

At the piano, Rex has improved dramatically. He works diligently, and has moved beyond repeating music – into the realm of genuine creativity.

In one exercise, one of his two new teachers, Sara Banta, makes up a run of music, and Rex has to instantly offer a musical response. "Some days we get a volley that goes on for a long time, you know, like a tennis volley," explains Banta.

The exercise is real improvisation.

Asked whether he is just making up his musical responses, Rex said, "Yes, Lesley," with a laugh.

Rex was born with a cyst in his brain. He was blind, didn't learn to walk or talk, and developed autistic-like symptoms, including hyper-sensitivity in his hands which he kept curled up to avoid having to touch anything. It seemed there was little hope for Rex, until his second birthday, when his father gave him a keyboard.

"Oh gosh. It was like he was being transported into another world. He started hitting it at first. And within two minutes, he was actually laying his hands on the piano and holding them there," explains his mother, recalling Rex's first encounter with the keyboard. And this was at the time when Rex wouldn't touch anything. "And he was just like fascinated. You could see it in his face," Cathleen remembered.

Rex was instantly hooked. The keyboard was the first thing he wanted to do in the morning, and the thing he wanted to do even when his body couldn't do it anymore. And as his skill at the piano grew, so came other skills. Rex learned to walk, and talk and even run, all things he was never expected to do.

"You know, I used to brag that he could play Beethoven before he could say 'mama.' But that was really hard for me that he couldn't, you know, even say my name," Rex's mom, Cathleen, says. "He was three when he played Beethoven. He was close to four when he said 'mama' for the first time."

Cathleen believes music was Rex's first language, and that learning music actually stimulated his brain to enable him to make the strides he has, like learning to spell and even to ski.

But with all his accomplishments, those dexterous little fingers still can't button a button. And real conversation continues to elude him. Emotionally, Rex is immature.

But he is not immature at the keyboard, says David Pinto, Rex's other piano teacher, who specializes in working with the blind.

"When he hears me play something for the first time, he'll laugh. He'll go through all these emotions on his face," Pinto explains. "The music is obviously a conversation to him. And he's understanding it on the levels in which the composer was really trying to convey it … He's really resonating to the music. Now to get that out into his hands, I think that's a challenge for him … So I'm teaching him that right now."

Rex is even driven to practice the dreaded scales. But he gets really agitated when he doesn't get something just right. "We need to try this over again," Rex said, visibly irritated at one point.

"You know, I saw yesterday real frustration and annoyance, when he kept missing notes," Stahl remarked. "And he was angry at himself … I didn't even know he had that emotion in him."

David thinks Rex's frustration is counter-productive, and has started turning the mistakes into a game. "I deliberately had him go faster and faster, and I said, 'OK, now you're going to make a mistake.' But if you make a mistake, all you have to say is 'No big deal.'"

During an exercise, Rex made a mistake, started to moan, prompting David to take his hands off the piano.

"OK, stop. What are you going to say?" David asked. "No big deal," Rex replied, and completed the exercise perfectly.

"And he jumped further than he's ever jumped before," Pinto explains.

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.

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."

Ockelford acknowledges that trying to figure out what will happen with Rex when he grows up is the biggest challenge.

"The trouble is that Rex is what? Ten now. In the next ten years, all of those other young folk are gonna get better and better as well. So they're gonna catch up with Rex," Ockelford noted. "But he's got to have something special when he's 20, when he's 25, when he's 30, that other people don't offer, if he's going to really make his mark."

"And Derek has?" Stahl asked.

"I think Derek has exceptional talents by any standards," Ockelford replied.

And that's no accident. Ockelford worked hard to enable Derek to turn his innate ability into real-world prowess, and he made Derek work hard too, on technique, learning to accompany others, and to shine when the spotlight is his.

And Ockelford taught Derek something else: how to play duets.

"I'll tell you what Derek can do. Derek can offer himself to play duets with people who don't play very well, and then make us seem as though we do play very well," Stahl said, laughing.

"Every musician who plays with Derek says 'That's a fantastic experience.' Because somehow he takes whatever you give and just adds a bit," Ockelford replied.

Ockelford keeps trying to figure out how Derek's brain processes music. Most people – musicians included – can make out about two or three notes at a time. Ockelford devised a test to see how many notes Derek could hear at once, and then repeat.

Stahl gave the test to Derek, initially playing four notes at the same time. Derek was able to instantly play back all notes.

Next, Stahl played Derek 10 notes at the same time, which sounded like noise. Derek was able to repeat that too. "Derek's hearing a different sound world. For us, we can perhaps hear the melody and the bass and the drums. But he can actually hear 10 different instruments at once. That's incredible," Ockelford said.

But even though he could repeat exactly what Stahl played, when asked to count the notes, Derek was lost. Stahl played a four-note chord and he Derek said, "Two, is it one, is it?

"He could separate the notes out … and yet, he couldn't tell me how many. He couldn't even tell me there were four," Stahl said.

"That really shows Derek's brain in action, doesn't it?" Ockelford said. "Intuitively, he's like one in goodness knows, ten million people or something. And yet on what would be a simple task for for my son, who's three, he could do that … He can't do it. I mean that just sums Derek up, really."

Stahl wondered whether Rex hears a different sound world, too, and tried the test with him. She played two chords, each of which he easily repeated.

It may be a gift common to all musical savants; Rachel Flowers can hear a piece of music once, and then play every instrument's part.

"She heard 'Maiden Voyage' by Herbie Hancock once on a CD. And she came to me the next week and she said, 'Well, I love it.' And I said, 'Well, you wanna sequence it?' That means actually lay it down, track, by track, by track. And what she did was she laid down the piano to 'Maiden Voyage,'" David Pinto recalled.

Using the synthesizer's keyboard, Rachel played the drum line to add onto the piano she had already recorded; next she switched to trumpets, performing the trumpet solo from the Hancock piece.

"She did all the parts herself?" Stahl asked.

"Oh yeah. Yeah, she did all the parts herself," Pinto replied.

Asked if they were what she had heard or whether is was pure improvisation, Pinto said, "They were exactly what she heard, except for the trumpet solo … which was the most amazing, hip solo."

Does Ockelford think people will ever understand how these remarkable musicians do it? "No. I don't think so. We don't understand how, how any of us enjoys music or can play, let alone a Derek or a Rex who have such outstanding abilities," he says.

Just imagine what Rex's life would be without music. This little boy was flown with his mother halfway around the world to Tokyo last year for his first paid concert before an international audience of 3,000 people.

If Rex keeps at it the way Derek has, with lessons and practicing every day, though he may never be a virtuoso classical soloist, he may well be headed toward a career in music that will outlive the childish charm.

"People can sense a sweetness from the stage don't they?" Stahl asked Pinto. "Oh yes. Later on, though, aside from his disability, aside from that he's an adorable kid. When he's a grown-up, can he compete in the world of music? I think so," he replied.
Produced by Shari Finkelstein