![]() ![]() An emerging finding is that autistic savants display a unique set of cognitive and behavioral characteristics that might influence the development of special skills and talents." There are several theories that try to address the reason why some people develop savant abilities while others do not. ![]() "Savants are not born with their skills - just like nobody is born with the ability to paint portraits or drive a car - so there has to be a learning mechanism that occurs. "Our understanding of how and why individuals come to possess savant abilities has progressed over the years," says Hughes. Each of these behaviors might influence the development of skills or talents in their own way. There is, however, a unique cognitive and behavioral style that contributes to the development of special skills, and it just so happens that this cognitive style seems to be linked to autism in particular.Īccording to Hughes, savant syndrome has a distinct psychological profile in autism that leans toward specific behaviors such as heightened sensory sensitivity, obsessional behaviors, increased technical/spatial abilities, and systemizing. How these abilities are developed is something researchers still don't completely understand. It's estimated that around one in 10 people with autism have some savant abilities, which often involves an enhanced ability to do something like memorize sports trivia or license plate numbers. Yet autism is the most common condition that overlaps with savant syndrome, although not all savants are autistic and not all people with autism have savant skills. Savant syndrome can accompany developmental differences, a traumatic brain injury or, in rare cases, can emerge apropo of nothing. ![]() He had trouble walking and doing things like making a sandwich and tying his shoes, but he could read two pages of a book simultaneously, one page with each eye, and give you specific driving directions from any two cities in the world from memory - the man loved maps and atlases, as well as trivia, and he remembered virtually everything he ever read. Kim Peek was a man from Utah who inspired the movie "Rain Man." He was born with some significant brain abnormalities, including a condition in which the nerve bundle connecting the right and left hemispheres of his brain was completely missing. You might come across the term 'prodigious savant,' and again the term 'prodigious' can be subjective, but this term usually describes the most famous savant cases such as Kim Peek, or Stephen Wiltshire who possess talents that are well beyond those that most people could attain." "This is one of the reasons why you may find subtle variations of the definition of savant syndrome in the literature. "The difficulty arises when you consider that 'remarkable' can be a subjective term," says James Hughes, a comparative psychology researcher in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, in an email. ![]()
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