Home > Autistic savant

When one has an extraordinary single skill in an otherwise unexceptional intellect, he or she may simply be described as a savant, without qualifier, although savant is usually meant to mean a person of learning, especially one of great knowledge in a particular subject, without remarking on the person's overall state of intellect.

It is a rare phenomenon which occurs in some people with autism and/or certain developmental disorders. Some people have acquired savant-like abilities after suffering from head injuries.

Autistic savantism is usually recognised during childhood and is often but not always found in autistic children. However it is also sometimes acquired in an accident or illness, typically one that 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 innate within all of us but obscured by the normal functioning intellect.

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 back perfectly a very long series of music, numbers, or speech.

Some other autistic savant skills include:

• lightning-fast arithmetic calculations, including finding prime factorizations
• precisely estimating distances by sight
• calculating the day of the week for any given date over the span of tens of thousands of years
• perfect perception of passing time without a clockA clock (from the Latin cloca " bell") is an instrument for measuring time. A clock can be a physical instrument (an especially accurate one is called a chronometer). The clock in its modern form (24 hour clock) has been in use since at least the 15th cen

Why autistic savants are capable of this sort of astonishing ability is not quite clear. Some savants have obvious neurologicalNeurology is a branch of medicine dealing with disorders of the central and peripheral nervous systems. Surgical operations on the nervous system are done by specialist neurosurgeons. Neurological disorders are disorders of the central nervous system ( br abnormalities, but the brainFor other articles about other subjects named brain see brain (disambiguation). In the anatomy of animals, the brain or encephalon is the supervisory center of the nervous system. Although the brain is usually cited as the supervisory center of vertebrates of most such individuals savants are anatomically and physiologically normal.

Examples of autistic savants include Blind TomBlind Tom (184?-1908) was a US African American autistic savant and musical prodigy. The first historical record of Blind Tom is from 1850 when his slave mother, Charity Wiggins, was sold to general (or colonel) and lawyer James N. Bethune alongside with, who had exceptional musical ability although no musical education, and Richard WawroRichard Wawro (born 1952) is a British autistic savant artist living in Scotland. Wawro was born 1952 to a family of Scottish father and Polish-born mother. He was diagnosed autistic at the age of 3. He did not learn to speak before the age 11 and require, who is an exceptional artist although retarded and autistic.