van vance , whose actual first name is jamison but practically everyone calls him van , professor of behavioral sciences at the university of california at irvine , a fifty-five year old academic who had seen and screened hundreds of savants , prodigies , and otherwise noteworthy case studies bordering on the murky dubiousness of clairvoyance , prescient abilities , and those sagacious well beyond the norm , was intrigued by adeles description of joshua as being different .