Savants

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An autistic savant (historically described as idiot savant) is a person with extraordinary mental abilities, often in numerical calculation, but sometimes in art or music. These skills are often, yet not always, associated with autism or mental retardation.

Abilities

A person with an extraordinary single mental skill but an otherwise unexceptional intellect, may be described simply as a savant, without qualifier, although savant is also frequently used figuratively to mean a person of learning, especially one of great knowledge in a particular subject, without regard to the person's overall intellect.

True savantism is usually recognized during childhood and is often found in children with autism and occasionally in children with 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 unusual 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 approved in a healthy individual by temporary disruption of the left front part of the brain - at least with some of the probates [1].

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.

Why autistic savants are capable of these astonishing feats is not quite clear. Some savants have obvious neurological abnormalities (such as the absent corpus callosum in Kim Peek's brain), but the brains of most savants are anatomically and physiologically normal; at least, there is no abnormality detectable by modern science.

Famous autistic savants

• Jebediah Buxton, U.S. savant calculator
• Alonzo Clemons, U.S. wax sculptor
• Tony DeBlois, U.S. blind and autistic musician
• Rüdiger Gamm, German calculational genius
• Tim Knab, a Russian artist in the 1830s, known for his cubism and accurate measurement of angles
• Leslie Lemke, U.S. blind musician with brain damage
• Jonathan Lerman, U.S. autistic artist
• Vito Mangiamele, Sicilian savant calculator
• Thristan Mendoza, Filipino autistic marimba prodigy
• Gottfried Mind, Swiss autistic artist in the 18th century (B. 1768)
• Gerald Newport, American autistic and subject of the film Mozart and the Whale
• Hikari Oe, Japanese developmentally-delayed composer
• Derek Paravicini, U.K. blind musician with learning disability
• Monty Pickren, U.S. autistic IT Executive
• James Henry Pullen, British deaf-mute "Genius of Earlswood Asylum"
• Matt Savage, U.S. autistic jazz prodigy (jazz composer and musician) - b. 1992
• Henriett Seth-F., Hungarian autistic savant with multiple autoimmune disorders, poet and writer
• Daniel Tammet, U.K. synaesthetic high-functioning autistic 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

See also: Kim Peek

See also

• Autism
• Calendrical calculators

Key texts

Books

• Treffert D.A. (2000) Extraordinary people, Bantom press, London.

Papers

• Heavey, L., Ping, L. and Hermelin, B., A date to remember: The nature of memory in savant calendrical calculators , Psychological Medicine 29 (1999), 145-60.
• Howe, M. (1989) The strange achievements of idiots savants. In: A.M. Colman and J.O. Beaumont (eds) Psychology Survey 7, Leicester: British Psychological Society.
• Hove, M. J. A. and Smith, J., Calendar calculating in "idiot savants":How do they do it? , British Journal of Psychology 79 (1988), 371-86. 32.
• O'Conner, N. and Hermelin, B., Idiot savant calendrical calculators:maths or memory? ,Psychological Medicine 14 (1984), 801-6.
• Lester, D., Idiot savants: a review , Psychology 14 (1977), 20-23.
• 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.
• Treffert D.A. (1988) The Idiot Savant: A review of the Syndrome. Am. J. Psychiatry 145, 563 ? 572.

Additional material

Books

• Pearce J.C. (1992) Evolution's end, HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco.

External links

• Autism.org's page on autistic savants
• 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