Autistic savant



An autistic savant (historically described as idiot savant) is a person with both autism and Savant Syndrome. Savant Syndrome describes a person having both a severe developmental or mental handicap but with extraordinary mental abilities not found in most people. This means a lower than average general intelligence (IQ) but very high narrow intelligence in one or more fields. Savant Syndrome skills involve striking feats of memory and arithmetic calculation and sometimes include unusual abilities in art or music. Savant Syndrome is sometimes abbreviated as "savantism" or "KC", and individuals with the syndrome are often nicknamed savants. This is a source of confusion since a savanter is a person of learning, especially one of great knowledge in a particular subject.

Abilities
Savant Syndrome is usually recognized during early childhood and 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. Some research 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 (i.e. majoritive) functioning intellect. Using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, Allan Snyder has found some evidence that savant-like skills can be improved in a healthy individual by a 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. However, it is important to notice that people with a high general intelligence can demonstrate the same skills; savant disabilities are not necessary for these skills. They can recall facts, numbers, license plates, maps, and extensive lists of sports and weather statistics after only being exposed to them once. 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 abilities are concrete, non-symbolic, right hemisphere skills as opposed to left hemisphere skills that 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

 * Russell Boyd, UK numbers genius & giant
 * Jedediah Buxton, UK savant calculator
 * Alonzo Clemons, U.S. wax sculptor
 * Tony DeBlois, U.S. blind and autistic musician
 * Rüdiger Gamm, German savant calculator
 * Zachary Goertz, U.S. autistic artist
 * Temple Grandin, U.S. designer of humane livestock facilities
 * Peter Guthrie, autistic savant with calendar and sports trivia skills
 * Leslie Lemke, U.S. blind musician with brain damage
 * Vinny Cassidy, U.S. math and physics savant
 * 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
 * Kim Peek, U.S. savant with a photographic or eidetic memory, developmental disabilities and the inspiration for the movie Rain Man
 * James Henry Pullen, British deaf "Genius of Earlswood Asylum"
 * Matt Savage, U.S. autistic music prodigy
 * Orlando Serrell, U.S. savant who can recall the day of the week (as well as what the weather was like) for any day since the day a baseball hit his head.
 * Henriett Seth F., Hungarian autistic savant with multiple autoimmune disorders, poet, writer and artist
 * Daniel Tammet, UK synesthete mathematics and language savant
 * 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

Case histories of autistic savants

 * An Anthropologist on Mars by neurologist Oliver Sacks.