Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (36 page)

Dostoevsky expressed great anxiety about how much more his wife could take; in a dream, he had seen her hair turn white, he wrote, and he feared what might come next. He was also alarmed by a nightmare in which his father had appeared in a “terrifying guise” that he worried portended some disastrous event. All of this terrible foreboding appears to have helped push him toward salvation. “It seems as if I have been completely morally regenerated (I say this to you and before God),” Dostoevsky told Anna. “I realize that you have every right to despise me and to think: ‘He will gamble again.' By what, then, can I swear to you that
I shall not
, when I have already deceived you before? But, my angel, I know that you would die (!) if I lost again! I am not completely insane after all!” he wrote.

This time, Dostoevsky stuck to his word. He spent the latter years of his life continuing to write, even as his own health declined and tragedy struck his family. By the time he and Anna moved back to St. Petersburg in 1871, they had lost their first child, a girl named Sonya, who succumbed to pneumonia when she was just a few months old. A second daughter, Lyubov, survived and returned with them to Russia, where two boys followed: Fyodor, and the couple's youngest child, Alyosha, who had a severe epileptic attack and died at the age of three in 1878.

Dostoevsky's final and epic novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
, was published in 1879. Two years later, on February 9, 1881, the writer
experienced a pulmonary hemorrhage and died at the age of 59. Aware of the family's financial troubles, the government offered to pay Dostoevsky's burial expenses, but Anna claimed to have turned it down, saying it was her moral obligation to cover the costs, according to biographer Frank. She did, however, accept a lifetime pension provided in return for her husband's contributions to Russian literature. At his burial, the couple's daughter Lyubov cried out a goodbye to her “dear, kind, good papa.” He was gone—leaving behind for his children, his wife, and the rest of us a trove of some of the most significant and affecting literature the world has ever seen.

T
HE HALLS OF THE ESTEEMED
Mütter Museum in Philadelphia are filled with biological curiosities. A plaster death cast of the famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng. A human skeleton more than seven feet tall. Gruesome ulcers. A jar of peeled skin. Even a tumor removed from Grover Cleveland's mouth. But nothing can trump the contents of a wooden container, not much bigger than a cigar box, which sits in a temperature-controlled display case. Stacked inside are 46 microscope slides containing what look like a series of Rorschach inkblots. The color of tea, they are beautiful and beckoning. It is hard to believe that these elegant works of art are actually thin slices of brain tissue that once resided in the head of one of the greatest geniuses of all time: Albert Einstein.

Before his death in 1955, Einstein requested that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered, in part because he did not want to become a shrine for tourists. But Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy of the scientist's body, could not help himself: He removed Einstein's brain. Harvey kept several pieces in a glass jar (at one point reportedly stored in a cider box under a beer cooler) and sliced the rest into sections, which were mounted on slides and sent to a handful of scientists around the country. Now, decades later, one of these sets of brain slides had made its way to the Mütter Museum. Peering in at the display, curator Anna Dhody recalled the first time the box landed in her hands. “I thought, ‘I'm holding a piece of Einstein. Wow!' ” Then she paused for a moment. “Wouldn't it be nice if just holding him made you smarter?”

Few other brains in history have so captivated ordinary mortals. And rightly so. How could one three-pound mass of neurons and glial cells produce such genius? Einstein unraveled cosmic puzzles in his 20s, published his general theory of relativity in his 30s, and won the Nobel Prize in physics in his 40s. He was a giant, even among the greatest braniacs in the universe. But human beings are multifaceted, and Einstein's brain, like the rest of ours, did more than power his intellect. It triggered his emotions, juggled his conflicting desires, and made him act and speak and walk in his own Einsteinian way.

The physicist's brilliance, it turns out, was paired with behavioral traits and personality quirks that are less well known and celebrated. As a child, Einstein talked late and was a social misfit who distanced himself from other kids. In adulthood, he was disorganized and had rocky relationships. Throughout his life, he focused intensely on topics that interested him, and was such a tenaciously persistent thinker that he often retreated from people entirely.
“I am a truly a ‘lone traveler,' ” Einstein reflected, “and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart. In the face of all this, I have never lost a sense of distance and the need for solitude.”

Yes, the way Einstein made sense of time and space is mind-blowing. But the way he acted has led some scientists to posit a hypothesis: Was Einstein on the autism spectrum?

I
N 1944,
H
ANS
A
SPERGER
, an Austrian pediatrician, documented similar patterns of behavior in a group of children, whose primary characteristics included a lack of empathy, difficulty forming friendships, one-sided conversations, preoccupations with a special interest, and clumsy movements. These children tended to focus narrowly on their subjects of choice, which they would discuss at length with anybody who had the patience to listen. Social challenges were especially prominent; the youngsters did not engage and play with other kids. In general, they tended to be outsiders.

Although some of the children had significant intellectual disabilities, others had notable cognitive attributes—namely, the capacity to see things in novel ways and the ability to pursue their interests with a unique persistence unmatched by their peers. Children in this group, Asperger noted, often seemed predestined for a particular profession from early in childhood and were capable of achieving great success professionally. Despite their social challenges, he wrote, “their narrowness and single-mindedness, as manifested in their special interests, can be immensely valuable and can lead to outstanding achievements in their chosen areas.” Asperger, who dubbed the condition “autistic psychopathy,” called the children “little professors.”

The condition received scant attention until 1981, when British psychiatrist Lorna Wing published an account of Asperger's work and proposed a new, less daunting name: Asperger's syndrome. Wing acknowledged similarities between Asperger's and autism, which had been deemed a distinct mental health diagnosis one year earlier, including problems in social communication and language. But she also noted differences. Children with autism could not speak or had delayed or abnormal speech; youngsters with Asperger's could talk, but what they said was often inappropriate. A child with autism was obsessed with repetitive routines (arranging toys in a row, for example); a child with Asperger's might become engrossed in math problems. The term “Asperger's syndrome” would be useful, Wing proposed, to distinguish people who exhibited some autistic characteristics but were not as significantly impaired as those with classical autism.

Throughout the 1980s, researchers studied the condition in earnest and in 1994, Asperger's disorder, as the
DSM
called it, joined autism as an official and related diagnosis. Many parents found relief, knowing that their unconventional kids were not alone and would be eligible for educational and support services. Over the next two decades, thousands of American children, teenagers, and even adults were diagnosed with Asperger's, and social consciousness about the condition evolved dramatically. As awareness grew, so did the recognition that despite their behavioral challenges, people with Asperger's also had unique abilities and talents to offer the world. A whole advocacy movement was spawned. Buoyed by the notion that quirkiness and brilliance are often intertwined, Asperger's support groups embraced historical icons who they believe share their condition. Albert Einstein tops the list.

In the world of autism and Asperger's, however, nothing is ever straightforward. Even as Asperger's gained new standing, many
clinicians found it difficult to distinguish the condition from what has been deemed “high-functioning” autism because of their overlapping characteristics, most notably communication difficulties, social challenges, and repetitive behaviors. As a result, the two conditions were merged in 2013 under a new umbrella diagnosis known as autism spectrum disorder. Variation among patients is vast. At the most profound and regressive end of the continuum, tiny babies filled with vigor and promise slip into a world of solitude and silence. In some cases, toddlers who had learned to say their first words are suddenly banging their heads against the wall and unable to communicate. Parents use words like “kidnapped” and “stolen” to describe the way the condition robs the minds and the very essence of their children. The other end includes people who fit the characteristics of Asperger's. They may show keen intellectual curiosity, but struggle to fit in at school and on the job.

The autism/Asperger's dilemma—a debate about whether or not the conditions should be united is ongoing despite the official change—highlights the broader issue of how confounding mental health diagnoses can be. It also underscores the reality that so many brain conditions overlap and yet can also harbor both subtle and striking differences. Terminology will always be tricky in the autism arena, and it will likely evolve even more over time. Although “Asperger's” no longer exists as a
current
diagnosis—at least not now, anyway—people previously diagnosed with the condition still identify with it, and it continues to be used informally by many patients and doctors as a way to distinguish its unique characteristics. Today, the accepted way to make sense of all this confusion is to use a shorthand reference that covers all levels of diagnosis, from severe to moderately affected: “on the autism spectrum.”

The symptoms that Einstein exhibited most closely resemble the Asperger's end of the autism spectrum. Hans Asperger's own
assessment of the condition speaks to the kind of person Einstein was. Despite the social challenges of the condition, Asperger said, a child who pursues his passion with vigor “may find his way into an unusual career, perhaps into highly specialized scientific work, maybe with an ability bordering on genius.” The critical ingredient, Asperger noted, was an ability to close off the outside world and rethink a subject in a wholly original way. “Indeed, it seems that for success in science,” he said, “a dash of autism is essential.”

A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN WAS BORN
to Jewish parents, Hermann and Pauline Einstein, in Ulm, in the southwest corner of Germany, on March 14, 1879. Although the family assimilated as best they could into German culture, anti-Semitic sentiments were on the rise. Hermann and Pauline considered naming their son Abraham, after Hermann's father, but decided that the name sounded “too Jewish” and chose Albert instead, according to biographer Walter Isaacson. Young Albert entered the world at a time of creative explosiveness. Literary masterpieces
—Anna Karenina, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Doll's House
—were making their debut. Pointillism, an alternative to the more lyrical and fluid impressionist school, was shaking up the art world. And the second industrial revolution, with its electricity and automobiles, was transforming the way people lived and worked.