Would this be considered a savant ability?

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At times, I play this game to pass the time. For this game, I grab two large handfuls of change (multiple types of coins such as quarters, pennies ect.), throw the coins on the ground, eyeball the change, and guess the monetary amount within a few seconds. I am typically right within 1-3 cents.

Last edited by timeisdead on 22 Jun 2009, 3:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

mm think so, i certainly couldn't do it.

Regardless of whether it's a savant ability, it's pretty freakin cool.

I don't know. It's probably close to having perfect pitch, though, as far as skills go. Pretty cool.

You should test it--do it a couple dozen times, report the average of how close you get. It can be easy to be biased towards the good guesses.

Perfect pitch isn't a savant ability, is it?

It often occurs in savants. I don't know if it can be called one. It is rather rare, though, and (like the OP's ability) is the ability to judge a quantity most people can't judge just by looking at. Most people need a reference tone.

It's a funny one, though, because supposedly the incidence of perfect pitch among the autistic population is estimated to be startlingly higher (1 in 20) than for the general populatoin (1 in 10000). For those who were blind from birth, it's something astronomically high... like 1 in 2.

Isn't that "flash-counting?" I know of a few autistics who can flash count.
See how it goes on guessing the number of birds in a flock in the sky.

pretty cool.

Last edited by millie on 22 Jun 2009, 4:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I've never tried it with change because that's combining flash counting and a running sum! Very impressive.

I can flash count well beyond 4-5 which is the highest the NTs can flash count. My limit is somewhere in the teens perhaps.

And even if the number is higher, I can arrange the items in groups of 3 or 4 or 5 in my mind, and then flash-count the number of groups and multiply by the number of items within the groups. It only takes a second or two to do it, vs much longer to count the items one at a time.

This ability is definitely linked to Autistic spectrum.