Autistic savant

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 exclusively, associated with mental retardation, and low I.Q.

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 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, writer and artist
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

Case histories of autistic savants

An Anthropologist on Mars by neurologist Oliver Sacks.

In movies and literature

Albino ^{[dubious – discuss]} 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.
Elling, ^{[dubious – discuss]} a movie about a man of the same name, based on the book of the same name, by author Ingvar Ambjørnsen.
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 see the night sky from anywhere in the universe.
Mozart and the Whale, a film about a taxi driver with a superhuman knack for numbers and his budding romance with a fellow Aspie.
Mercury Rising, a film about an autistic boy whose life is threatened because of his ability to decipher complex encryption.
Rain Man, the main character of this film was inspired by Kim Peek.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a novel about a boy with Asperger syndrome who has amazing numerical ability and a photographic memory.
Forrest Gump (book). In the book Forrest Gump (unlike the film adaptation, which took many liberties with the original story), Forrest is described as an idiot savant as he's skilled in complicated calculations but is considered close to retardation.
Naiv. Super, ^{[dubious – discuss]} by Erlend Loe.

External links