Prodigies aren’t typically autistic, but some aspects of prodigy and autism do overlap:
Prodigies, like many autistic people, have a nearly insatiable passion for their area of interest. Lauren Voiers, an art prodigy from the Cleveland area, painted well into the night as a teenager; sometimes she didn’t sleep at all before school began. That sounds a lot like the “highly restricted, fixated interests” that are part of autism’s diagnostic criteria.
Prodigies also have exceptional working memories. In a 2012 study led by one of us, Dr. Ruthsatz, all eight of the prodigies examined scored in the 99th percentile in this area. As the child physicist Jacob Barnett once put it during an interview on “60 Minutes,” “Every number or math problem I ever hear, I have permanently remembered.” Extreme memory has long been linked to autism as well. Dr. Leo Kanner, one of the scientists credited with identifying autism in the 1940s, noted that the autistic children he saw could recite “an inordinate number of nursery rhymes, prayers, lists of animals, the roster of presidents, the alphabet forward and backward.” A study on talent and autism published in 2015 in The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that over half of the more than 200 autistic subjects had unusually good memories.
Finally, both prodigies and autistic people have excellent eyes for detail. Simon Baron-Cohen, an autism researcher, and his colleagues have described an excellent eye for detail as “a universal feature of the autistic brain.” It’s one of the categories on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, a self-administered test Dr. Baron-Cohen helped develop that measures autistic traits. The prodigies in Dr. Ruthsatz’s 2012 study got high marks in this trait on the test. One of the subjects, Jonathan Russell, a 20-year-old music prodigy who lives in New York, described how startled he gets when the chimes on the subway are slightly off key.
Beyond the cognitive similarities, many child prodigies have autistic relatives. In the 2012 study, half of the prodigies had an autistic relative at least as close as a niece or grandparent. Three had received a diagnosis of autism themselves when young, which they seemed to have since grown out of.
There might even be evidence of a genetic link between the conditions. In a 2015 study published in Human Heredity, Dr. Ruthsatz and her colleagues examined the DNA of prodigies and their families. They found that the prodigies and their autistic relatives both seemed to have a genetic mutation or mutations on the short arm of Chromosome 1 that were not shared by their neurotypical relatives. Despite a small sample size (the finding rested on five extended prodigy families), the data was statistically significant.