Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (38 page)

Einstein admitted to having a problem with relationships, at one point writing in a letter that he had “grossly failed” at staying faithful to one woman. During his marriage to Elsa, which he plunged into just months after his divorce from Mileva in 1919, Einstein had a number of affairs. There's no way to know how deeply intimate these relationships were—or if they were at all—but Einstein seems to have treated many of them with a kind of nonchalance. Seemingly oblivious to how his escapades would come off, he even wrote a letter to Elsa's daughter, Margot, at one point in which he reported that one woman was chasing him and another was “absolutely harmless and decent.”

Still, Elsa not only stood by Einstein, but devoted her life to caring for him. Often, this meant overseeing the way he presented himself. Disorganization is a classic trait on the autism spectrum, and it manifests both in the way people process information and in their inattention to how they look. Despite his razor-sharp intellect, Einstein was somewhat scattered, both inside and out. He was said to be an absentminded and confusing lecturer. In an article published in the
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine
, Ioan James, a British mathematician, noted Einstein's haphazard teaching style, which involved “giving specific examples followed by seemingly unrelated general principles.” “Sometimes,” James wrote, “he would lose his train of thought while writing on the
blackboard. A few minutes later he would emerge as if from a trance and go on to something different.”

It is clear from photographs, correspondence, and Einstein's own writings that his appearance, which was often disorderly, was the least of his priorities. Among the children he studied, Hans Asperger observed a tendency to disregard cleanliness and physical care. “Even as adults,” Asperger wrote, “they may be seen to walk about unkempt and unwashed, including those who have taken up an academic career.” Einstein once wrote in a letter to Elsa that “if I were to start taking care of my grooming, I would no longer be my own self.”

The physicist was well known for his disheveled dress. His clothes were often tattered, his shoelaces untied, his hair unbrushed, his pants wrinkled. He went without socks, even in winter. “Don't make yourself ridiculous in your dress coat, which is good for train travel but not for anything else,” Elsa wrote to Einstein shortly after they were married. “Change your socks regularly, otherwise they get too large holes. And give a shirt and a nightshirt to the laundry now; you took hardly enough along with you.”

Elsa took it upon herself to at least
try
to make Einstein presentable. The American artist S. J. Woolf, who visited Einstein in Berlin to draw his portrait, vividly depicted this in a piece he wrote for the
New York Times
in 1929. Woolf reported that he was greeted at the door by Elsa, whom he described as “a sweet, motherly woman, whose attitude toward her distinguished husband is that of a doting parent toward a precocious child.” Einstein, described as average height with a notably large head, mostly gray hair, and a quizzical expression on his face, soon appeared in bare feet and a black-and-white bathrobe. “Patting him on the back, his wife told him to get dressed, and as he left the room she said with a smile: ‘He is terribly hard to manage,' ” Woolf reported. “In a
few minutes he returned. His brown suit needed pressing and on his feet he wore, over wool socks, a pair of open-work sandals. His coat collar was half turned up in the back, and when we started to go upstairs Mrs. Einstein fixed his collar and arranged his hair.”

What mattered to Einstein was not the aesthetics of the body but the substance of the mind. Asperger described the tendency of one of his patients to sit in a corner buried in a book, “oblivious to the noise or movement around him.” Einstein's passion for the quandaries of gravity, time, and space left him little taste for socializing and conversation, and he often withdrew into himself—so much so that he would sometimes “go into some sort of trance or seizure, as if he had just disappeared into his own world,” writes biographer Overbye. Woolf observed this during his visit. “Talking, he appears to be thinking of other things; gazing, he does not appear to be seeing the object at which he looks,” Woolf wrote in his article. “In fact, these peculiarities are so marked as to appear almost abnormal.” As the artist prepared to draw the physicist's portrait, Einstein began jotting notes on scraps of paper he had taken out of his pocket as if he were the only one in the room. “As far as he was concerned, I was not there,” Woolf wrote. “To talk to him would have been out of the question.”

Although amiable and unaffected (“I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university,” Einstein is said to have remarked), his behavior could come off as aloof, shy, and removed—as if he had a shell around him. His mind was his constant and most alluring companion and, away from people, he found solitary pursuits that gave him time to think. Einstein liked to play Mozart sonatas on his violin while tackling gnarly theoretical problems. He also retreated to sailing, first in a sloop he was given for his 50th birthday in Germany and later in a dinghy sailboat in the United States. Although
unable to swim, the physicist was comfortable on the water, drifting along various lakes and waterways on the East Coast while thinking through equations. At times, he was so impervious to the clock and the demands of the day that he had to be retrieved by local boatmen. Once, as Isaacson recounts, friends sent the Coast Guard out to find him at 11 p.m.

Temple Grandin, who is on the autism spectrum and is a leader in the field, readily identifies with Einstein's intense absorption in his hypotheses and theories. “Like me, he was more attached to ideas and work. I don't know what a deep relationship is. His deep passion was for science. Science was his life,” she writes in her book,
Thinking in Pictures: My Life With Autism
. She relates to the way Einstein perceived information, too. Many people with autism excel at visual thinking—and, as the title of her book suggests, Grandin stands firmly among them. She stores information and memories in a “video library” in her head, which she draws on to design her revolutionary livestock equipment. Grandin suggests that the disorganization Einstein displayed as teacher and lecturer may have been the result of a brain that, like hers, processed in pictures, not in words.

Although Einstein was a prolific writer—he left behind thousands of letters and personal papers—he admitted to having a “bad memory for words and texts.” Instead, he imagined physical problems in a simple, almost visually childlike way. Even the theory of relativity had a graphic beginning. One day when he was 16 years old, Einstein wondered what it would be like to chase a light beam and ride alongside it. Years later, while working at his patent job in Bern, Switzerland, Einstein made a stunning discovery inspired by the city's famous clock tower. He imagined that if a streetcar sped away from the clock tower at the speed of light, time on the clock would appear to have stopped, but it
would continue ticking normally in the streetcar. “A storm broke loose in my mind,” he recalled, revealing a simple truth: Time moves faster or slower depending on the point of view and speed of the observer. This revelation, sparked by visualization, would soon lead to his celebrated theory. “The words or language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought,” he once wrote in a letter. On another occasion he said simply: “I very rarely think in words at all.”

One of the criteria for a diagnosis of autism is that a person's symptoms impair his everyday activities. Einstein clearly excelled in his mind's work. In navigating everyday practical affairs and social conventions, he was helped along. In addition to Elsa, Einstein's secretary, Helen Dukas, became his dedicated protector. Dukas began working for the physicist in 1928 in Germany and moved with the Einsteins to the United States in the early 1930s after they fled the rise of Nazi Germany. She handled Einstein's correspondence, forcefully shielded him from unwanted visitors, and guided him back to his home on Mercer Street in Princeton after his circuitous walks. One day, the famous story goes, the physicist called Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, where he worked, and asked for Einstein's home address. “Please don't tell anybody,” he whispered, “but I
am
Dr. Einstein, I'm on my way home, and I've forgotten where my house is.”

Dr. Carl Feinstein, director of the Stanford Autism Center at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital, believes Einstein had personality traits that would be considered symptoms of the autism spectrum today. He wonders if Einstein would have inspired the same kind of assistance and acceptance from other people had he not been so brilliant. A person with similar behaviors and an average intelligence might have struggled to garner admiration and support—not to mention hold down a job and lead a relatively stable
life. In Einstein's case, people seemed to adapt to his foibles and look past them because of his radiant mind and the wisdom he imparted, says Feinstein. “He was peculiar with other people, he was categorically different in numerous ways,” he says, “but he was also a breathtaking genius.”

T
HE SCIENCE OF AUTISM HAS
come a long way since Hans Asperger published his paper in the 1940s. At the time, doctors blamed cold, unloving mothers for their children's detached and socially awkward behavior. Today, the “refrigerator mother” theory, long discredited, has been replaced by sophisticated biological research as scientists attempt to pinpoint causes and determine why the condition can vary so much from one child to the next. Early brain development appears to be one key factor. Neuroscientists have discovered that healthy brains prune their communication channels, known as synapses, in the first years of life to allow specialized areas to mature. In children with autism, however, this trimming is somehow compromised, and synapses propagate out of control. Scientists know that autism is highly heritable; when one identical twin has the disorder, there's a 70 percent or even higher chance the other twin will be on the spectrum as well. Now they are isolating specific genes associated with autism (there are likely hundreds) and studying their interplay with environmental factors that may also play a role, including older parents, exposure to infections or medications in the womb, and prematurity.

Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge, England (and, as it happens, the cousin of comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen), believes that there may be another strikingly positive force at work: a talent for science. In the 1990s,
Baron-Cohen gained attention with a provocative theory about autism and the brain. The average male brain, he proposed, is driven to understand how things work (“systemizing,” he calls it), while the female brain is hardwired to interpret what people are thinking and feeling (“empathizing”). Baron-Cohen posits that people with autism have an extreme male brain, a concept first raised by Hans Asperger, which makes them exceedingly captivated by how train schedules and vacuum cleaners operate, but far less skilled at understanding social cues and making friends. Even newborn infants reflect this gender difference, according to Baron-Cohen, who found that girl babies show a stronger interest in the human face, while boy babies would rather look at a mechanical mobile. This could be triggered in part by exposure to elevated levels of prenatal testosterone, Baron-Cohen suggests, which might help explain why autism occurs almost five times more often in males than it does in females.

Baron-Cohen's quest to understand the brain-autism connection has led him to explore the link between the kinds of children Hans Asperger studied and minds that seem destined for science. Scientists have a unique ability to make sense of complex systems—the mysteries of the human body, weather patterns, or, in Einstein's case, the physical forces of the universe. Is it possible that scientists are prone to autism? Baron-Cohen has turned up some interesting data from surveys he has conducted: technically minded people scored higher on a checklist of autistic traits compared to nonscientists; math students at the University of Cambridge were nine times more likely to report a formal autism diagnosis than their peers studying the humanities; and children with Asperger's did better on tests of mechanical reasoning compared to older children who were not on the spectrum. In one of his studies, Baron-Cohen set out to determine if autism was more common in places overrun
with techies. He and his colleagues looked at rates of autism in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, where roughly 30 percent of jobs are in the information-technology sector. They discovered that children living in what Baron-Cohen refers to as the “Silicon Valley of the Netherlands” were two to four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than children in two non-tech cities of similar size.