Research study on savantism in ASD

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I don't feel very impressive. The spaghetti model trick seems like one that almost anyone could use, perhaps with plasticene or another more familiar substitute. It may depend upon the kinesthetic memory of playing with such materials, or experience with FEA models, but its main benefit is to get people out of the illusion that anything is perfectly rigid. The numbers always reveal distortions; we just need a way to visualize them easily so we can work with them.

The definition of savant will always be a bit fuzzy, but it often includes not being able to show one's work, just the results.

Rimland (1978), in a postal survey of 5400 parents of children with autism, found that 531 (9.8%) were reported to have savant skills. Of those with reported skills, the most common were music (53%), memory (40%), mathematical/calculating skills (25%) and art (19%); 53 per cent had multiple special abilities (Rimland & Fein 1988).

Bölte & Poustka (2004), in a study of 254 individuals with autism, identified 33 (13%) with at least one special skill as assessed on the Autism Diagnostic Interview—Revised (ADI-R; Le Couteur et al. 2003). Exceptional memory was the most frequently reported and 29 individuals had multiple savant skills.

Inconsistencies in definition and wide variation in diagnostic ascertainment, ages and ability levels of the cases reported also give rise to problems, and there is little valid information on the true rates of savant skills in ASDs. Existing estimates range between 10% and 30%.

It seems to me that the savants with multiple talents are in the Asperger's Syndrome area, while single savants appear to be more common on the rest of the spectrum, though no-one has yet investigated this in any convincing way, and the issues of tautology and reductionism in the research have not been addressed in the research community yet. The definitions the NTE's are and have been using as a base for their theories don't seem to be empirically sound.

I would argue that any mental process needs practice; the brain grows first as wetware before programming emerges. Savantism seems more like a failure to develop other abilities; pouring almost everything into one function. Deprived of human contact, shepherd boys were far more likely to become instant calculators. To me, 1,369 is just a number, but to them, it's "Hello, 37 squared."

What abilities do you think savants don't develop?

Whatever normal functions they are poor at. Kim Peak couldn't dress himself. Paul Erdos had to be delivered and collected from airports like a child, and would summon help if rain came in the window. He basically did nothing but math, delighting but burning out his hosts in just days, for decades.

Can't related to any of those points speaking personally. I have the full range of "normal skills". However I can't ride a motorbike, except as a passenger, which I don't think counts against the savant abilities and normal skill range..

Look at Wrong Planet as a whole: we have members who can't live independently at all, and we have members who live entirely independently, and there are members who need limited supports. I am in the entirely independent group, and it's this group of savants that are generally ignored. We are not like the rainmen. We may even be the silent majority in the overall population of savants, however the media and the researchers have focused on the rainmen unduly, as part of the enfreakment discourse they have created.

I can ride a motorbike, and do controlled slides in a car, but it can take me days to prepare for a 'phone call and then digest it. If I try to write fiction, all the characters are close variations of myself. On a renovation job, I am faster than average at dealing with unique situations and seldom need to re-do work, but I'm never competitive at routine tasks unless I get to mechanize them.
NTs are not particularly impressed with talent, but finding it juxtaposed with severe disability is a "man bites dog" story.

NTs are impressed by NT talents. Because of the stigmatic myths about the ASD spectrum generally which have become so entrenched, they rarely respect ASD talent and I think there is very abundant evidence for that claim. It comes back to the tyranny of normal, the dominant population established by weight of numbers as the normative one, imposing their narratives on other populations (and it seems a lot of neurodiverse people internalise those narratives). However some of us refuse to do that, and like NTs, claim the power to be self-defining. However at this time, it seems many ASD people have been so affected by the stigmatisation that they have a resultant damaged capacity for personal agency, a profound disempowerment.

However that's another topic for another time. In this thread I am hoping to hear from more gifted ASD savants, their experience, their talents, their discovery of their savant abilities and why they prefer to remain in the shadows (as I did).

Very thought provoking. this thread. I too had always thought savantism to be rare, but learning that it is achievement without obvious effort, I suspect many of us fit into that category. For example, how many on here are educated to at least postgraduate standard and didn't find it hard to get there? At University, I didn't realize how lazy I was at revising until I overheard NT students discussing the hundreds of hours of revision they needed to do! I didn't, after all, working would have got in the way of reading for pleasure! Academic success was quite effortless, really. Looking back I wish I had made the effort. I can easily see that many of us are unaware of our talents.

My friend George had a job doing commercial stone sculpture, at which he was about 6 times faster than average. However, he couldn't stand art dealers, and went into machine shop work, fairly soon winning championships with his custom bicycles and tricycles.

I am still actively seeking situations where I'm inspired to savant-grade work, and doing my best to attract attention to things like a radical simplification of automotive suspension with astounding lack of success, if we assume that people are rational and consistent with their stated goals. They are not, which is confusing to us.

I know (from literature search) that the research on this hasn't even been theorised, let alone attempted at this stage. Pilot studies would only succeed if the academic savants were guaranteed absolute anonymity, at every stage of the process. There was at least one other academic savant I worked with, although he didn't seem to know (as I didn't at that stage) that he was on the spectrum, let alone a savant. This was 30 years ago, when Aspergers was simply unheard of. I am sure there were more that I didn't know about, as I chose to get to really know only a few academics whose perspectives I found very refreshing, divergent and quite brilliant. Looking back I can recognise a few aspies who were fellow travellers, and also came in with effortless A's at exam time. Thank you for your interesting point.

Geroge sounds like a savant to me. There are mechanical savants, largely ignored by the NTE's. I wonder about the New Zealand man who made the Indian motorcycle out of bits and pieces, made famous in the film "The World's Fastest Indian", played coincidentally (or not) by aspie actor Anthony Hopkins. I would love to hear from some of the mechanical savants. My son had that ability which I first noticed at age 8, he could tell me how things worked and fixed them in a way that astonished me, because he had no obvious way of knowing that. He restores and races racing cars in his spare time now, his "real" job is as an executive of an engineering company. I didn't recognise his ability as savant and he was right under my nose!

Harry Miller put a lot of the roar into the Roaring Twenties with his race car business. His engine was copied by everyone else, and direct descendants of his original motor were still winning Indianapolis in the 60s. His wife said "he was a funny man" - not in the ha-ha sense. The design for that motor had come to him in a dream.

The inventor of the sewing machine had spent many months on complex, dead-end designs until one night, he had a dream of being menaced by savages bearing rather stylish spears, having large pointed ends with big holes in them. The next morning, he drew a machine with the hole and point at the same end of the needle, and the rest is history.

I got quite a lot of my education by tinkering with machines to see the chain of actions. My friend Don got a real bargain on a hay baler by discovering one little lever inside the hay chute that had a bit of paint on it, and would sometimes stick. He'd just followed the rod it usually operated. I learned even more by examining the tool marks on everything, to see how it had been made.

It does not always work out well. In the 1930s, Alexander King had to spend an afternoon in a remote Austrian village due to a car breakdown. He was hauled off to an inventor's shop, where the guy decided to risk everything and reveal his work to a possible partner. It was a very crude prototype for a typewriter.

Even excellent inventors are very rarely rewarded. There is theft of course, and expensive litigation to determine it. The business community is far more numerous and experienced than the specialist inventor, and has much ingenuity of its own. The government of Czechoslovakia had enough money for the best lawyers to patent a new plastic injection molding machine, but the Italians got around it by just bolting the plunger to the floor, and moving the mold instead.

When Bruce Myers, inventor of the Dune Buggy got caught up with orders after about two years, he noticed that he only had 15% of the market. So, he called the lawyers, who had filed for the usual protections. They went after the infringers, and after another couple of years, Bruce was broke from that, and divorced as well. He just wasn't a fun guy on the dunes any more.

Two more questions please to those individuals with savant experience:

1) How old were you when you first perceived your own savantist ability? (Even if you didn't have a name for it then.)
2) If you have savant ability in different areas:
which area of ability showed up first, and how did it show up?
at what age did the second/third (however many you have) of your savant abilities first show up?

I only recognized a degree of savantism in retrospect, when I tried to return to my technical work after trying to secure funds to pursue it further. I had done my best work in my late 30s. It had taken that long to set me up with both information and motivation. For me, the motivation is knowing someone who values the work in a way that keeps it focussed.
I impressed a family friend with a cardboard model around age 3 I'd done on my own. At 16, I taught an impromptu review of the year's science course when our class had an unexpected open period. About 1/3 of the students listened, and several commented that they had not understood most of it before.
I probably did a few other projects that no ordinary talent could pull off, but the ordinary talent had not been willing to try, so the customer got lucky. Once, I was hauling in hardwood to do a floor in a condo when we got braced by the building management. They insisted that even someone who owned the suite below their own had to keep their floors carpeted. It took me about 3 seconds to come up with a way to lay it over carpet, and the result was delightful. Another job I remember was making a 12' long wall in a house portable, to combine two rooms for special occasions. In or out, there was almost no sign of it being odd, but the conversion was quick and easy.

Where you also one of the early reading self-taught children before you started school, DearOne?