In autistic savants, like Matt, the problems are more pervasive. Many savants are left-handed, and most have deficits in language – additional clues that something is amiss in the left hemisphere. These tasks draw primarily on the strengths of the brain's right hemisphere, indicating that, in many savants, a healthy right hemisphere is overcompensating for damage to the left. In every culture, the enhanced skills of savants cluster in the same narrow domains: numerical and calendar calculation, artistic and musical proficiency, mechanical aptitude, and feats of memorization. 'Monday's child,' he says, 'fair of face.'įor savants, asking for a birth date is a common way of introducing themselves.

Scanning the menu, he exclaims, 'Soy sauce on salmon, that's triple s!' After the salmon arrives, he asks me my birthday – December 23, 1957. The unusual timbre of his mind is immediately apparent. He doesn't so much sit in a chair as climb around it. Four and a half feet tall, with huge brown eyes that seem to devour whatever he focuses on, Matt is as restless physically as he is mentally. I meet Matt and his mother, Diane, both fresh from a TV appearance, for lunch at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. By finding out how savants work, we learn how we work.'

'Now we have to acknowledge that the disk comes with software, that we were wrong in many of our assumptions about intelligence, and that the brain is much more capable of healing itself than we thought. 'We used to have this idea that we were born with a magnificent piece of hardware in our heads and a blank disk called memory,' says Treffert. The traditional conception of the brain – two hemispheres that are hardwired from birth – is yielding to an understanding of the ways the regions of the cortex learn to function together as a network. We're learning that the extraordinary skills of savants tap into areas of the mind that function like supercomputers, compiling massive amounts of data from the senses to create a working model of the world. As these two paths of investigation converge, many of our long-held notions about the limits of human potential are being overturned.īy studying the minds of people like Matt, neuroscientists are discovering that savants are more like the rest of us than the medical world once believed.

Now researchers are probing the savant mind from the inside, using tools like gene mapping and PET scans. Until recently, much of what we knew about savants came from the observations of clinicians like Treffert and neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of An Anthropologist on Mars and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Geneious 10 key