Autistic Savants

1869 Words4 Pages

“Autistic Savants”

Autism is a biological disorder that affects a child’s motor and social skills. These children cannot work in social settings like school and so many of them feel left out not because they are different, but because they don’t know how to interact with others.

It seems that everyone knows about autism very well; however, there are some children who are autistic yet they have a very special ability in one area. These children are called autistic savants. Autistic savants are individuals with an amazing skill or ability that most people do not have. There is an estimated prevalence that 10% of savant abilities are in autism. Children with autism have savant abilities, which mean they excel in certain areas like music, art, and mathematics.

Leslie is an extraordinary person who happens to have a couple of handicaps such as: blindness, autism, and cerebral palsy. Though he has these three handicaps, which is not a good combination at all, he is still very happy. Leslie has gone through many different things; for instance, his blindness happened at birth when the doctors noticed that his eyes were not open and had to remove them both when he was 6 months old.

Although Leslie was put up for adoption at birth he did not think that his foster mother, May Lemke, was not his real mother, though she cared for him as much as she did her own children. One night, when Leslie was about 14 years old May was watching “Sincerely Yours.” The program featured- Tchailovsky’s Piano concerto No. 1 in the middle of the night May heard some noise downstairs and went to investigate. Leslie was playing on the piano Tchailovsky’s Piano concerto No. 1. Leslie just played by ear.

When he was 22 years old Leslie gave his first per...

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...al abilities, they can process the square root of 12034 in a matter of seconds; however, simple mathematics are very difficult for them to understand. No one really knows how they can process such high numbers, but some say that it is just too simple and easy to figure out that they don’t understand.

There seems to be many people that are autistic savants or just have savant abilities. Many researchers have theories of why some autistic individuals have savant abilities. Dr. Rimland, Mark Rimland father, has a theory that these individuals have incredible concentration abilities and focus their complete attention on a specific area of their interest. It does not seem that Dr. Rimland is able to prove his theory, so we will never really understand how individuals have savant abilities. It seems that the most common type of autistic savants is mathematical abilities

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