The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens Page B

over the previous few years. She wound up receiving ten completed surveys from each group.
    The responses—though relatively few—were intriguing. The autists’ relatives and the prodigies’ relatives’AQ results indicated that both groups had elevated levels of some autism-linked traits. Both had more difficulty with “attention switching” (the ability to multitask, switch between activities easily, and embrace spontaneity) and were less drawn to social situations than the control families.
    But the headline result, the one that Joanne thought might offer a real clue to the relationship between autism and prodigy, came from the families’ scores in attention to detail, another autism-linked trait. The relevant AQ questions measured the degree to which the test takers noticed small changes and absorbed patterns, dates, or other tidbits of information. In this category, the prodigies’ families spiked. They demonstrated significantly greater attention to detail than the control families
and
scored higher than the autists’ relatives.
    The results reassured Joanne that she was onto something. The connection between prodigy and autism, the one she had suspected since seeing Garrett and his cousin Patrick together seven years before, was not a figment of her imagination. But there was also a fascinating twist. The prodigies’ families’ and the autists’ families’ results were not identical. The prodigies’ relatives seemed to have less trouble with conversation and social niceties than the autists’ relatives, at least according to the AQ. It was a curious inconsistency. It seemed that prodigy and autism were connected in some—but not all—respects. A summary of Joanne’s findings was published in the fall of 2007 in the academic journal
Behavior Genetics,
revealing the first hints of a connection between prodigy and autism.
    In 2008, Joanne began a tenure-track position at Ohio State’sMansfield campus, where she finally got her hands on some research funding: she received a seed grant—more than $13,000—earmarked to help new faculty jump-start their research. With money in her pocket, she could finally travel to the prodigies and begin digging into their cognitive profiles. Once she did, the deeper connections between prodigy and autism quickly began to reveal themselves. The first of these was memory.

Chapter 3
The Tiniest Chef
    By the time Greg Grossman was a toddler, the skinny New Yorker with the fluffy dark hair already had a wide palate.Fellow diners around Manhattan and East Hampton gaped, astonished, as the doe-eyed kid requested foie gras and other adult fare. “He’d order anything—anything different and weird,” his mother, Terre Grossman, recalled. While waiting for his food, he scavenged for ways to observe the back-of-the-house action. He climbed onto his chair for a better view of the pizza oven; he snuck into the kitchen to watch the chefs at work.
    Greg soon began experimenting in his own kitchen. At age four, he presented special candlelight dinners to his parents—often little more than a stuffed baked potato. At six, he used canned tomatoes to whip up his own pasta sauce. His recipes grew ever more sophisticated as he began sautéing fresh basil to add to his sauce and switched from limp spaghetti to al dente pasta. He began directing his mother as to what produce was in season when they went to the supermarket. “I would be buying stuff, and he would actually be telling me not to buy certain things, you know, ‘This isn’t ripe; it’s not in season,’” Terre said.
    Around the time Greg was nine, the complexity of his creations swelled. He began using a grill, an appliance he described in a school essay as an “infrared, propane masterpiece of stainless-steel.” His repertoire exploded. He went from riffing on classic pasta dishes topairing melon carpaccio with