Savant Syndrome

Savant Syndrome is an extremely rare condition in which a person with a severe mental handicap has extraordinary abilities in a certain area, such as memorization, mathematics, or the playing of instruments. The first known case of savant syndrome was documented in a German scientific journal, Gnothi Sauton, in 1783. This article described the case of a man named Jedediah Buxton, who was talented in memorization and mathematics (Treffert 2009). Ever since this first account of Savant Syndrome was recorded, scientists and physicians alike have tried to understand this unusual disorder.

The most well known case of Savant Syndrome is the fictional character; however, Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 movie Rain Man, was inspired by a real person. The now fifty-seven year old has memorized over six-thousand books and has an encyclopedic knowledge of over fourteen subjects, including geography, history, literature, and sports. He can name all the US area codes and the zip codes of major US cities, has memorized the maps in the front of the telephone books and can tell you exactly how to get from one city to another has calendar-calculating abilities and is a rather advanced musician (Treffert 2009). This man, however, cannot comprehend simple tasks and cannot even dress himself. One of the earliest reports of Savant Syndrome is that of the amazing calculating ability of Thomas Fuller. Thomas “who could comprehend scarcely anything, either theoretical or practical, more complex than counting” was asked how many seconds a man who was seventy years, seventeen days, and twelve hours old and replied the correct number of 2210500800 in less than ninety seconds. He even accounted for the seventeen leap year...

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...hat causes autism by labeling autism a “signal-processing” disorder with information reduction through compression (Fabricius 2010). Basically, compression is where the brain takes an image and remembers the basics of the image but not the fine details. Fabricius explained Savant Syndrome using the compression theory: that normal people work with a compressed image while Savants retain one hundred percent of the original details. This is known as the “Savant Hypothesis (Fabricius 2010).” For cognitively normal individuals, fine details are often lost in a process known as “prototyping.” When a cognitively normal individual sees an image, unimportant details-like, in Fabricius’ example, an embedded triangle- are lost. To the autistic Savant, those details stand out, and the Savant has trouble seeing the big picture. Below is the example from Fabricius’ work: