They are often unable to read and count, and their IQ does not exceed 70. At the same time, they know phone books by heart, can play the entire concert by ear, give pi to thousands of decimal places, and they sculpt or paint very well. Savants are exceptional geniuses who, thanks to their amazing talents, are able to come out of the shadow of their own disease.
Savants have always been among us – different, less talkative, withdrawn. At the same time, each of them hid a unique talent that was often not noticed in time. Usually they were considered freaks, sometimes – like in the case of Kaspar Hauser – they were sent to the circus to earn a living. It took many years for autism and Asperger’s Syndrome to be slowly understood and associated with the characteristic skills that are now estimated to be shown by one in ten affected by these diseases.
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It all started at the end of the XNUMXth century, when the mentally disabled and blind slave Thomas Fuller amazed the US research community. Upon hearing about the black boy, Benjamin Rush himself, a well-known educator and doctor, signatory to the Declaration of Independence of the United States, became interested in him. When he arrived to check rumors of his lightning-fast calculations, he was amazed. The young man, despite a clear mental retardation, was able to accurately give the number of seconds any human being lived. Using only the basics of algebra, when asked how many seconds had elapsed in 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours in less than a minute, he replied without hesitation – 2. When the scientist sat down to the accounts to confirm his version, it turned out that the given value was incorrect. «You forgot the leap years» replied «Blind Tom». In fact, after including the corrections, everything was correct. Thus, the boy became not only the first savant described in medicine, but also contributed to the emancipation of slaves and the refutation of the thesis about the alleged low IQ of black people.
Savant brain
Many years have passed since that event, but we are still not able to precisely define the causes of the savant syndrome. Defined as an ailment consisting in having outstanding talents and great memory in a person who is also mentally retarded. Although, according to estimates, it manifests itself in over 110 thousand. people suffering from autism or suffering from brain damage, to date, only about 100 such cases have been described. This is due in part to the fact that there are difficulties in communicating with sick people. It should also be borne in mind that not all talents are characteristic enough to make it to the front pages of newspapers or to medical quarterly magazines. Sometimes the savant syndrome manifests itself through exceptional manual predispositions. For example, Alonzo Clemonz can form wax into a faithful image of any animal he has seen in 20 minutes. Other times it just turns out that the child remembers the name and surname of everyone they meet in their life, but no one has ever asked them about it and the child’s gift remains hidden.
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Despite their differences in aptitude, savants share a number of features. First, their IQ varies between 40 and 70 in most cases. Second, they are six times more likely to be men than women. Although savant syndrome is congenital, it also occurs in people who have suffered damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. This fact largely explains the repetitive spectrum of savants’ talents. It is not by accident that the expressed features are almost always identical with the functions of the right hemisphere of the brain responsible for remembering, artistic thinking and spatial orientation. Thus, most of the cases described in medicine concern, for example, the fast memorization of street names, postal codes, foreign languages (verbal adhesion), manual skills, musical skills or complicated calculations, which also have their basis in memorizing certain principles that are key to algebra. A large group of savants can also precisely measure time and instantly recognize the number of items in a given space. Intriguingly, savantism does not develop when the right hemisphere of the brain is damaged.
Savant syndrome and medicine?
Although the biggest breakthrough in research on autism and savant syndrome occurred in the 80s and 90s (not by accident then the “Rain Man” and “Forest Gump” appear in cinemas), the first hypotheses were formulated a little earlier. In 1975, it was established that damage to the left hemisphere of the brain has a direct impact on the activation of the right hemisphere, which thus compensates for the lost brain functions. As in the case of blind people, the senses of hearing and smell are expressed, similarly in the savant syndrome, those cognitive areas located on the right side of our brain develop more intensively. These speculations were confirmed by pneumoencephalographic studies, during which air was injected into the cerebrospinal fluid by taking a series of x-rays. Over the years, more and more cases of people who, as a result of accidents resulting in head injuries, began to show the characteristics of savant syndrome have also started to be recorded. The thesis about the activation of the right hemisphere was also unequivocally confirmed by research, during which 34 thousand autistic people have unequivocally demonstrated increased blood flow in this part of the brain. Along with the development of new diagnostic methods, the areas subject to special activation were determined more and more precisely. Using the SPECT method, involving the use of single photon emission tomography, not only was it confirmed increased blood supply to the right hemisphere, but also to the neocortex, with a simultaneous impairment of the right temporal lobe in the left part of the brain.
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Be a genius
The possibility of determining the area responsible for the extraordinary talents of savants has raised the obvious question: is there a method that allows such effects to be artificially induced without damaging the left hemisphere of the brain at the same time? It did not take long for the answer to arrive, because already in the early 90s a series of experiments with a magnetic field was carried out, where, using transcranial repetitive magnetic stimulation on 17 volunteers, two of them actually saw the appearance of abilities characteristic of savants. The subjects counted faster, painted much better and memorized even complex numbers without difficulty. Unfortunately, a few hours after the stimulation – along with the decrease in blood supply to the right part of the brain – these features gradually disappeared.
Today, thanks to more and more effective drugs that enable a partial recovery from autism and the related savant syndrome, many people who lived in isolation begin to open up to social contacts and talk about their inner experience of the disease. «I don’t want people to say:
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