Lab Notes
Homer Simpson Is a Big Fat Idiot (Savant)

Have you ever had the experience of hearing a song on the radio, or seeing a rerun on TV, and saying to yourself, "Gee, I was just thinking about that a few minutes ago. What a strange coincidence!" Back in the mid-to-late '90s I used to have that experience all the time with The Simpsons; over and over again, the episode airing on any given day was one I'd just been thinking about. I actually began to suspect I was psychic, but I eventually, found a more disturbing explanation: As a geek of truly epic proportion, I was simply thinking about every single Simpsons episode, every single day.

As you might imagine, this takes up a lot of my time, and now that the show has swelled to 400 episodes, I'm having to cut back on luxuries like food and sleep just to keep up. With Fox preparing to release its long-awaited Simpsons movie, it's only natural that I'd be so apoplectic with excitement that I actually traveled to Springfield to have a look around (see images, below). But that's hardly fodder for a science column, so we'll talk about Homer Simpson's brain instead.

The thing is, in spite of an overwhelming preponderance of stupid behavior, Homer is not actually an idiot. In fact, despite having a crayon lodged in his skull and a defective Simpson gene that causes "foolishness, and baldness, too," Homer shows infrequent but vivid flashes of genius, leading the scientist in me to classify him as more of an idiot savant.

There's no particular evidence for this in the first season, but during the second he designed his own automobile. It cost $80,000 and didn't meet the needs of consumers, but in my opinion—and Bart's—it was pretty cool for a first try. In the third season he saved Springfield from a catastrophic nuclear meltdown. By "accident," yes, but seemingly random events do have an uncanny habit of going Homer's way. In season six's "Fear of Flying," his reassurances to Marge betray a surprisingly detailed knowledge of jet aircraft. Years later, holding up a globe of Mars (actually just a kickball with the name of the planet written across it), he squints and says, "I see no evidence of water."

"I am so smart! S M R T!"

Other examples abound. In "Mayored to the Mob," when the head of Leavelle's Bodyguard Academy told him he owed his allegiance to the job, not to family or country or Allah, Homer responded, "Not even during Ramadan?" Since this was in 1998, when few Americans knew anything at all about Islam, it is a rather shocking response for an "idiot" to give. Similarly, when he told Lisa he'd had "enough of your Vassar-bashing, young lady," and when he accurately predicted where Ned Flanders had taken Bart, Lisa and Maggie when he wanted to baptize them, you sort of had to wonder.

But it gets better. In the later seasons, he not only built a fake robot for gladiatorial combat but also built a real one that was capable of speaking, identifying people by sight, dragging itself on its hands and apparently also feeling the human emotion of anguish as it begged to be given legs and "finished" (although in retrospect that might also have been a request for termination). Alas, for the robot, Homer's attention (and his intelligence) had already wandered away. And that wasn't even a Halloween episode!

Homer is also a surprisingly prolific inventor, having come up with the automatic hammer, the makeup gun, the bear-fighting suit, the condiment pen, the Flaming Moe cocktail and "a popsicle made of Mountain Dew." He never made any money from these inventions—not surprising, given his poor planning skills—but some of them have made millions for other people. And don't get me started on the elaborate schemes he hatched as a Canadian drug smuggler, and as the Beer Baron during Springfield's brief experiment with prohibition.

Anyway, the only legitimate son of Abe Simpson is not just a journalist*, neighborhood organizer, vigilante and rabble-rouser of Sam Adams or Tom Payne-like stature, but a sometime union leader and serial politician who has held a number of local offices, including mayor, chief of police, sanitation commissioner, town crier and Safety Salamander. He's an ordained minister, too, and briefly ran his own doomsday cult. Not exactly the resume of an idiot. And if athletic intelligence counts, Homer is also a competent golfer and a good enough bowler that he could go professional if the idea ever occurred to him. His martial-arts talents seem to wax and wane on a random schedule, but he held his own in season four's "Brother From the Same Planet," and really dished it out on "Whacking Day." More significantly, in season 17 he escaped from an entire U.S. Army platoon tasked with hunting him down.

He may be a failure as a movie producer, but he's a notably talented (indeed, prize-winning) dancer, choreographer and talent agent. He is also a successful musician in his own right who can play classical and jazz piano (especially with the encouragement of a prison guard's whip), and composed both the lyrics and the melodies of several hit songs, including one Grammy winner. If Halloween episodes can be considered "real" for the purposes of the show, Homer has also outwitted the devil, discovered time travel, made a shrewd bargain on the world's only pair of teleportation machines and taught dolphins to walk.

I've got plenty more Simpsons anecdotes (heck, I've got them all), but I suspect the point is made. Interestingly, when the crayon was briefly removed from his brain, Homer's IQ jumped from some unknown-but-presumably-low value to a measured score of 105, although in practice he seemed a lot smarter than that. My theory? Being inhibited by the crayon for so long, he was forced to devise coping mechanisms, including what experts call aim inhibition, compartmentalization, conversion, denial, repression, regression and trivialization. With a normal IQ and these coping mechanisms still in place, he was the intellectual equal of Lisa, with her IQ of 159. To put it a different way, without that pointy cylinder of wax in the way he was better able to access his savant talents, so they came and went a little less randomly.

The faded genes of an accidental genius

From this I conclude that the crayon was actually lodged in his prefrontal cortex, which governs rational planning, impulse control, the delay of gratification and other functions of what neurobiologists call "executive intelligence." This is also consistent with the crayon having been forced in through his nose, since the prefrontal cortex is located just above the maxillary sinuses and behind the frontal sinuses, which are the largest cavities behind the nose and are exactly where you'd expect a foreign object to end up if jammed in with sufficient force.

Remember, though: Homer also has a defective "Simpson gene," which is located on the Y chromosome and is thus passed on to male members of the family. We can make some guesses about the function of this gene by studying Abe and Bart Simpson (who don't have Crayolas on the brain), as well as the many uncles and cousins Homer managed to round up in "They Saved Lisa's Brain." It's quite a collection of clods and dolts—most of them clearly not savants!—and the traits they have in common include poor academic performance, innumeracy, confusion and a general sense of not being "all there." This can be explained if the gene codes for some protein that's essential in the process of short-term memory. It's hard for the Simpson men to remember much of anything from one moment to the next!

The good news is that anything they do commit to memory (i.e. anything that makes it through the sieve and ends up in long-term storage) has a good chance of being remembered forever and forming the basis of semi-normal cognition. Which is good, because these disparate memories, reworked and reassembled by Homer's broken-genius mind, sometimes come together in surprising—and hilarious—ways. We should also keep in mind that Homer's half-brother Herb (see image at right), who also inherited Abe's Y chromosome, doesn't seem to suffer any ill effects. This implies either that the gene has a recessive nature (i.e., it causes problems only in combination with another gene) or that the defect is a "single nucleotide polymorphism" whose effects can be undone by another minor mutation to the same gene.

So.

The cartoon world of which Springfield is a part is on the brink of nuclear annihilation—again!—and it's up to Homer Simpson to save the day. The question before us is: Can he do it? Will he have a flash of insight or "luck" at the crucial moment, or will his idiocy overwhelm his savance? Fortunately, there are some questions science simply can't answer; to find out, we're going to have to see the movie.

*Blogger, food critic, talk-show host and, most recently, paparazzo photographer

Sources:
Albertine, Kurt H. and David Tracy: Anatomica, Barnes & Noble Books, 2001
Glannon, Walter: "Neurobiology, Neuroimaging, and Free Will", Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXIX (2005)
The Encyclopedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, 2005 Edition: "prefrontal lobe"
Every Simpsons Episode, Ever