Dotan Nitzberg

Dotan Nitzberg’s hands fly across the piano keyboard at lightning speed, bringing to life a musical work that he believes captures the essence of his Asperger’s mind. “Liszt’s etude, ‘Dance of the Gnomes,’ ” he explains, “is a fast paced piece. It is very mercurial and sparkling. It correlates since my brain is so mercurial . . . . [Z]illions of thoughts are traveling at the speed of light and sometimes it causes confusion . . . . [T]he absorption is quick but the classification process is slower, [and] this gap is hampering.” At the piano, however, Dotan is not hampered in the least. There, he is fully in his element, and this too, he says, is a product of his Asperger’s mind: “[A]t the moment Aspergers tackle a piece they recognize the character and ‘emotion’ right away. It’s instilled there, [but] only people with [a] sixth sense—that is, endowed with sensitivity beyond the average—can catch it.”