Savants
2–7–17, Adil
Alright fam, this week I shall dive into a topic that truly blows my mind: savants. The condition of being a savant is, aptly, savant syndrome. You’re all familiar with the idea — it generally refers to someone with exceptional brilliance, typically in one of 5 broad areas: arithmetic, art, music, spatial skills, and/or calendar calculations (examples to follow). However, as we’ll discuss, there are other categories too, such as languages. The kicker is that these gifts usually come at a cost; a lot of times savants are incapable of really simple physical or social tasks. About half of savants are on the autism spectrum, and other half have some sort of central nervous system injury/disorder. Acquired savant syndrome refers to the gaining of prodigious abilities after a severe blow to the head or similar injury.
A quick note on some hypothesized neurological mechanisms: it is thought that savant syndrome results from damage to the left anterior temporal lobe. This is a relatively big chunk of brain that does a lot of stuff. I only bring it up so that I can explain something cooler — experiments have shown that we can actually induce savant-like abilities in normal people by temporarily inhibiting this brain region. In super simple terms, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a technique where you basically use a magnet to induce electrical changes in the cortex, temporarily and harmlessly disabling a part of the brain (downside: you can’t be too specific in your targeting). As you can imagine, this is fun for science. It sounds like “savant-like abilities” is a bit of a stretch, though — from my reading of this review paper it basically sounds like people get temporarily better (but not amazing) at drawing, proofreading, guessing how many of X item there are in a picture (“numerosity”, e.g. guess the number of dots on a screen that you only see for 1.5 seconds), solving puzzles, and reducing false memories. Still pretty cool though. The same review also argues that savants do their magic by gaining access to lower-level processing that “normal” people can’t consciously access.
The best and most fun way to talk about this is with actual examples, so without further ado, lets get to it.
- Jedediah Buxton
Let’s start with one of the OG savants, our friend Jed. Jed was born in Elmton, Britain, in 1707, and was/is famous for his mental calculations. He measured the area of the whole lordship of Elmton just by walking over it — but not only did he measure it in acres (it was a few thousand, about 4 square km), but also square inches. Wow you say, that’s ridiculous. But he goes one step further: he converted from square inches to “square hairs’-breadths, reckoning forty-eight to each side of the inch.” Another example is when he calculated the product of a farthing (British unit of currency equal to 1/4 of a penny) doubled 139 times. So yeah I guess this is almost the same as just starting at 1 and then doubling, but the “farthing” adds a nice touch of old-ness and Britishness. Anyway, he calculated this number correctly — and the number had 39 digits. And then, he multiplied this number by itself, just because he could. Later in life, he walked to London (lol) where his skills were tested and approved by the Royal Society of London. Nice work, Jed.
2. Leslie Limke
Leslie Lemke was born in Wisconsin in 1952, and he is an autistic savant famous for his musical talents. He had a pretty horrible start to life, as he was born with severe birth defects necessitating the removal of both of his eyes. His mom gave him up for adoption, and a 52-year old nurse (who was raising 5 other kids) adopted him when he was 6 months old. Leslie had to be force-fed to learn how to swallow. He couldn’t stand until he was 12. He finally learned to walk by age 15, after his mom strapped his fragile body to her own and taught him step-by-step, literally. But at 16 (though Wikipedia says 14), Leslie started ballin’ out. Apparently, in the middle of one night, mom woke up to find Leslie flawlessly playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto № 1 after hearing it just once on the television earlier (he had no classical music training). After this, he went on to play all kinds of music, from “ragtime to classical,” always only needing to listen to music once before playing it on his own perfectly. He has even been known to compose songs on the spot, singing baritone — despite his verbal IQ of 58. He gave many concerts around the world before his health declined (still alive though).
3. Kim Peek
Kim is the OG Rain Man. Like literally, the movie is based on this real human being. Kim was born with FG syndrome (a genetic disorder causing severe intellectual problems and developmental delays), along with some other wild brain problems. In addition to macrocephaly (abnormally large head), he also had damage to the cerebellum and — get this — was missing his corpus callosum. This is the massive bundle of white matter that connects the 2 hemispheres of your brain. He was also missing other minor hemisphere-connecting fibers, such as the anterior commissure.
The doc told Kim’s father to put him in a mental institution and leave him alone, but luckily he didn’t do this. Kim was severely disabled in some ways until his death at age 58 in 2009 (heart attack) — for example, he was unable to button his shirt (presumably because of his cerebellar damage) and clocked in well below average on IQ tests. But the dude had a legit super power. Fantastically, he could read extremely fast, because he could read the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye (I assume this is somehow related to his lack of corpus callosum). He would finish lengthy books in an hour and, better yet, retain everything he read. Kim could accurately recall content of over 12,000 books.
4. Daniel Tammet
This homie seriously blows my mind. I can’t do him justice in one paragraph, but I’ll hit the highlights. Danny boy is an autistic savant, and a wizard with both numbers and words. He’s currently 38 years old.
Let’s start with numbers. Dan also has a neurological condition called synesthesia which some of you may know about. Most relevant for Dan’s case, synesthesia basically allows him to attach visuals and emotions with numbers in a way that non-synesthetes simply can’t (other forms of synesthesia allow people to taste words, associate sounds with color, etc — really wild stuff, will save for another fun fact). So, “in his mind, Tammet says, each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, color, texture and feel. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi, though not an integer, as beautiful.” Speaking of pi, one of Dan’s most impressive feats: on March 14, 2004 (pi day, of course), he spent 5 hours and 9 minutes reciting 22,514 digits of pi from memory. [Side note: surprisingly, this is just the European record. Rajveer Meena recited 70,000 digits (!!!!) in India in 2015. A Japanese dude also claimed to recite 100k digits in 2006, but this was not verified by Guinness World Records.] Anyway, back to Dan: he’s also wicked at arithmetic. In the video below (starting at 1:00, watch him work out 37⁴ and then 13/97 to more decimal places than the calculators; he says he can go to ~100 decimal places).
The fascinating thing with both his pi feat and these calculations is that he doesn’t really seem to be “calculating” — it’s more effortless; he’s just “seeing the numbers…seeing pictures, shapes, patterns…” You can hear him describe this in the video.
Now for words. Dan can learn any language in about a week. He knows at least 10 languages. To test this, Channel Five documentary gave him seven days to learn Icelandic, and then Daniel was successfully interviewed one week later in Icelandic on Icelandic national television. Ridiculous.
Scientists love Daniel because he can actually describe what he’s seeing/doing in his brain while he performs insane feats, unlike most others who simply say “it just comes to me, I have no idea how it happens.” His combination of synesthesia and Asperger’s is probably part of what makes him so amazing.
5. Stephen Wiltshire
As a child, Stephen was mute. After being diagnosed with autism, he was sent to a school for children with special needs, and here he discovered his passion for drawing. Today, he is a world-famous architectural artist. He has one particularly impressive skill: he can draw an accurate and detailed landscape of a city from memory after seeing it just once. Here he is drawing Tokyo on a huge 32.8 foot-long canvas after a helicopter ride over the city:
As another example, he did a 19-foot drawing of 305 square miles of NYC after a single 20-minute helicopter ride. He has also created huge canvas drawings of Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai, Jerusalem, London, and Rome. Speaking to his level of detail, in his drawing of Rome, he had the exact correct number of columns in the Pantheon. Baller.
6. Alonzo Clemons
As a toddler, Alonzo suffered a severe brain injury resulting in developmental delays. His IQ is in the 40–50 ballpark, but ‘Zo is a sensational sculptor. He can create small clay sculptures of almost any animal, usually in under 20 minutes, even if he has only seen a glimpse of it on TV. Moreover, he can create an anatomically-accurate 3D clay rendering of an animal after just looking at the 2D image for mere moments. He’s also famous for a life-size horse sculpture, but most of his work focuses on the smaller stuff.
7. Orlando Serrell
In 1979, 10-year-old Orlando got smacked in the head with a baseball, giving him acquired savant syndrome. Pop quiz: guess where in the head he was hit? Yep, on the left side — reminiscent of the left anterior temporal lobe, right? For a while, Orlando had headaches, but after they stopped, he discovered a funky new talent: if you list any random date from any year after the day he got hit, he can immediately tell you the day of the week, the weather, and something he did that day. Now, it looks like he’s also getting good at any year before 1979 too (see video below). The best part is, the dude himself seems surprised that he can do this — when you watch him answer these questions, he just shakes his head… it looks like he’s thinking “oh my god this is so weird, why am I getting these right.” He really can’t explain how he does it. Definitely recommend checking out this video.
Other cool, similar ideas:
- Einstein syndrome: super smart people who experience a delay in speech development. Named after ya boi Albert, but other notable examples include Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (shoutout @mehulerooni) and “father of the hydrogen bomb” Edward Teller.
- Child prodigies: you know what this is. In psychological literature, it’s formally defined as any kid under age 10 who produces meaningful output comparable to an adult expert (no trauma or autism component). So yeah, some differences versus savants. This could be a whole fun fact on its own.
- Hyperthymesia: condition where one has extremely good autobiographical memory. Like, to the point where you can vividly remember every day of your life after age 10–15, and you’re so caught up in the past that you can barely function in the present. Spooky stuff, also worthy of a fun fact of its own.
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