Transcript
Speaker: Tony came with me to the piano store and so he has his hands above his heads and he's doing dueling pianos with the store owner and people started coming in off the street. They thought that it was a player piano until they looked around the corner and seen this little kid playing dueling pianos with his hands above his head being so short.
Speaker: And so we talked to the music store and asked them about getting piano lessons for Tony on the time that he was at home. And they got us piano lessons. And we got an organ for him. I asked, well, after that, I had found out that Tony was blind and autistic.
Speaker: And so I took everything that I had been saving from college out and I had $500 saved and I asked Tony whether he wanted a piano or an organ and he wanted an organ. So that's what I got him. Welcome back to Cadence, the podcast where we explore what music can tell us about the mind. I'm Andrea Viscontes.
Speaker: In the first episode of season two, where we're asking the question, can music be medicine? We delved into Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by pathological friendliness. People with Williams syndrome often have a high affinity for music. They'd love to listen to it and they find it very emotionally moving. But their cognitive problems often prevent them from becoming virtuosic musicians themselves.
Speaker: Then there are people on the autism spectrum, some of whom seem to have prodigious musical talents, like being able to hear a piece just once and then playing it on their instrument. But their social problems can make their performances seem more mechanical than musical.
Speaker: Today we'll meet an exception to that rule, Tony DeBlois, who's not only autistic but also blind nearly from birth. Yet he can play 23 musical instruments and thousands of songs and even great impressions. I'll let you be the judge, but I hear a lot of feeling in his playing. He's exceptional on so many levels.
Speaker: But first, let's talk to Darryl Trefort, who is a psychiatrist from Wisconsin who's been studying savants for over 50 years. Now in his late 80s, he is the world's foremost expert on the condition. My name is Darryl Trefort, M .D., and I'm the research director at the Trefort Center in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. I finished my residency in 1962.
Speaker: And I was assigned the responsibility as my first job to start a children's unit at Winnebago Mental Health Institute here in Wisconsin. There were 800 patients at the hospital and about 30 of those were under 18 and it made sense to put those into a separate unit.
Speaker: So my responsibility was to start the children's unit. And we had 35 patients, most of whom were autistic, and three of them caught my eye particularly. One little guy had memorized the bus system in the city of Milwaukee. And if you told him the time of day and the bus number, he would tell you what corner that bus is going by just then.
Speaker: A second little fellow was mute, but you could put a 250 -piece jigsaw puzzle in front of him on a table, picture side down, and he would put it together just from the geometric shapes. And a third little guy was interested in what happened in the stay in history.
Speaker: And so I'd come on the unit in the morning, and you'd say, Dr. Trefford, you know what happened in this day in history. I tried to bone up the night before, and that was in the days of the encyclopedia. There was no Google, and I could never outmatch him. So I got interested in the situation in which somebody with a severe disability
Speaker: had these remarkable abilities or islands of genius that stand in such juxtaposition to overall handicap. At that time, the condition was called the idiot savant. But there was very little, I think there were fewer than 100 reports in the whole world literature at that time. So I began to study savant syndrome and have been interested in it since that time.
Speaker: And so, Darryl began collecting these individuals, and has since built up the largest database of savantes in the world. He's also responsible for popularizing their condition, having worked as a consultant to the movie Rain Man, which brought savantism to the world through Dustin Hoffman's portrayal. People like the one that Hoffman portrayed seem to be born with prodigious potential, and their talents seem to emerge without the extensive training that the rest of us would need in order to do what they do.
Speaker: But some people also seem to find untapped talents after a brain injury or stroke. I call the one congenital savant, which means these are children who were born with autism or some other disability. And in childhood, this special ability emerges often. It's music, sometimes it's art or mathematics. The acquired savant are ordinary people who have no special interest or
Speaker: in a particular area who have a head injury, dementia, or stroke, for example, and suddenly are musicians, artists, or mathematicians, and this occurs in adult life.
Speaker: About one in 10 persons with autism has some savant abilities. So, however common autism is, savant syndrome would be common in 10 % of that population. Some say it's higher percentage, but in my experience, about one in 10. I have hundreds of cases in my savant registry through the years. Acquired savant is a much more rare condition. I presently have 91 cases worldwide.
Speaker: And surely there are more that I'm not aware of, but it's much less common than congenital savant syndrome. Actually, there's a third type of savant syndrome, which I just have been encountering, and it's what I call the sudden savant. And these are ordinary persons who some evening, I'm thinking one particular patient,
Speaker: no particular interest in art and one evening just woke up with the urge to draw and she went and began
Speaker: And now she's doing these very intricate portraits. And there's been no head injury, but this, it's an epiphany or an awakening that just occurs spontaneously. I have probably only about five such cases so far. The sudden savants, there is no trigger. It just happens spontaneously, either when the person's awake or asleep.
Speaker: And frankly, I'm a bit baffled by that because I understand the mechanism of the congenital savant and the acquired savant. I'm less certain as to what would be the mechanism with the sudden savant. So how does savant ability emerge? Where does it come from? And what does it imply about the rest of us? There is what I call the
Speaker: the three R's. First of all, in the congenital savant, there is brain damage in the congenital savant. It occurs prenatally or at birth or someone after birth, there is brain damage that results in the autism as well as the savant syndrome. The brain damage in the savant is typically in the left hemisphere on the
Speaker: left hemisphere. So there is then the first R, which is recruitment of undamaged tissue elsewhere in the brain, particularly in the right hemisphere, although not always.
Speaker: Then there's the second R, which is rewiring. There is actual rewiring to that newly recruited area. And then there's the third R, which is the release of dormant potential from that undamaged area. As it turns out, whether congenital savant or acquired savants, they are all acquired savants. The congenital savant is actually an acquired savant, the difference from the adult.
Speaker: being that in the congenital savant, the damage occurred prenatally or at birth or soon thereafter, but they're both, but the mechanism is the same. Brain damage, recruitment of undamaged area, rewiring to that area, and then the release of the dormant potential. Some start out explosively and with the information
Speaker: whether it's musical or artistic, what I call the rules of art or the rules of music are there. And they simply literally explode on the scene. More typically, however, there is this first beginning interest, a beginning ability. And then as time goes on, that ability improves. To some extent, it's the nurture nature argument.
Speaker: that the nature part of the savant syndrome is that it is the three R's that I talked about. But that can be improved, and the fact that it occurs spontaneously doesn't preclude it improving with nurturing. And some people seem, because the savant can improve, they have the assumption that it's all nurture.
Speaker: But aside from the skill progressing, there is an even more interesting progression now that I've studied some of these people long enough. I've known him for 30 years now.
Speaker: Leslie Lemke is a blind autistic savant who is known for being able to flawlessly play any musical piece that he hears after only listening to it once. The transition is this. Their first is the ability is often recollection. That, for example, Leslie can listen to a piece one time of a very complex piece and play it back after a single hearing. And he has a repertoire of thousands of pieces
Speaker: Please, Lord, please
Speaker: But it seems after a while that Leslie and others get a little bored with just recollection, and then they begin to improvise. So, for example, with Leslie, at one of the concerts, a little girl came up and played the Mississippi Hot Dog. And Leslie dutifully played it back, mistake and all.
Speaker: But then, when he got to the end, he started to do what's called variations on the Mississippi Hot Dog, and it was a five -minute concerto of his improvisation. And now, Leslie seems a little tired with just improvising, and he actually is composing his own music, both lyrics and tunes.
Speaker: And so he is into this third phase of creation. I've seen this in artistic savants as well, moving from recollection to improvisation to creation. And that, I think, is a move that often is not recognized unless you follow these people long enough.
Speaker: This move to improvisation and composition does seem particularly rare, and argues against the general impression that autistic savants are technically proficient but mechanical musicians, as opposed to people with Williams syndrome whose technique lacks sophistication but whose affinity or emotional connection with music is what's so impressive.
Speaker: Enter Tony DeBlois, who, when you first meet him, seems to toss this distinction out the window. This song is dedicated to the people of autism who have not found a voice yet.
Speaker: Here's Janice, his mom, telling us about his early childhood.
Speaker: I went into labor about 26 weeks. He technically died 12 times his first day of life. He had colostomy surgery when he was 10 days old and spent his first two years in and out of the hospital. He was actually five months old before we got to bring him home.
Speaker: Then when we did bring him home, my mom and I were taking care of him and my husband in eight hour shifts around the clock. In the middle of the night, my mom brought Tony to me in her hand. She goes, Jen, I don't know what to do. He's turned black.
Speaker: And I had to give him CPR and do heel clicks to get him breathing. And when he called the fire department, they had never operated or never administered oxygen to anybody that long.
Speaker: Tony is blind because of the amount of oxygen that they had used to save his life. He has retrorental fibroplasia, or ROP. He wasn't developing language correctly. I just noticed that things weren't going right for him.
Speaker: And Ivar Lovas, who was one of the leading authorities on autism, came to El Paso to speak. And he showed videotapes of his students. And I looked at his students with their rocking behaviors and twirling behaviors. Ekelele, I went backstage and I said,
Speaker: I want to know, how can you tell the difference between the twirling behaviors, the rocking behaviors, the hand flapping of blind children from children who are autistic? And I said, have you ever worked with somebody who is blind and autistic?
Speaker: And he said that in the 40 years that he had been working with autistic children, he had never worked with a blind autistic child. So, you know, it had, Ray Santoni was, there was no textbooks as to what to do.
Speaker: It seems that the school system didn't know what to do either. Janice had to fight every step of the way to get Tony the education that he deserved. His first school, when he was just five years old, was a 12 -hour drive from their home, even though there was a school for the blind just 17 miles away. But that school happened to be in New Mexico, as opposed to Texas, where he lived. So instead, he was shipped off to this faraway boarding school.
Speaker: He was a five -year -old child who could have been a day student at the School for the Blind, but instead they sent him a 12 -hour car ride, and I got to see him four times a year.
Speaker: Just don't do that with five -year -old children. Children have to learn how to get along first in their family, then their neighborhood, their community, the state, the country, and the world. But there was one good thing about the school. Tony actually got to have music classes, which was his favorite part. They did activities of daily living. They were rock.
Speaker: doing his dressing skills, pre -brail shapes, those type of activities. But then, so who took care of him in the evening? That was, you know, it was an all immersive environment and, you know, did they? The house parents took care of him at night. Wow. After a year of being so far away from her child, though, Janice couldn't take it anymore. And so she moved with him to a better location and he got to live at home again.
Speaker: But those classes at age five weren't his first exposure to music. Janice actually stumbled upon his talent while trying to help him solve another problem. When Tony was two and a half, since I had been going to child development classes, my teacher told me that I should teach at the child's level. Since Tony had spent the first two years of his life in and out of the hospital at two years of age, he wasn't sitting up yet.
Speaker: and I needed him to learn to sit up. And so I wanted to give him a reason to sit up. And since I was taught you should teach at the child's level, I went out to a garage sale and purchased a little Magnus cord organ. I took it home and I took the legs off of it and I put it down on the floor where he was at, because I wanted to give him a reason to sit up.
Speaker: The first six weeks was absolutely horrible. He put every combination of notes together that there was. But then I heard him put the first three notes of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star together. And I ran in there and I showed him the rest of it.
Speaker: I went to the store and they had this collection of stuffed animals. And each one had a music box in it with a different song. And I bought every single music box that they had. And then he started playing all the different children's songs that were on all the music boxes. And he was able to pick them up right away. At two and a half, my husband and I had watched Lawrence of Arabia on television.
Speaker: Six weeks later, we heard the theme song from Lawrence of Arabia coming from his bedroom on the little organ on the little organ. That's amazing. I thought my husband had left the tape recorder on her album and it was Tony playing.
Speaker: So how rare is Tony? We are likely more familiar with savant's who can calculate large sums or rattle off prime numbers in their heads, but how common is musical savantism? It's the most common of the savant abilities. It's the one that's seen most frequently. And it is usually starts with with recollection. A number of
Speaker: the savants, especially some of the prodigious ones, are blind. And the link between mental disability, blindness, and musical genius is one which is recurrent through the last several hundred years of savant syndrome.
Speaker: And I'm not sure why that is, but it is a pattern. If you look at the occurrence of musical savants and the extent to which blindness interferes or contributes, it's rather striking. At the time of the Civil War in this country,
Speaker: musical salon called Blind Tom was probably the highest earning black artist in the world. It was recognized internationally. And then I've worked with Leslie Lemke now for 30 some years. And he's also blind. So this particular triad of blindness, mental defect and musical genius is one that I'm
Speaker: puzzled about and it recurs. The other thing is that all of the musical savants have perfect pitch. And in fact, I'm looking and finding perfect pitch in more and more savants, even those who are not musical. So that seems to be an accompaniment of the musical savantism.
Speaker: The first thing that Tony can do is Tony can improvise, and other people who are autistic haven't been improvising. Other people, if there's a mistake made, the first time they hear it will always play it that same way. Tony can create songs. Tony's written three songs already. He knows over 10 ,000 songs, and he sings in 11 languages.
Speaker: Now I'm going to play the slow version.
Speaker: So tell me a little bit more about all the places that you've performed. Singapore twice, Taiwan three times, Canada, Lemrick and Dublin, Ireland.
Speaker: We've been to the Center for the Performing Arts in Limerick, the National Consul Hall in Dublin. We've been to Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria. In China? In China. Beijing, Wuhan, Shenzhen, China. And we played between the Olympics and the Paralympics of China. In 2008. I played 23 musical instruments.
Speaker: I play piano, organ, harmonica, guitar, harpsichord, violin, English, handbells, double bass, drums, pan foot recorder, saxophone, clarinet, handbells now. And I'm also doing piano and ukulele now. And then on top of that, I was just given a slide trombone or on South Dakota. And so how did you learn to play all these instruments?
Speaker: First, after the mechanics has to be done, how an instrument is played. Once I show him the mechanics of how an instrument is to be played, he's able to pick it right up. OK. He's had seven lessons on the trombone now. And I figured out how to play the Star Spangled Banner. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's great. So how do, what is that like for you? I mean, do you, I like it. It's fun. But do you, I mean, do you hear it in your head first or? I just hear it first. And then, and then do you kind of like, you know, when I get, when we get over to Gene Havlin, I just, we just play it and we go over for the lesson. I'm just prepared to do it. I'm prepared.
Speaker: Uh -huh. And he has a friend that we go out to South Dakota on tour every year. We do a three -day tour. And Gene Handel gives him one or two trombone lessons when we go out there once a year. And then we go to Dairy Queen for ice cream after the last thing gets out. Yeah, that's pretty good. So what's the impulse that Tony uses to play music? Just music comes out of my head.
Speaker: And when you, what, do you hear it all the time or is it only? Oh yeah. Uh -huh. What is that like? Um, I just hear it one time and then play it. So if I hear Ray Charles and it goes, you are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are great. Like that one.
Speaker: Are you, is it mainly jazz that you like or other types of music? What do you? Oh, I like, I also do nine impressions. I do nine different impressions. Can you do them for us? Well, it's one for the money, two for the show. Pretty good red knuckle, can't go, but don't you step on my blue sweatshoot. Hear the new winter thing, well, they're all for my blue sweatshoot. Oh, yeah. Thank you very much, everybody.
Speaker: Johnny Mathis. Chances are, cause I wear a silly grin the moment you came in to you. Chances are you think that I'm in love with you. I see trees of green, red roses too. I'm sleazy blue.
Speaker: Despite the fact that playing music seems effortless for Tony, he does have something important to say about that. When we're doing the concert Saturday,
Speaker: I like the meet and greet where they summon, we do firm handshake. So when someone comes up to us.
Speaker: And we have a very special message for you. It's okay to be different. Believe in yourself. Don't give up on your dreams. Always have high hopes. And the two most important words are thank yous. And the three P's are practice, practice, practice.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, a lot of people sometimes think that when someone is really good at something, especially music, that it just comes naturally to them and they don't have to practice. Oh, yeah. But that's not true, is it? No. So tell me about how you practice. When do you practice? How much? And what is that like? Two and a half hours every day. Like when we're doing
Speaker: We're doing the songs. Speaking of that, the first week of April, I'm backing in the High School Music of the Wizard of Oz. Cool. It's three hours of music I had to memorize, three hours of music for the play.
Speaker: Right. So wait, how do you, how do you memorize music if you can't see the sheet music? Um, I just say, um, Alexa play songs in the Wizard of Oz and then just pick up and I just learned the score and I just pick up the score. Wow.
Speaker: But what happens when you're in rehearsal and the conductor says, okay, now we need to go back to, you know, page. And I just know right where we left off. Okay. It is amazing to hear the, uh, director say, okay, uh, starting at major 85. And I can pick up. Exactly. How do you know that? Are you counting? It's like, he knows, he knows.
Speaker: the mistakes that people made. In fact, if we're doing hand bells, I'll hear him say, that was supposed to be an E flat. So you know all of this by sound. So let's say you're on measure 85. You've counted 85 measures. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I did. I just keep the measures in my head. Wow. I don't know. I can't imagine what that's like, because for me, when I memorize music, I can see the sheet music in my head. You know what I mean? Like, and like, so I'd have to. But what is there are some people that can like sometimes when we're doing a community band, I'll hear them say, oh, what? There's a five major break.
Speaker: Or there's the eight measures of rest. Like when we're doing the play, I go, eight measures of rest. There's a vacation. And it's really amazing when the song changes the timing.
Speaker: And you'll pay something in six -eighths time and then it goes back and it goes into a different time sequence and with rest in between. And yet he knows how to do it. But the actors are on the stage. And when he does the plays,
Speaker: He'll tell the kids what their line was supposed to be. I tell them, practice your lines. Anyway, they made a movie about us called Journey of the Heart and we were out there and Sybil Shepherd and Stephen Lang was doing our parts and Tony says, can't they get it right the first time?
Speaker: And despite what Janice initially thought, Tony did make it to college on a full scholarship. Tony played with the high school jazz festival. He was at the music school at Rivers at the time. And so they do this big festival every year. The first year, Tony won a certificate of musicianship.
Speaker: to which his teacher says to me, oh, you know, they just kind of gave it, you know, because he's handicapped. Oh, I bet that didn't go over well.
Speaker: No, it did not. The next year he went back, he got a certificate of musicianship and a $500 scholarship to go to Berkeley College of Music at the Summer Performance Program. So then, because he's autistic, he got to do it again to repeat everything the following year. Then his ensemble, one second place at the High School Jazz Festival,
Speaker: And the music school at Rivers was given a $1 ,000 scholarship to give to their best student to attend Berkeley full -time. Well, after he won the scholarship, Tony was still at Berkeley College of Music.
Speaker: When he won the scholarship, I said, I want him to go to Berkeley full time for vocational education. And Tony, when he went there, did not have conversational speech. And Tony does not read or write. And their first question to me was, well, how are we going to test him?
Speaker: I said it's simple. Are you testing whether he can read and write, or are you testing whether he knows music theory? You need to ask him questions in such a way that he can play the answer on the keyboard, which you have plugged into a computer, and he turns in a computer disk.
Speaker: So imagine their surprise when Tony gained conversational speech while he was there and he graduated magna cum laude with high honors. Had he not clapped out of his three ear caning classes, he would have graduated summa cum laude.
Speaker: So what can people like Tony teach us about our own untapped potential? Where does this prodigious musical prowess come from? And is it dormant in all of us? When we're born, we don't start with a blank disk and become only what we've learned or what we've experienced. The brain comes loaded with all sorts of software, and this is demonstrated not just
Speaker: by myself, but others have demonstrated this. The blank slate is not blank. And so there is these pockets of ability within all of us. It's what I call the little rain man within each of us. That isn't to say all of us are little Picassos or Mozarts, but to a greater or lesser degree, we have these unused areas. We depend very much on language.
Speaker: logical, sequential thinking, and it has served us very well. But I think we tend to use our left brain freeway more than the right brain paths, which are less critical, I guess, or sometimes seen as less important. And I suppose using a computer analogy, if we tried to use all of those systems at once,
Speaker: the brain would crash just like a computer. And that's sort of what happens when you take LSD or some of the psychedelics, the brain literally crashes. So I think these are backup systems that we sort of have as backup systems, but we don't access them as much as we could. The question then becomes, okay, if that's true,
Speaker: Are there any ways that one can tap into those abilities without having a stroke or a head injury? And I think there are really five or six different ways. One way is electronically. We know, for example, from work with Ellen Snyder and his group that using
Speaker: rapid trans stimulation, transcranial stimulation, you can put to sleep a portion of the cortex. It's done for neurological location reasons. And when you do that in normal volunteers, some savant abilities
Speaker: do emerge, which can be shown with problem solving. A second way I think that we will tap some of these abilities is chemically. We know, for example, that amphetamines will improve short -term memory.
Speaker: But side effects and addiction potential make us have problems with the amphetamines. Meditation, we know, affects our consciousness, and we can see that in brainwaves. And then finally, there's something, a mechanism that's not very spectacular, but I call rummaging in the right hemisphere.
Speaker: which means that we set aside some of our left hemisphere activities and play for a time with those things that are often seen as more frivolous or, when I retire, then I'll get to do these things. And we consciously, I think, can rummage what I call rummage at the right hemisphere, too, so that you don't have a stroke or a head injury to tap these. And my work at the present time is trying to
Speaker: put more facts or more flesh on the skeleton, I guess, of tapping these little rain men within the saw. Well, just as Darryl's work isn't done, neither is Tony's. He still has a dream that he's working on achieving. And I wonder if any of our listeners might be able to help. Well, my dream is I want to be a piano player for Carnival Cruise Lines. Uh -huh. Do you like cruises?
Speaker: I love doing, we just did a carnival miracle. He did. I loved it. It was my favorite part was the doing the karaoke. Oh, cool. I liked that. Uh huh. The singing part. Yeah. They let me come up and sing a couple of songs of karaoke night.
Speaker: Wow. I'm sure people love it. Sing three or four songs. The band also. And the band let me come up and jam Monday night. They had a ships band. Awesome. And they gave them a lounge to play in for two hours every day. One to three p .m. That's great. I liked it. Tony's journey is really inspiring and touching to me. But before we leave it, I wanted to let him speak one more time, performing a song that was written just for him. It's called The Way I See It.
Speaker: I see things in my ways You see things in yours I see open highways And never closing doors You may find this a bit of a surprise But you would see a lot more things If you saw them through my eyes
Speaker: I see happiness I see hopefulness In a world that says you won't I see things they think I know I see warm I see strong I see a war I belong And as I see it The way I see it The way I see it I can't go wrong
Speaker: I see beautiful, you are beautiful
Speaker: That it isn't hard to see Once you'll know what to see Means my dreams As I do I'll see all of your dreams too And as I see it The way I see it The way I see it We'll see them through I see hurt Now and then I see fear
Speaker: Oh, but time and time again, when you're near, I see love. You are love. I see melody. And I see harmony. And I see music all around. Every subtle little sound.
Speaker: Though I may not see it in the way you do The world's made up of many points of view And as I see it, the way I see it The world's beautiful, cause I'm seeing it with you
Speaker: I see hurt, now and then, then I see fear
Speaker: Oh, but time and time again, when you're near, I see love. You are love. I see melody. And I see harmony. And I see music all around. There is subtle little sound.
Speaker: Though I may not see each thing the way you do The world's made up of many points of view And as I see it
Speaker: The way I see it, the world is beautiful Cause I'm seeing it with you
Speaker: If you want to learn more about Tony or book him for a gig, you can visit his website at tonydeblois .com. That's T -O -N -Y -D -E -B -L -O -I -S.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode of Cadence. Join us again in a couple of weeks as we continue our exploration of what music can tell us about the mind. You can find us online at the ensembleproject .com slash Cadence, at Facebook slash Cadence podcast, and on Twitter at Cadence podcast. You can also find me on Twitter at Andre Vis. And you can get in touch with us at cadencemind at gmail .com.
Speaker: Also, you can support us at patreon .com slash Cadence Podcast. Cadence is produced by Adam Isaac and me, Andre Viscontes. I also created and write the show. We have additional production support from Scott Lowry. The music in this episode was provided for us not only by Tony DeBlois, but also by acclaimed New Zealand composer, Rian Sheehan. Check him out at riansheehan .com. Cadence is generously supported by the Germanicos Foundation.
