To use all functions of this page, please activate cookies in your browser.
my.bionity.com
With an accout for my.bionity.com you can always see everything at a glance – and you can configure your own website and individual newsletter.
- My watch list
- My saved searches
- My saved topics
- My newsletter
Autistic savant
An autistic savant (historically described as idiot savant) is a person with both autism and savant syndrome. Savant syndrome describes a person having a severe developmental or mental handicap with extraordinary mental abilities not found in most people. This means a lower than average general intelligence (IQ) but very high narrow intelligence in one or more fields. Savant syndrome skills involve striking feats of memory and arithmetic calculation and sometimes include unusual abilities in art or music. Savant syndrome is sometimes abbreviated as "savantism", and individuals with the syndrome are often nicknamed savants. This can be a source of confusion since a savanter is a person of learning, especially one of great knowledge in a particular subject. Additional recommended knowledge
AbilitiesSavant syndrome is usually recognized during early childhood as coincident with other developmental abnormalities; the plurality of cases occur in children with autism. Males with savant syndrome outnumber females by roughly 6:1[1]—slightly higher than the disparity for autism spectrum disorders. Most autistic savants have extensive mental abilities called splinter skills.[citation needed] However, it is important to notice that people with a high general intelligence can demonstrate the same skills; savant disabilities are not necessary for these skills. They can recall facts, numbers, license plates, maps, and extensive lists of sports and weather statistics after only being exposed to them once. Some savants can mentally note and then recall perfectly a very long sequence of music, numbers, or speech. Some, dubbed mental calculators, can do exceptionally fast arithmetic, including prime factorization. Other skills include precisely estimating distances and angles by sight, calculating the day of the week for any given date over the span of tens of thousands of years, and being able to accurately gauge the passing of time without a clock. Most autistic savants have a single special skill while others have multiple skills. Usually these abilities are concrete, non-symbolic, right hemisphere skills as opposed to left hemisphere skills that tend to be more sequential, logical, and symbolic.[citation needed] Why autistic savants are capable of these astonishing feats is not quite clear. Some savants have obvious neurological abnormalities (such as the lack of corpus callosum in Kim Peek's non-autistic brain). Many savants are known to have abnormalities in the left hemisphere of the brain. [2] There are only about 50–100 recognized prodigious savants in the world.[3] Famous autistic savants
See also
References
Further reading
|
|
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Autistic_savant". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia. |
- Genetic modification can make apple growing more environmentally friendly
- Benitec Obtains License to Unique RNAi Non-Viral Delivery Technology from Stanford University
- fully automated Askion FluoM® | Fluorescence microscopes | Askion
- Genedata Opens Subsidiary in Tokyo
- Merck Announces Joint Agreement With ImClone and Bristol-Myers Squibb for Erbitux in Japan - Co-development and co-commercialization of Erbitux in metastatic colorectal cancer upon health authority approval