Autistic savant

An autistic savant (historically described as idiot savant) is a person with both autism and Savant Syndrome. Savant Syndrome is described as having both a severe developmental or mental handicap and extraordinary mental abilities not found in most people. The Savant Syndrome skills involve striking feats of memory and often include arithmetic calculation and sometimes art or music.

Abilities

Savant Syndrome is sometimes abbreviated as "savantism" and individuals with Savant Syndrome abbreviated to savants. This is a source of confusion - a savanter is a person of learning, especially one of great knowledge in a particular subject.

Savant Syndrome is usually recognized during childhood and is found in children with autism and other developmental difficulties. However it can also be acquired in an accident or illness, typically one that injures or impairs the left side of the brain. There is some research that suggests that it can be induced, which might support the view that savant abilities are latent within all people but are obscured by the normal functioning intellect. By the help of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation researchers are providing empirical evidence for the hypothesis that savant-like skills can be improved in a healthy individual by temporary disruption of the left front part of the brain - at least with some of the probates.

Most autistic savants have very extensive mental abilities, called splinter skills. They can memorize facts, numbers, license plates, maps, and extensive lists of sports and weather statistics. Some savants can mentally note and then recall perfectly a very long sequence of music, numbers, or speech. Some, dubbed mental calculators, can do exceptionally fast arithmetic, including prime factorization. Other skills include precisely estimating distances and angles by sight, calculating the day of the week for any given date over the span of tens of thousands of years, and being able to accurately gauge the passing of time without a clock. Most autistic savants have a single special skill, while others have multiple skills. Usually these skills are concrete, non-symbolic, right hemisphere skills, rather than left hemisphere skills, which tend to be more sequential, logical, and symbolic.

Why autistic savants are capable of these astonishing feats is not quite clear. Some savants have obvious neurological abnormalities (such as the lack of corpus callosum in Kim Peek's non-autistic brain), but the brains of most savants are anatomically and physiologically normal; at least, there is no abnormality that modern science can detect. Some neurologists (see e.g., Oliver Sacks) theorize that those with savantism utilize an "innate" modular arithmetic to compute such complex problems as what day of the week a distant date (for instance, July 11th, 88182) will fall on.

There are only about 50 - 100 recognized prodigious savants in the world.

Famous autistic savants

• Kim Peek, U.S. savant with a photographic or eidetic memory, developmental disabilities and the inspiration for the movie Rain Man
• Daniel Tammet, UK. synesthete first recorded savant to have no easily recognizable autism
• Jedediah Buxton, U.K. savant calculator
• Alonzo Clemons, U.S. wax sculptor
• Tony DeBlois, U.S. blind and autistic musician
• Zachary Goertz, U.S. autistic artist
• Peter Guthrie, autistic savant with calendar and sports trivia skills
• Leslie Lemke, U.S. blind musician with brain damage
• Jonathan Lerman, U.S. autistic artist
• Gottfried Mind, Swiss autistic artist in the 18th century (B. 1768)
• Hikari Oe, Japanese developmentally-delayed composer
• Derek Paravicini, UK blind musician with learning disability
• James Henry Pullen, British deaf "Genius of Earlswood Asylum"
• Henriett Seth F., Hungarian autistic savant with multiple autoimmune disorders, poet, writer and artist
• Gilles Trehin, French autistic artist and creator of the fictitious city of Urville
• Richard Wawro, Scottish autistic artist
• George Widener, U.S. autistic savant, artist with calculator and calendar skills
• Blind Tom Wiggins, U.S. blind and mentally handicapped pianist in 1860s
• Stephen Wiltshire, British autistic artist
• Orlando Serrell, U.S. savant who can recall the day of week (as well as what the weather was like) since the day a baseball hit his head
• Temple Grandin
• Matthew Kerrigan, Canadian savant who can guess the number of jellybeans that would fit into any jar

Case histories of autistic savants

• An Anthropologist on Mars by neurologist Oliver Sacks.

In Media and literature

• Albino from The Technopriests comics by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Zoran Janjetov.
• Cube, a film in which one of the characters, Kazan, performs prime factorization with ease.
• Funes, the Memorious, a short story about a boy who gains remarkable mental ability after falling from a horse.
• K-PAX, a book and a film in which it is suggested that a character is an autistic savant who can visualize the night sky from anywhere in the universe.
• Mercury Rising, a film about an autistic boy whose life is threatened because of his ability to decipher complex encryption.
• Rain Man, the autistic main character of which was inspired by savant Kim Peek.
• The Wizard, a film about an emotionally troubled boy with a remarkable talent for video games.
• Naiv. Super, by Erlend Loe.
• John Doe a character from Fox networks John Doe was a savant; even refered to as an idiot savant in one episode.
• Christopher Boone, main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

See also

• Autism
• List of fictional characters on the autistic spectrum
• List of autistic people
• People speculated to have been autistic

Further reading

• O'Connor N., Cowan R., & Samella K. (2000) "Calendric Calculation and Intelligence." Intelligence 28, 31–48.
• Pearce J.C. (1992) Evolution's End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco. ISBN 0-06-250693-5
• Snyder A.W. et al. (2003) "Savant-like skills exposed in normal people by suppressing the left fronto-temporal lobe." J. Integrative Neuroscience 2, 149–158.
• Snyder A.W. (2001) "Paradox of the savant mind." Nature 413, 251–252.
• Snyder A.W., & Michell D.J. (1999) "Is integer arithmetic fundamental to mental processing?: the mind's secret arithmetic?" Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. 266, 587–592.
• Tammet, Daniel (2006) "Born On A Blue Day"
• Treffert D.A. (2000) Extraordinary People, Bantom Press, London.
• Treffert D.A. (1988) "The Idiot Savant: A review of the Syndrome." Am. J. Psychiatry 145, 563–572.

External links

• Purple Medical Blog: Autistic Savant: Two Seconds to Discover Prime Numbers Two Years To Learn to Ride the Bus
• Inducing savant-like abilities in ordinary humans by applying slow repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the left anterior temporal lobe.
• Wisconsin Medical Society: Savant Syndrome