Are you a savant of any type?

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Yes, writing is SO different! You can stop and think before you write something down; you can edit it; you can take the time to choose the right words so your point gets across. Plus, it's visual--it's right there in front of you, and you can look at it whenever you like rather than here and then gone like auditory input is. For me, reading and writing are easier than speaking; and making a speech is easier than having a conversation.

I'm not a savant except in the very weakest sense of the word (easily learning a skill at an unusually young age that most people have to work very hard to master). I can improvise a harmony line to any melody after hearing it once, sometimes during the first hearing if the melody is predictable. That's not too impressive as far as savant skills go because most adult music students can do it, too. I only think of it as something of the sort because I was nine when I started doing it. But most autistic "splinter skills" or "savant talents" are along those lines--an unusual little ability that your brain happened to be perfectly suited for, which most people could do with practice, but which you basically discovered you could do with very little practice. I like music, and have fun singing along and weaving another melody into the song; but other than that, it's not particularly useful--just, like I said, fun. Quite a few autistics have unusual little skills like that; one in ten sounds pretty close to right.

A prodigious savant is quite another creature--there you get things that nobody could do, no matter how much they practiced; and these are very rare. They have highly unusual brains; in some cases due to injury or illness, in others simply born that way. About half are autistic; the other half are not. They are what many people think of when you say "savant".

Maybe it would be easier to just call things like my harmony improvisation "splinter skills" instead of "savant skills". They're synonyms, but "splinter skill" doesn't have the connotation of memorizing pages of phone numbers at a glance, or telling you that your birthday will be on a Friday in 2050.

Goodness.

More autistics than NTs, though; we've already narrowed it down to the 1:100 on the spectrum just by asking the question on WP.

I don't think of myself as one, nor do I know how one qualify as a savant. To me most savants seem to be exceptionally good at something (I think one should be in atleast the 1/10,000 or 1/100,000), yet doesen't understand what makes them exceptionally good or how this greatness is achieved. I'm gifted intellectually and in the arts - piano I learned the hard way trough years of practice. My gift with arts was evident at the age of 4-5 when I drew comics from memory, but I don't consider my talent to be exceptional nor is there anything savant about my work. The only thing that may be exceptional is my visual memory, which allows me to store alot of visual information with great depth and detail. I place my intellectual abilities in the 1/100-150, artistic in the 1/200 and musical in a modest 1/25 and then I have some weird abilities like rapid counting (tested by psyciatrist),rapid pattern/word/object recognition (based on assumptions), ambidexerity (from birth), exceptionally visual recall plus other abilities that I may not be aware of. None of these abilities are prodigious, yet never/rarely seen in NT's. I've been called a math savant/genius, but there's not much to this as they way I solve math/logical problems require a sense of clarity and awareness that a savant would not possess as he/she would solve the problem perfectly (and most likely faster) but wouldn't know how.
When I draw, it's much more savantlike because I can read at the same time /listen to audiobooks/do something else with my free hand (not what you're thinking of..), but I do outlines first and focus on the whole picture and then fill in details which isn't very savant-like (they often draw from top to bottom with no outline).

I wouldn't consider myself a savant at all. Talented, yes, but in no way a savant.

I am an artist, always been an excellent painter and drawer. I had a chemistry class in High School, Basically I'd barely pass all my tests. Until, we studied a highly visual and conceptual unit and I got a near perfect score on the test, while this kid in front of me (Always got straight A's) received a D. The teacher would remark about my visual talents. However, I wouldn't call myself savant

"Talented" means you learn quickly, but you take practice. "Savant" means hardly any practice; it's more instinctive, something you do because your brain's made that way.

There are some skills that would be called savant skills if they were not so common.

For example, most human toddlers are language "savants". They pick up thirty to fifty new words every day. Compared to an adult, that's a ridiculously fast rate of learning. Plus, they learn the language accent-free, while they are still too young to tie their own shoes or make themselves a sandwich.

Most humans are also "savants" at recognizing people by their faces. They can look at a person they have seen only once, months ago, out of hundreds of people they have seen, and instantly identify him (though they may not remember his name or associate him with where they met him--that's a different skill set). They cannot do the same thing with leaves, or with shoes, or with anything else but faces.

That kind of thing--instinctive learning, a brain that seems to specialize in one particular thing--is what you call a savant skill.

For it to be a savant skill:
--You have to have learned it very quickly and instinctively.
--It has to be significantly above the rest of YOUR skills. Learning to read at age 3 is not a savant skill if you have an IQ of 180; but it is a savant skill if you have an IQ of 65.
--It has to be significantly above the skills of the average person, which is why face-recognition and toddler language learning are not usually called savant skills.

Talent merges somewhat smoothly into savant syndrome; there's no obvious cutoff. But at some point, you have to say, "This is unusual."

at the age of 6 i was a jazz drummer in a band of adults. and i program computers and im currently working on a infinite generating password generator

I like patterns and problem-solving. When I see the usual "Do you have an interest in numbers" question in assessments, I tend to think "No", but actually many of my books are maths or statistics. I am pretty bad at arithmetic and algebra, but I have a PhD in maths. I used to write a lot. I decompose a lot of things into maths, like music, or cookery or language (I love word frequency analysis).

There are a number of things I can do more or less effortlessly that I understand most people either cannot do or can only do with difficulty:

1. Counting – I can accurately count a collection of items, up to a few dozen, as long as the items are very similar in size, shape and colour.
2. Remembering numbers – I can memorise a string of 100 digits within a minute or two (it forms a distinct musical pattern in my mind) and retain it indefinitely.
3. I can perform repid mental multiplication and division, with products to six or seven digits.

Strangely, for about three to five consecutive days each month, I wake up feeling "disconnected", as though I am partly still asleep, and these abilities are either intermittent or totally absent. Other times they work reliably.

Incidentally, I also have absolute pitch.

I don't know what qualifies for "savant"-ness in a specific talent. Also, while I don't have the best social skills and such, I thought being a savant (of any type) often meant that social skills and such were even worse. Or am I way off? I don't know much about savants.

If I was, it would probably be music. I had the curse of not being born in a musical family, so I didn't even begin listening to music really, until about 15. Discovering it much earlier would have helped significantly, but whatever. Either way, in a short time I've gotten pretty far with it. Although I picked up my first guitar at 16 and I was pretty aimless with it at first (though my first two songs I learned how to play were both ~8 minute complex metal songs), eventually I ended up really getting into it, and a lot of stuff that was supposedly "difficult", I picked up easily. Such as reading traditional sheet music and learning by ear. Less than a month ago I bought a violin and the first few minutes, it was difficult adjusting from guitar to violin in terms of strings - but right after I was picking out famous basic melodies (I couldn't even identify - Three Blind Mice?), just from holding the violin for a few minutes. Now I'm sight-reading basic stuff easily.

I play at least four different instruments (ambiguity here - if vocals count, add that, if the piano, organ, synthesizer, and keyboard all count as different instruments, count all them), and soon more.

Callista wrote:

"Talented" means you learn quickly, but you take practice. "Savant" means hardly any practice; it's more instinctive, something you do because your brain's made that way.

I'm a savant idiot. I can make an @ss of myself without even trying.

I am a flash counter, which means I can know how many without counting - like taking a picture in my head. It happens in a flash, quite literally. I've 'inadvertently' counted 1,065 light squares in an elevator, for example, or I know how many cows are in a field (118, lately). Hate to say this, but like how Rainman knows how many toothpicks - 147 (3 left in the box). 33 blades in the venetian blind I see now.

I don't think this is a savant skill. but I usually can figure out the year a song was released- within 1 to 3 years- just by hearing a few seconds of it.

I also can remember the release dates of films. I really don't know why this is important for me to know, but I've made a habit of memorizing them.