Savant skills

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I would say: visual arts, analytical thinking (literature, politics, and such, maths only to a certain degree), and mindreading. Don't know if the last one qualifies but it definitely keeps me out of a lot of potentially painful and dangerous situations I would otherwise be oblivious to.

Eep. On those criteria, I qualify.
I possess an eidetic memory when I've not been on the risperidone again, and oooh, I'll have a 2, a 3, a 5 and a 7 off the list. I'm not sure what 'writing' is, but I'm fairly sure it's both interesting and not something I possess at that level.

I can't even manage 'normal' calendar calculations.

My skills are in music and engineering. I can remember things from when i was 18 months old.

Can you explain what u mean by learning in concepts? I am just curoius. I often have trouble explaining what i know to someone else, can't get what was in my head out. I do better in writing when i have time to think about it. Thanks.

No, but I wish. The only thing remotely like a talent I have is having a good long-term memory. I can usually remember what movie I saw in what theater.

Not much.

Basically, I will remember patterns, or the reasons things are as they are, and apply them to other things if they fit. ALSO, I tend to link related things, etc. You would think learning 3.14159265358979323846264338 would be EASY. For some reason, the 141,535,979,323,46264, etc... make it easier to remember. HECK, I never even learned the 9,10,11, etc... tables, because of the patterns they had. I learned the idea of how oscillators work, and can just design one, so I didn't bother learning the specifics of any schematics.

One of these days I'll get back to where I was.

Steve

I have artistic talent and good long-term memory (age 2-3). I don't consider my art a savant skill, though. Just a normal-people talent. I think artistic savants are those like Stephen Wiltshire, who can draw anything they've ever seen out of their head. My skill and creativity seems to be in the normal range for other art students at my school. Just being autistic and having a talent does not make one a savant.

man, i wish i could remember before age 2. that would be so cool!

I don't know if this is a savant skill, but I can open up a book to an exact page or passage on the first try.

I bet you'd be good at cards!

I don't really have savant skill but I'm pretty sure I have slightly above-average intelligence. My long-term memory seems fairly good; I have many childhood memories, including a couple from before the age of 2. I taught myself to read time on a clock at the age of 4. I could play familiar melodies on a keyboard by ear not long after this. In school I got so fed up of being better than my class at reading that I started to pretend I couldn't do it and faked getting stuck on words here and there like the others, which ticked off the teacher but actually got results - she gave me a harder reading book which I still found easy but at least more interesting, and she gave me reading comprehensions to do a year before I was supposed to do them. Today, I tend to remember which page I was on in a book by memorizing the page number instead of using a bookmark. It's not like I have any great memory for numbers but for some reason I find keeping my page number easy. I learn music very quickly (I play piano and organ), e.g. I memorized Schubert's Drei Klavierstucke in about a month. In school I was one of the best at drawing.

I'm kinda glad not to be a savant because even though I wasn't all THAT talented growing up, I got so many frustrations from people with what abilities I did have. I got into a lot of trouble that time I pretended not to be able to read any better than the others, and I got into trouble when I stared into space in boredom from always being finished first, and I got the teacher very angry when one day she was teaching the class how to draw cubes and when she came to my desk she saw that I had done it far better, but differently, to the others, so she whipped out her gigantic eraser and very roughly erased it off my page and stood over me until I did it like the rest... It's one thing getting into trouble for doing a worse job than your classmates, but for doing better...? I did it that way because I knew it was the right way, it looked a lot better than using two squares and joining the corners with lines, and I was bored and wanted to use my time for something else! Perhaps I've lost abilities like some of you have mentioned, as I often felt I like wasted my time in school. If I'd been given the maths book without the written instructions perhaps I'd have figured it out like the way I figured out the clock in toddlerhood...

Recently I've been feeling a big improvement in how fast I can learn music and even in sight reading which is something I've never been able to do. In fact, reading anything with meaning always felt difficult until lately... Suddenly I can read 116 pages of a book and take it all in (although that resulted in getting overwhelmed with information and having a slight meltdown!) and I can play through easy music without getting lost or stuck half as often as I used to. I wonder, does the human brain, when left to its own devices (I'm doing a gap year at the mo), develop better in people with ASDs...? Because I haven't been practicing more than I used to or anything; in fact, less! I find that I'll read through a couple of pages of music and sort out what fingering to use etc. and then days later I'll come back to it and be able to remember it quite well...

Nope, but I'm a pretty talented artist (though I haven't developed my skill over the years), if that counts.

no. i'm just your regular run of the mill aspie,

I don't have one

I've always just sort of been "good" at things without being super good at anything. Ex: I graduated second in my class from high school, but I was never the best in any individual subject, more like second or third best in all of them. I could do some math in my head, but not if it was too hard. I learned languages fairly easily, but I was always best at reading them, never really able to converse. I had some natural ability when it came to playing music (played simple tunes by ear, first or second chair flute in school), but was never good enough to make a career out of it or anything. I got A's in college as well, but no subject really jumped out to me as something that was a good "fit".

I certainly don't have any of the awesome savant skills that I see some of the people on this site talking about!!

I'm not sure. I'm very good with music and can improvise harmony after hearing a song once; but this could be more of a natural talent. I started doing it when I was about nine years old. If anything, I guess you could call it a splinter skill...

I can't really tell. There are a lot of odd little abilities I have which are unusually easy to pick up and unusually good; but there are also a lot of odd little deficits which most people don't have, and don't even know exist (the inability to memorize information in the absence of context, for example)...

The only conclusion I can draw is that I have widely scattered skills. Whether you could call them "savant" depends on how broad your definition of savant is. I would fit only into the broadest definitions.

I have a really good memory for anything that I read. I'm not all that comfortable talking about it because I'm afraid I'm going to be flamed and called a liar. But yeah, I have a pretty fantastic memory - for everything but car keys, my belts, and my wallet / credit cards. I'm always losing simple things, but when it comes to academia - I feel that I have been gifted. I'm a lot more grateful too. I've been sober for over 2 years now and counting!

Maybe I should post one of my short stories for you guys to read sometime?