Savant Skills
Approximately 10 percent of autistic children display savant skills. A savant, from the French for “clever” or “learned” is a person with incredible brilliance in a specific area. Autistic people with savant skills have exceptional talent, mostly seen in the arts, music and math. A common savant skill is being able to calculate days of the calendar from years back, or playing pieces of music after having heard them only once (Comer, 457).
Autistic individuals usually have problems altering the focus of their attention. They become fixed on something and cannot be distracted. The relevance of this for savants is that being able to focus so intensely on one particular thing might be why these people develop amazing skills. Savant skills are primarily related to the five senses (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and taste). These special skills are almost always non-symbolic. The right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for this. The left hemisphere is the one implicated in language and logical operations. Thus, it is believed that the right hemisphere develops at the left hemisphere’s expense in people with autism. Therefore, they are impaired in language functions but often display amazing right hemisphere talents. This information was gathered from the following link, which has more detailed information about savant skills and its relation to brain development in people with autism: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro01/web2/Shah.html
Here are some artwork pieces created by autistic people with savant skills:
By: Christophe Pillault Courtesy of: http://www.autismarts.com/photo_album6.0.html