The Barretts are speech pathologists, and when Elizabeth was born, they started teaching her sign language along with spoken language. They read to her often, and her favorite television program -- the only one her parents let her watch -- was a PBS show called “Signing Times,” which teaches kids sign language.
Yet as much as her parents worked to stimulate her language skills, they were as astonished as anyone when she started picking out words and reading them – especially as they had never attempted to teach her to read.
“This is something we never expected,” Katy Barrett said last March. “We didn’t teach her this. We don’t sit down and drill her on words. She loves reading books.”
The Barretts had gone public with Elizabeth’s story in hopes of meeting other people with similarly precocious children. “We’ve had contact from people all over the country who have similar stories,” Katy Barrett said.
Elizabeth is 2 now, and not only reading sentences in English, but also reading and learning Spanish.
On. Nov. 7 the Barretts joined TODAY’s Ann Curry from their home in Lubbock, Texas, where they are awaiting the imminent arrival of a sibling for Elizabeth. As they told of how their precocious daughter has progressed over the past seven months, Elizabeth, as cute as a boxful of puppies, assembled a jigsaw puzzle of words on the floor.
“Her mind right now is very much like a sponge, and she’s just absorbing everything,” her father told Curry. Seeing how eager she was to learn, the Barretts decided to teach her Spanish. “She just loves Spanish,” Michael Barrett reported.
Gently interrupting her play, Michael Barrett picked his daughter up and held her on his lap for a demonstration. Katy held up printed sentences that Elizabeth had not seen before.
“The sky is blue,” Elizabeth said, reading the first one.
“My name is E–LIZ-a-beth,” she said, reading the next.
Her mother switched to Spanish, and Elizabeth flawlessly pronounced, “Hola, Ann.”
Finally, Curry asked Katy to show Elizabeth a final sentence.
The 2-year-old displayed a budding anchor’s skill as well as remarkable cognitive ability. “And now, here’s Matt,” she read softly, throwing the broadcast back to New York and TODAY’s Matt Lauer.
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TDY_WhereAreTheyNow[i-1].body = "He never forgets
Rick Baron first appeared on TODAY on May 19, 2008, when he showed off his exceedingly rare ability to remember everything that’s happened during his lifetime. Give him a date anytime after he was about 11 years old, and the 50-year-old from suburban Cleveland will tell you what happened on that day.
Baron is just the third person in America to have a super autobiographical memory, according to researchers studying the phenomenon at the University of California-Irvine. The first, Jill Price of Los Angeles, views her perfect recall as more of a curse because the bad things that have happened in her life keep cropping up to torment her. But the second, Brad Williams, a radio reporter in La Crosse, Wis., does not have a problem with bad memories. Neither does Baron, who said he can recall any memory, good, bad or indifferent, then file it away again.
His skill has won him countless trivia contests and everything from free dinners to 14 free vacations. But when Baron was on TODAY last spring, he was between jobs and hoping that by showing off his skills, he might find employment.
And he succeeded. Baron got a call from The Learning Channel, which is doing a two-hour special on him. In his May appearance, he had been reserved and a bit rumpled. But appearing on TODAY on Nov. 7 for an update he was a changed man, bubbling with enthusiasm, looking natty in a sport coat, and ready for national television with a stylish new haircut.
“Things are brewing,” he happily told TODAY co-anchor Matt Lauer. “Next month, I’m going to be in California – exciting prospects in television and movies. A year from now, I may be a star.”
With the help of two people plucked from the audience on the plaza, Lauer ran Baron through another memory test. First, a woman gave her birthday – Nov. 18, 1968. Baron informed her that on the night before she was born, NBC switchboards were flooded with calls from viewers complaining about the infamous “Heidi Game”: The network had been a Jets-Raiders football contest, but cut away from the fourth quarter to show the movie “Heidi.” The Raiders staged a comeback for the ages that fans missed, and the resultant uproar prompted NBC and other networks to vow never again to cut away from a game before it was finished.
A second spectator gave his birthday as Nov. 27, 1976. “History-wise, it was a slow day,” Baron reported. Instead, he said that the movie “Carrie” premiered eight days later. And one day before, O.J. Simpson rushed for 276 yards.
TODAY show researchers checked the information, and Lauer came back later in the broadcast to report that Baron was dead on with the Heidi Game, but not precisely accurate about O.J. and “Carrie” Simpson actually rushed for 273 yards, not 276, a minor difference. But “Carrie” actually premiered on Nov. 3, 1976.
Baron wasn’t available to explain, but in May, he had had a similar minor discrepancy. It turned out that he was reporting the date he read about an event, rather than the day it actually happened.
Still, his abilities are impressive. Medical researchers aren’t sure how Baron, Price and Williams perform their feats of memory. Baron told Lauer that he’s been to Harvard, where specialists told him his brain is wired differently, a revelation he marked with a comic “yikes!” -- as in, “Tell me something I don’t know.”
There is some evidence that the ability is linked to the same areas of the brain that are identified with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). And Baron admitted, “I am kind of orderly with my possessions.”
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TDY_WhereAreTheyNow[i-1].body = "Boy pierces brain with antler
On Nov. 30, 2007, 5-year-old Connor Schick appeared on TODAY with his mom, Melissa Schick, and stepdad, Bob Schick, to talk about the day the previous summer when he found an antler on the ground during a camping trip. While bringing it back to show his parents, Connor fell and had it – and the antler penetrated his eye socket and went deep into his brain.
Almost a year later, on Nov. 7, 2008, the first-grader, now 6, brought his antler along with his parents to New York to show TODAY’s Meredith Vieira that he’s had no ill effects from his frightening experience that led him to become known as “Antler Boy” across the Web. Like many boys his age, he didn’t find it necessary to explain a lot to inquiries from grown-ups. “Good,” he replied matter-of-factly to the question, “How are you?” and “No,” when asked, “Do you ever think about it?”
He left most of the talking to his mom, who told Vieira Connor has had no lingering effects from his injury. “He’s a perfect 6-year-old boy little boy, fully recovered, nothing wrong at all,” Melissa Schick said.
That’s remarkable. Connor had tripped over his dog while running with the antler in July 2007. The antler poked him in the eye. He yelped and pulled it out, with no apparent damage other than a little cut.
Just to be safe, Melissa and Bob Schick took Connor to an emergency room in Park City, where doctors examined him, put antibiotic ointment and a patch on the cut, and said Connor would be just fine. The next morning, he was full of fun, but when doctors took the patch off the cut, they found a baseball-sized abscess.
He was given a CT scan, which revealed a fracture in his eye socket. Looking for soft-tissue damage, doctors then gave Connor an MRI, and found something astonishing: the antler had penetrated at least an inch into the frontal lobe of his brain, leaving a wedge-shaped gap behind when Connor pulled it out.
The antler had been lying on the forest floor, and doctors knew it was loaded with dirt and bacteria that caused a pus-filled abscess in Connor’s brain. If it continued to grow, it could threaten his life and necessitate surgery.
Connor was given massive doses of antibiotics, and over the next two months the abscess continued to shrink until it disappeared.
Vieira asked the family if they planned any more camping trips.
“No,” Melissa said. “Absolutely not.”
“We’ll go camping again,” her husband maintained. But he didn’t say when.
As for the antler, it currently resides on a mantel in the family home, out of reach of the children. And Melissa Schick finds herself giving out more hugs than ever.
“You hug them tighter,” she told Vieira. “Every time you get up in the middle of the night, you go check on them to make sure they’re OK. Every second you want to make sure they’re there, and you want to hug them and kiss them.”
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