Secrets of the Wild Child 1

Tonight on nova. The shocking story of a girl who spent her childhood locked in a bedroom. The girl reportedly was still wearing diapers with a social worker discovered the case two weeks ago. Raised in isolation Genie was a wild child, uncivilized, barely able to walk or talk. The indications are that she was beaten for making noise. With footage never before seen on television, nova follows the controversial efforts to unlock the secret of the wild child. Once in a great while, civilized society comes across a wild child. A child who has grown up in severe isolation with the virtually no human contact. This is the story of such a case. The story begins in Los Angeles on November 4th, 1970. Officials in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia have taken custody of a 13 year old girl and they say was kept in such isolation by her parents that she never even learned to talk. Her elderly parents have been charged with child abuse. This is the scene of the crime. A child was locked in a room and tied to a potty chair for most of her life. Completely restrained she was forced to sit alone day after day and often through the night. She had little to look at and no one to talk to. For more than ten years. The girl reportedly was uttering infantile noises and still wearing diapers when a social worker discovered the case two weeks ago. But the authorities are hoping she still may have a normal learning capacity. Here was a 13 year old who seemed like an infant. A girl who would be known as Genie. Genie was taken to children's hospital in Los Angeles, where she immediately won the hearts of doctors and scientists. She was fragile and beautiful, almost haunting. And so I was pulled, I was very drawn to her even though I was nervous and had no idea in many respects what to expect. Jeannie was about to test an idea important to science and society that a nurturing environment could make up for even the most nightmarish of pasts. If you make up a sentence in your head or you write it down and it has a ten, 12 words in it. Chances are you can listen for the rest of your life for someone else to say the sentence. You can go to the library. Here at UCLA, Susan Curtis teaches students about a crucial human trait. The ability to learn language. And chances are you will never come across that symptoms. So what I want to do now is the students begin their study through a famous case. Is genius. This is not the person's real name, but when we think about what a Genie is, the Genie is a creature that comes out of a bottle or whatever, but emerges into human society, past childhood, and we assume that it really isn't a creature that had a human childhood. Susan Curtis has a special connection to the story she's telling. 20 years ago, she was asked to join a team working to rehabilitate Genie. I was literally at the right place at the right time. I was a new graduate student interested in language acquisition. Unencumbered by family ties or responsibilities. And they asked me if I would be interested. When Curtis first joined the case, Jeannie had a strange, bunny walk, and other almost inhuman characteristics. Jeannie constantly spat, she sniffed and clawed. She barely spoke or made any noises. The indications are that she was beaten for making noise. And consequently had learned basically not to vocalize, and she really didn't vocalize very much at all. When I first met her, she was silent most of the time. Jeannie also received daily visits at children's hospital from James Kent, her psychologist. Kent recalls first meeting his new patient. I was captivated by her. I was not the last person to become captivated by her. The story as we began to learn about it was sort of one of the things, of course, it would reach out and grab you anyway. But she had a personal quality that seemed to elicit rescue fantasies. And this in a group of people who were interested in taking care of kids and would specialize in early childhood who were going to be powered by rescue fantasies anyway. She's reached out and grabbed lots of us. One of Jeannie's most captivating qualities was the intense way she explored her new environment. Oddly, even strangers who knew nothing about her story seemed to sense her need to do so. One particularly striking memory of those early months was an absolutely wonderful man who was a butcher, and he never asked her name. He never asked anything about her. They just connected and communicated somehow. And every time we came in and I know this was so with others as well, he would slide open the little window and hand her something that wasn't wrapped, a bone of some sort, some meat, fish, whatever, and he would allow her to do her thing with it, and to do her thing, but her thing was basically was to explore it tactically to put it up against her lips and feel it with her lips and touch it almost as if she were blind. Word of the wild child spread, attracting scientists from all around the country. One of them was Oklahoma psychiatrist J Shirley. When introduced, I extended my hand. She reached out with her fingers and delicately touched my hand and then in a sense, that was it. She had made my acquaintance. She was satisfied for herself about me, but my reaction was I had a thousand questions immediately who, what, how? How does this come about? Why is this, why do I see what I'm seeing? Surely was an expert in social isolation. Jeannie was the most extreme case he'd ever seen. Solitary confinement is diabolically the most severe punishment and in my experience. Really quite dramatic symptoms developed in as little as 15 minutes to an hour and certainly inside of two or three days and try to expand this to ten years boggles one's mind. Surely wanted to assess how well Jeannie had survived her long years of isolation. He directed the team to gather information on her brainwaves. For four nights running, they wired Genie to instruments that measured the electrical activity in her brain while she slept. What they found was an unusually high number of so called sleep spindles. The dense bunching patterns that look like spindles on a spinning machine. This was an abnormal brainwave pattern.