How do you tell if someone is a savant?

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I would say a savant is someone who has mastered his/her craft. I'm more like a Jack of All Trades. I'm decent at many things, but I've never really put a whole lot of time into really mastering anything. Even with my photography, which is my main creative outlet. I WANT to get better, but I'm in an environment that just isn't very inspiring or motivating.

I don't know which type of Savant you are talking about.

Prodigious Savants (Daniel Tammet, Stephen Wiltshire etc) don't need to work at mastering their talents. Their prodigious abilities are how they were BORN.

Glider18 is a Talent Savant and it is my understanding from what he has kindly shared on WP about his giftings that his musical savant talents are also how he was born.

He has been/is able to play an instrument the first time he sees it. He MIGHT very well improve his ability with a particular instrument with practice BUT he requires no practice to pick up a new instrument and play it.

I don't really know about splinter group Savants.

I think mastering a craft is probably more in the the domain of the 'gifted'.

I happen to be quite gifted in maths and to a certain extent foreign languages. I am NOT a Savant and NOT even close to being one.

I make good use of my gifts but they do require work and there are plenty of people with these gifts, many if not most far more gifted than me.

Last edited by Blindspot149 on 27 Feb 2010, 5:01 am, edited 4 times in total.

Yeah, I didn't think about that. I've always had a natural talent for music, but I'm still no savant.

I have eidetic memory (what is popularly, but misleadingly, called "photographic" memory), but I don't know if that counts as a savant skill.

Incidentally, Tammet said it kicked in after a seizure when he was around 4.

I've had this math visualization ability as long as I can remember, in that I can read equations and see through them rather like a window, it isn't the same sort of raw calculation of arithmetic though, much more geometrical.

Callista, I never had to practice to draw and paint like I do, or to do my savant thing in the law, either. I just see it and can do it - no practice necessary. Like Daniel Tammett recites pi.

That is a very interesting observation. I can't do math. I was a math savant until about age 13, when my large pony ran me under our back porch at a gallop, uphill, and hit my head on a crossbeam, and fell off backwards over the tail.

I was always hyperlexic and didn't lose that, and I have no idea how young my artistic savant abilities might have started, since I didn't even have art supplies until I was around 9-12 - after my mom took my chemistry set away for too much experimentation. (She got upset after I made rocket fuel for my friend next door so we could see his model rockets launch.)

Sometime after the loss of my math savant abilities, I began seeing not only words and letters in color pictures and with black letters on color backgrounds, but also "right answers." I forgot to better explain them to my Autism doctor - but you are right, I see them in geometric shapes. The black letters - word(s) / phrase(s) - and sometimes it comes as a 3-D picture, are on the moving colored shape thingie (different moving geometric shapes) I see.

It really doesn't matter what I am working on, I see "right answers" this way in almost any context I tend to work in. It is most useful for savant abilities in the law. Usually a "right answer" or a "right course of action" or a "right decision" just pops into my mind and it has shapes and colors and sticks out. This ability is similar to calendar calculators who can instantly know how many matchsticks fell on the floor from a container - no thinking process is required for me; I just see the "right answer." It materializes and then moves closer to me and changes shapes but not color (but I can see different colors for different "right answers," and colors also have emotions for me), until it stops and sits there, what I see in my mind - I have never been wrong, and I can do it at lightening speed, even one after another in rapid sequence.

My hubby the lawyer always says "how did you know that ?" It just happens in my Autistic savant synesthete mind. I can't really tell him how I know the "right answers" etc. - I can even do it in overlaying state and federal civil procedure and rules of evidence In-Real-Time. The constant "issue spotting" we are made to do in law school (a/k/a Autism Language Boot Camp), trained this talent even more. One of the opposing attorneys and a federal magistrate were so astounded when I did it in the courtoom once, they both let me get appx 7 items admitted and marked into evidence with no objections from anyone standing there with their mouths hanging open. It was utterly shocking they let me get the appx. 7 items admitted into evidence in under appx. 2 1/2 minutes. My run to to 'goal line' in the 2 1/2 minutes I was allowed amazed even me. I couldn't believe they let me do it and no one even objected or stopped me !

I don't know how that compares to other lawyers, but I'd say that was pretty fast.

I have also been criticized for being given 15 minutes to find "right answers" about appellate procedure, for getting the answer in about 2-3 minutes when thrown in the conference room -law firm law library and told to come up with an answer. Lawyers get mad because they want to bill the clients for the 15 minutes, not for only 2-3. But if it only takes me 2-3 minutes and I have the "right answer," why should I sit around going twiddle-dee ?

~Equiis

I'd never used a computer before. I discovered Photoshop and figured it out without the instruction manual in about a day.

I'm usually not good at following instructions because I don't know what the key terms mean , even when I do know what they are supposed to mean, if that makes any sense. Like I know what a DNS is but it doesn't really solidify as an idea.

I am hopeless with anything else like this but I instinctively got Photoshop straight away because its rules were totally obvious and self communicating.

I now use it to blend real images which I or my wife originate ourselves. People buy the stuff and I think they like it.

I don't think it is savantism .

I wouldn't want to do this for other people.

My NT wife likes this trait because I can do all her stuff as well.

I do get a bit bored editing images. We still have a cheap camera. You have to reverse engineer all the color and contrast and balance to what it should be, and it takes ages. With my wife's 3d stuff you have to flip it all about as well. The key thing is knowing what something should look like in the first place. I guess that goes for music and maths etc. because you instantly form an ideal to work from and all the rest is just messing with the techniques of expression and representation.



Does any ever get bored with aspects of things you can do well?

A savant has abilities that are on par with the 'best of the best' in the world, abilities that came naturally, such as your own. I believe, that in the actual definition for "savant", another requirement is that you are below average in almost all other areas. So, if you are truly an exceptional artist, you wouldn't be classified as a 'true savant', but more likely 'exceptional, with savant qualities, as a result of being on the spectrum'.

Oh, that's awesome. It looks like a galaxy, a symmetrical one.

Spazzergasm :

I thought they were ace.

I wonder how much natural symmetry is in a galaxy/universe.

There'd be less symmetry in the stars than in the patterns made by the forces of gravity. And the less resolution you looked at it with, the more symmetry. So, maybe some pretty chaotic stuff on the small scale looking very orderly on the large scale. Fractal-ish. (Speaking of which, that prime pattern really reminds me of fractals...)

I always wondered why spiral galaxies have spiral arms, instead of just having a more-or-less gradually decreasing number of stars as you go out from the center. I bet it has something to do with small asymmetries.

As a kid, I always used to wonder what it would look like if the universe itself were rotating, instead of expanding, because of how everything else below that level seems to move in circular or elliptical patterns. Apparently, somebody else had gotten to it first, as there's a rotating-universe model out there already. And before I was born, too. *sigh* Why do they never leave some of the good problems for me?

Spiral galaxies have spiral arms because they're floating in massive clouds of dark matter.

The rotation of the dark matter clouds keeps the outer edges moving faster than they would be otherwise, which causes the interior sections of the galaxy to build up a bar type structure as material both rains in, and is "flung" outwards.

The separation of different material densities, the effects of supernovas, and the effects of microgalactic structures merging into larger galaxies also play significant roles.

There is fractal structure in the convection patterns on a stars surface, the magnetic fields braiding their interior, the patterns the photons take on their brownian walks out to the surface (fun fact: it takes photons roughly a million years to reach the surface of the sun), I'm certain there is a droplet of dark matter at the core of the sun, which should have a much more symmetrical structure due to how smoothed out the interactions of a Spin 0 tetraquark would be.

The interesting thing is how much interaction such a locally deep gravity well would induce on the weak/gravitationally interactive dark matter and the fusion environment at the core, assuming the core hasn't gone out, and we're merely watching a layer of fusing ash burning it's way out as we speak, preparing for the stellar evolution to a red giant.

It's all very crisp in my head, and is what happens when I see the equations, and ponder the processes.

Btw, in a Godel solution of the EFE, i.e. a rotating Universe, you could follow a purely timelike path and complete a causal loop, which normally requires spacelike motion.

So you could head off somewhere, and meet yourself on the way back as you left.

Sorry, what's an ace?

It's an NT shorthand way of saying they are excellent.

It is card related . The ace in a pack of playing cards is generally given the highest value, although not always ( As you would probably predict, given their flexible social rules - a universe in themselves .)

They take the label given high value to the card and apply it to another context.

Hence a good fighter pilot can be referred to an "Ace".

Or

Something that is good can be "ace".


Does quantum physics / propensity for matter to self emerge translate into explaining how social rules/ behavior / new strands of language can spontaneously emerge with a seemingly complete integral set rules by which to structure conveyed multiple meanings and their order of significance in relation to context ?


Also putting is in "what is meaning" like a Heisenberg ? You can't measure meanings that accurately with an "is".

No, I think language and meanings derive from the neurology, structure, and functions of our brains - it is just that Autistics see everything in terms of physics.

I also like the pixel dot Galaxy representations. Very cool. I used to have a Spirograph I liked a lot.

I have been absent from my Online communities et al since my last comment. My computer was destroyed by others who don't like my Autistic savant nature. But I got a new computer and it is a very pretty red and very fast.