The Prodigy's Cousin (14 page)

Once Kristine had Jacob home again, she had to figure out what to do with him. She decided to help him focus on his interests—even if she didn't understand them. As Kristine once said during a TV interview, “
Some of these things that he liked to do were considered repetitive behaviors. So he would, you know, he would play with a glass and just look at the light, twisting it for hours on end, and instead of taking that away, I would give him 50 glasses filled all different levels and let him explore.”

Jacob learned about chess and was soon beating adults. He studied shapes. He taught himself Braille. He was intrigued by planets and
particularly fixated on Pluto's distance from the sun. During trips to the library, Jacob sought out books about space. If those books represented Pluto as closer to the sun than it should be, he would rip the picture of Pluto out of the book and move it farther away.

On a trip to Barnes & Noble, a three-year-old Jacob discovered an astronomy textbook on the floor. He looked through it, drinking in the minuscule text and the maps of the solar system for more than an hour. He refused to leave without it. The book seemed far too advanced for him, but it was on sale, and Kristine bought it. Jacob couldn't get enough of it. He brought it with him everywhere, dragging the large tome around by its cover.

When the Butler University planetarium put on a special program on Mars, Kristine took Jacob to see it. During the presentation, the lecturer asked if anyone knew why the moons around Mars are elliptical. Kristine was shocked when Jacob responded with a question about the size of the moons and then answered the lecturer's original question: he said that because the moons were small with a small mass, their gravity was too weak to round them into spheres. As Kristine remembers, it was more conversation than she had ever heard from Jacob. “Then I knew, okay, he doesn't just know the information; he's able to understand the information, and he really knows how it all works together and what it
means,
” Kristine said, “on this really crazy, crazy level for a three-year-old.”

Jacob's interests engaged him in a way that nothing else did. The more time Jacob spent learning about astronomy, the more he interacted with those around him. Diving deep into one of his powerful, narrow interests—a classic autism symptom—
eased
his isolation. Kristine and Michael let him dive in as deeply as he wanted.

The fall he was five, Jacob enrolled in a mainstream kindergarten class.

He and Kristine had prepped for it like a stealth military
operation. Kristine wasn't concerned about academics. Jacob could read; he could calculate. His abilities on kindergarten basics were almost absurdly advanced. It was the social aspect of kindergarten—the group play, the communication, the ability to follow directions—
that
was the element that she worried could bring it all crashing down.

They practiced every night. Sometimes they prepped on their own; sometimes they prepped at Little Light, a twice-weekly “
kindergarten boot camp” Kristine had organized for kids with autism. The program had two goals: to help the kids develop their passions and to give them the tools to make it through circle time.

Jacob fought for every inch of progress. He practiced sitting still; he practiced engaging in group activities. It took nearly a year for Jacob to master sitting next to another child for ten minutes, but he learned to do it. Kindergarten would be the test of whether he had learned it well enough.

When school started, there were bumps: Jacob struggled with social activities and communication. He had a hard time when things were out of the ordinary, like when the school had a pajama day or his class had a substitute teacher. But for the most part, he did fine. He read the class books on the weather and rocks and tried not to let on about how advanced his academic abilities were. He made it through kindergarten.

The next few years felt like steady progress. It was still difficult to have a conversation with Jacob about anything other than science, but he began connecting with some of the kids in the neighborhood over video games. Kristine set up a sports program for kids with autism; there, Jacob met Christopher, a child who became a close friend.

But as the social struggles eased somewhat, problems bubbled up on the academic front. Jacob's boredom with the curriculum was wearing on him. The Barnetts headed it off as best they could. They spent most Saturday afternoons at Barnes & Noble, where Jacob used his two-book allowance on reference books and science textbooks. He loved reading about history and memorized the presidents and a motley assortment of facts about their lives and terms. As Kristine recalls in
her memoir,
The Spark,
when Jacob discovered the test prep section of the bookstore, “
he looked at me reproachfully, as if I'd deliberately been withholding this wonderful treat.” He particularly loved working his way through the math problems in the GED prep book.

But by third grade, the reference books weren't enough anymore. At home, he stayed up late reading. Kristine found him hiding in the bookshelf again, just as he had during the most isolated days of his autism. He didn't want to go to school. Jacob had been pleading with Kristine to help him learn algebra, so she hired her aunt to teach him. They perused the NASA Web site and watched
Cosmos
and videos about savants. It felt as if they were squeaking by, though, hanging on precariously to the progress they had made.

When the Butler planetarium, Jacob's favorite haunt, closed for the winter, Kristine panicked. “That was like the whole world to Jacob,” Kristine said. “I was like, oh brother, this is gonna be really bad. He's gonna lose all his social skills. He's not gonna play with anybody. I have to have the planetarium.” She called around, searching for another planetarium they could visit. Eventually, she wound up on the phone with a professor at IUPUI, the joint Indianapolis campus of Indiana University and Purdue University, who said that Jacob could sit in on his astronomy class.

Eight-year-old Jacob lit up. He was eager to attend. During class, he asked and answered questions. When the course ended, he informally audited another and then another. The classes brought something in him alive. He was fully, deeply engaged.

Word of the kid attending college classes got around. When Jacob was ten, the Barnetts got a call from someone at IUPUI who proposed that Jacob formally enroll in college through SPAN, a program geared toward allowing high school students to take college classes.

The idea sounded crazy. Jacob was still in elementary school. The Barnetts couldn't see a future in which Jacob never attended prom or went to a high school football game. Jacob wanted to do it, though.
He was accepted into SPAN and withdrew from elementary school. But after a debacle during his college welcome interview—Jacob spent much of it chasing coins that had fallen on the floor—IUPUI started him with just one course.

Jacob had time on his hands. Other kids might have played video games or lost hours watching TV, but Jacob dove into his own research on an expanded theory of relativity. During this unstructured time, a dam broke. Ideas burst from Jacob's brain like an unstoppable torrent of water. They flowed constantly—when he was working, certainly, but also when he was at the playground and when he was having dinner. He once stabbed his whiteboard with a fork because, in his haste to write down an idea that came to him while eating, he forgot to swap his utensil for a marker. He stopped sleeping.

The Barnetts grew concerned. They took Jacob to see his pediatrician and enrolled him in a sleep study. But nothing was
wrong
. Jacob was just completely engrossed in physics.

Kristine was still eager to get Jacob out of the house and away from his work, though. She thought an expert in the field might help him move forward on whatever problem he was working on and hopefully ease its grip on his mind. She contacted an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who confirmed that Jacob was working on some of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics.

After another semester of SPAN, Jacob applied for college through the traditional channels. He was accepted and awarded a scholarship. Formally enrolling in college brought new challenges: Jacob was too small to carry all his textbooks in his backpack; Kristine worried about him on campus. But Jacob found a home in the Honors College, a program with a suite of rooms in the library where he could hang out between classes. He tutored other students in math and science, and many of them began to treat him like a younger brother. To twelve-year-old Jacob, college felt like home.

In Jacob, the connection between autism and prodigy is palpable. As a kid, he
had
autism (which raises the interesting question of whether he should technically be considered a prodigy or a savant—and whether that distinction is really as clear-cut as the terminology makes it sound). He had the communication difficulties; he had the social difficulties.

He also had a tendency toward obsession (or a tremendous passion for his interests, depending on how you look at it). When Jacob thinks back on the most isolating days of his autism, he remembers already being highly focused on the interests that would later catapult him to college. “I was focusing on things in such extreme detail that it seemed like I wasn't thinking at all,” he said during his TEDxTeen talk, “Forget What You Know.”

Even after Jacob no longer had social and communication difficulties, his obsession with math and physics persisted. He stayed up late into the night devouring the subjects; taught himself much of geometry, algebra, algebra II, trigonometry, and calculus just so he could sit through a calculus review course; and created a home laboratory equipped with whiteboards, the periodic table, space posters, and an oscilloscope (an instrument that measures voltage changes over time).

His memory was breathtaking—just like that of prodigies, just like that of savants. Once, when a three-year-old Jacob was shopping with his mom and Wes, he listened to the songs played by a series of music boxes. He found a keyboard in the store and played the songs from memory. Around the time he was four, he memorized a U.S. atlas, and his family nicknamed him JPS—Jacob Positioning System—for his ability to navigate even unfamiliar cities.

He had the extraordinary attention to detail. He picked up on even seemingly inconsequential facts, like the number of blue cars in a parking lot and what percentage of the electoral vote President James
Buchanan received. When Jacob was four, his grandmother gave him a large, detailed map of Indianapolis. He studied it for a few minutes and then told his grandmother the map was out of date. A small section of I-465 had been renamed I-865, but the map didn't reflect the change. It was inaccurate; Jacob didn't want it.

Jacob embodied nearly all of these connections between autism and prodigy; he also possessed another, less well-known trait: synesthesia.

It sounds more like the stuff of science fiction than serious academic research. Synesthesia occurs when a certain type of stimulus, maybe a musical note or a number or a word, elicits a response, such as a color or a taste, usually associated with a totally different type of stimulus. Those with synesthesia don't just see what others see or hear what others hear or taste what others taste; they see and hear and taste
more
.