Savant syndrome: extraordinary abilities alongside neurodevelopmental differences

The term "idiot savant" (intended as "one with limited knowledge"), introduced in 1887 by the English neurologist John Langdon-Down in a series of lectures to the London Medical Society, is misleading and discriminatory by today's standards.

Currently, one speaks of island gifted or savants. The US psychiatrist and researcher Darold Treffert refers to particularly outstanding insular gifted people as prodigious savants, derived from prodigy (child prodigy, talent). Autistic island gifted individuals are also called "autistic savant" or "savant autistique". The term "savant" is also misleading, as the noun "savant" in French and English means "knower" or "scholar" in a broad sense.

The term "insular giftedness" best captures the essence of the phenomenon, as it expresses the fact that when overall giftedness is weak, there can be an outstanding performance in a delineated single subject, an island, that stands in bizarre contrast to the rest of the personality. It is "an isolated gift in the midst of defects" (Douwe Draaisma, 2006).

Exceptional memory

• Solomon Weniaminovich Shereshevsky (1886-1958) was a memory phenomenon whose extensive memory was apparently not subject to any of the usual laws of memory. The Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Romanovich Luriya observed Shereshevsky for 30 years with regular experiments and published his results in a case study.
• According to Kim Peek (1951-2009), he knew the contents of about 12,000 books by heart. He read this amount by means of an extraordinary ability: He could read two pages at the same time, one with his left eye and the other with his right eye. In addition, he could name the zip code, area code, and highway leading to any U.S. city. Furthermore, he could name the day of the week for each date within seconds. Kim Peek was the model for Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 film Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman.
• Orlando Serrell (* 1969) was hit in the head by a baseball when he was ten years old and has since remembered every single detail of his life since the accident.

Musical talents

• Leslie Lemke (b. 1952; blind), who can replay pieces of music he once heard from memory.
• Tony DeBlois (* 1974; blind), who can play about 8000 pieces on the piano as well as 13 other instruments.
• Derek Paravicini (b. 1979; blind), who learned to play the piano at age two, gave his first major concert at age nine, and by age 28 could play 12,000 pieces of music by heart. He learns the pieces by listening to them once.
• Matt Savage (b. 1992; autistic), jazz pianist who taught himself to play the piano overnight at the age of six. At the age of seven he was already composing his own pieces and released his first CD.
• Brittany Maier (b. 1989; blind, autistic), U.S. pianist who had a musical repertoire of over 15,000 pieces by age 18. She plays with only six fingers because she cannot move all of them.
• Tom Wiggins (1849-1908; blind), exceptionally gifted musically but under-achieving in all other areas of life.

Computational talents

• Rüdiger Gamm (* 1971) has an extraordinary talent especially in the field of numbers, on the one hand the actual calculation, but on the other hand also around the retention of results with large sets of numbers, which can be "recalled" even after many years. It is debatable whether Gamm is really a savant, because he has the ability to adapt his calculation algorithms to new problems. Savants, however, tend to act intuitively and cannot do this.
• Jason Padgett can recognize geometric figures and draw fractals anywhere after suffering a concussion in a fight.

Artistic talents

• Alonzo Clemons, who can make animal sculptures out of clay based on illustrations in books, but can neither read nor write and can only speak very rudimentarily.
• Richard Wawro (1952-2006), who was able to draw what he saw in detail with wax crayons after a few seconds of brief observation.
• Gilles Tréhin (* 1972), who since 1984 has been "building" a fictional town called Urville on paper in the form of numerous drawings. He has studied history in order to give his town a history.
• Gottfried Mind (1768-1814), who was physically handicapped and considered mentally retarded, but showed a talent in the field of fine arts and specialized in children and animal motifs - especially cat drawings.
• Seth F. Henriett (Fajcsák Henrietta, * 1980) is an early autistic writer and artist.
• George Widener (* 1962) is an American artist who was already considered to have behavioral problems as a child, but whose savant syndrome was not diagnosed until he was 38 years old. Since then, he has used his special talent for numbers and data artistically.

Linguistic talents

• Ziad Fazah, Lebanese, speaks 59 languages fluently, including Chinese, Thai, Greek, Indonesian, Hindi and Persian. Fazah taught himself most of these languages. This requires a great deal of perseverance and discipline, explains the multilingual, whose talent has also been included in the Guinness Book of Records.
• Muhamed Mešić, Bosnian, lawyer, Judaist and Japanologist as well as a linguistic talent. At the age of 26, he already spoke 56 languages. He was diagnosed with a kind of insularity, a form of autism.
• Christopher Taylor, who can understand, write, read 25 languages and speak ten of them more or less fluently. A computer tomography of his brain did not reveal any special features. Autistic islanders are otherwise not particularly gifted linguistically, which is why Christopher Taylor stands out. It is unclear why he scores poorly on general intelligence tests but reaches university level on language tests. It seems that the autistic motivation is different, i.e. that he only collects vocabulary and sentences and regards language as a mere (learnable) system, the use of which to communicate with other people is unimportant.

Visual talents

• Temple Grandin (* 1947) thinks in pictures and can think herself into animals, especially cattle. She now teaches at Colorado State University. Her life was made into a film in Du gehst nicht allein.