Research

Autistic Savants

Autistic Savants

"Autistic savant" refers to individuals with autism who have extraordinary skills not exhibited by most persons. The estimated prevalence of savant abilities in autism is 10%, whereas the prevalence in the non-autistic population, including those with mental retardation, is less than 1%.

Savant skills occur within a narrow but constant range of human mental functions, generally in six areas: calendar calculating; lightening calculating & mathematical ability; art (drawing or sculpting); music (usually piano with perfect pitch); mechanical abilities; and spatial skills. In some instances unusual language abilities have been reported but those are rare. Other skills much less frequently reported include map memorizing, visual measurement, extrasensory perception, unusual sensory discrimination such as enhanced sense of touch & smell, and perfect appreciation passing time without knowledge of a clock face. The most common savant skill is musical ability. A regularly reoccurring triad of musical genius, blindness and autism is particularly striking in the world literature on this topic.

Theories to explain Savant Syndrome include eidetic imagery, inherited skills, concrete thinking and inability to think abstractly, compensation and reinforcement, and left brain injury with right brain compensation. Newer findings on cerebral lateralization show left hemisphere damage in savants suggesting that the most plausible explanation for Savant Syndrome to be left brain damage from prenatal, peri-natal or postnatal CNS damage with migratory, right brain compensation. Along with this is corresponding damage to higher level, cognitive (cortico-limbic) memory circuitry with compensatory take over of lower level, habit (cortical-striatal) memory. This accounts for the linking of predominately right brain skills with habit memory so characteristic of Savant Syndrome.

There are probably fewer than 25 prodigious savants living at the present time. Some of those include Leslie Lemke (music), Alonzo Clemens (sculpting), Richard Wawro (painting), Stephen Wiltshire (drawing), Tony DeBlois (music) to name some. Other prodigious savants more recently described are in England, Austrailia and Japan.