What is your savant skill?

Post Reply New Topic

none

Walking encyclopedia on history (especially sports history)

I'm not surprised to see that most people are saying they don't have savant skills. They are supposed to be really rare among autistic people (maybe 1 in 100).

I would call my skill more of a "knack" than a savant skill: spotting visual errors. My mom said when I was a toddler, I would walk/crawl toward anything that was even slightly different in a room: something that was moved, a new thing that was small. I'm still that way, which can be handy for debugging things. My colleagues would sometimes hand me their code to find an error in it. It doesn't help with some things (like math errors, which I think use a different part of the brain). It also tends to make me panic if anybody moves something of mine when I'm not around: it's like the object ceased to exist. I'll be freaking out about my missing mouse when it's only a couple of feet away.

I thought they were MUCH more common among autistic people than 1 in 100, more like 10 in 100 or even 30 in 100, depending on how you define things. Also there are different levels of "savant" skills, with full-fledged "prodigy"-level skills being less common than just "talented" savant skills.

What makes someone a "savant" (the older term for it was "idiot-savant") is having a spiky ability profile, being very good at some things but very bad at other things. Although not all autistic people are like this, it is much more common among autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people than among NT's.

At some point I'll write a blog post about this, with links to scientific journal articles.

Anyhow, I was definitely a musical savant as a child. I figured out, on my own, how to play the piano by ear -- first just melodies, then chords -- at around the same time I belatedly learned how to talk, at around age 4. However, I never got formal musical training, and I'm out of practice these days, so I'm not an especially talented musician today.

My lifelong areas of talent (though certainly not prodigy-level) have been math and analytical thinking.

EDIT: My experiences have led me to suspect that potential savant skills are much more common than actual savant skills. For example, I could not have figured out how to play the piano if there were not a piano in the house -- and my parents were very lucky to have that piano, which was a hand-me-down gift; they could not have afforded it on their own. Also my parents did a lot to help me develop mathematical skill. So I was very lucky, in crucial ways. Many, probably most, autistic children are not nearly as lucky. So I figure there are probably a lot of autistic children who could have developed the same skills I did, but who didn't develop them due to lack of opportunity.

well, this was a one-off, so I didn't count it before, but if we're looking for odd flashes of potential genius of the mind-trick variety...

One time at work, about three of us were gathered around the boss and he had a big (like over 100 pages) report printout in his hand and he needed to find one thing in it. So he sort of flicked hopelessly through the pages, and halfway through I saw the word he was looking for and said "there it is". Nobody else had seen it because he was flicking too fast to actually read anything, but he stopped and went back to that page and I was right.
They all looked at me weirdly, like "how did you do that?"
But I still don't know how I picked one word out of hundreds within a few milliseconds

Ever since then I've wondered whether savant skills may only work their magic on a subconscious level, so that the savant themselves would be unable to explain how they do what they do. And possibly I might have a little bit of savant skill related to visual pattern-matching which I'm not aware of using?

But when I see a true savant skill in action - like human calculators and the like - I have nothing like that.
And then I decide that one episode was just a fluke, or just related to me having learned to read when very young.

When you read up about autistic savants, there is often an element of synaesthesia involved. For instance, I read "Born on a Blue Day" by Daniel Tammet and it's clear he has strong synaesthesia in the way he visualises numbers. Also, when they studied the brain of Albert Einstein they discovered some unusual wiring, with the numbers part of the brain connected to the visual processing part, which suggests synaesthesia also.

So I don't believe true savant abilities are very common, even amongst autistics, because not many of us experience synaesthesia.
However, many autistics have either great memory or advanced pattern-matching skills - just not to a savant level.

I’m definitely not a savant... but I have described my skill at drawing animals specifically as “savant-like”. I am also very good at doing simpler math calculations inside my head.

No Doubt .

i think the Savant Abilities are Often Individuals Barely Scraping Being Able to Communicate on a Basic Level . Kim Peek For Example (The Real Life Rain Man) ..

i think This is Linked to a Deep Submergance in a Singular Activity . Because Said Individuals are Clearly Limited in Social Skills . Their Time isn't Compromised Integrating into the Mainstream .

The More Social or Conventional You are The Further You are Distracted From Masterry of Anything . Some of it is Natural Ability , Some Being Rapid Growth in Specific Area .

Your post reminded me of something: I have a bit of this skill with numbers, but only when they are in matrices (linear algebra form). For some reason, I always see them as a dimensional sub space set that I can manipulate much like a rubrics cube. Each operation gave a different color code to a transformation. This was the most natural math for me to learn.

When I was young, I was once challenged to solve a 50x50 by hand by my math teacher. No cheating with a computer. At the time, most computers available to me would not have been useful for this anyway. She thought no one would do it as it was a very tedious process. I had to show all work for it to count. It took me a few weeks to do but I did solved it in my spare notebook just for fun. She never challenged me after that point.

I just assumed everyone could do this, they just chose not to. It can be adapted for solving crystal structures using symmetry operations. Most undergraduate chemistry students struggle learning how to use this skill in inorganic chemistry classes, but I could do it with ease. It has been a while since I have used it, so I may be a bit rusty on it now.

Meh don't have one...

And if I did/do its intellectualism

surprisingly stupid in many ways, surprisingly bright academically.....talk about incongruancy

Other than intualectualism don't have one....

Ha! When I saw the thread title I thought "I'm not a savant in anything! Oh, wait -- I wonder if synaesthesia counts?!"

I have many forms of synaesthesia including coloured letters, words, and numbers, and spatial-shape-sound connections. I was able to learn multiplication, arithmetic, and algebra at a very early age because I could see colour patterns in the numbers and letters. I remember the birthdate and phone number of everyone I ever met in childhood because of the "colours". I was able to study and memorise vast amounts of information by placing it in various spots of my spatial / temporal memory (hard to explain). I use synaesthesia purposefully at times but it's always there involuntarily whether I'm consciously memorising or not. The connections I make from synaesthesia never change - so I can easily recall information years later just by flipping through my colour-spatial rolodex in my mind to trigger a memory.

In otherwords, outside of the social arena I am smarter than I look...but savant I am not.

Have you ever tried coding information using music songs before? Try it out sometime if you have not. You may have this ability. I got it to work on things that I want to lock away from active use. The songs become like a combination that I must hear in order to reach those thoughts/ideas.

Ok - I was thinking "nothing for me" but . . .

Weird thing I could do at school -
when I was in high school I was able to solve Geometric Proofs the teacher said we couldn't solve because we hadn't learned the necessary sub-proofs. I used a 3 way proof by contradiction - divided up the problem into "right angle, acute angle and obtuse angle" and proved a contradiction for two thus proving the third.
Not very like Rain Man.
I had been very lousy at math up until that point - elementary school math was just a mess. I never learned my multiplication tables, but Geometry was super easy or obvious - and even fun. I could do algebra and calculus well if I could picture it in my head - and I can picture most things 3d, sometimes even 4d. But if I cannot picture I cannot do it. I would often look at the problem, "see" the answer, then "prove" my "hunch".
I would still get random things wrong by spontaneously switching "+" with "-" and other things like that.
Math classes that required a lot of memorization - like differential equations were much harder for me.
I was able to solve another problem the teachers couldn't figure out in high school that had to do with the computer and geometry. I think that one irritated them.

I've never tried that purposefully but it sounds like something I'd be able to do. I associate certain colours with songs, to the extent that whenever an old favourite is playing my daughter asks me what colour it is. Everything by the Psychedelic Furs is pink but most bands have different colours per song. I also get sensations of weather or smells and scents related to music. It's common for me to associate humidity with some songs even though there's no obvious connection. I like the idea about coding more information into music so I'll have to try that. Normally I code things with visual imagery. For instance I picture specific places from my life in response to each thread on WP and those never vary.