Savant Syndrome: Myth vs. Reality

Thu Nov 12 · Human Meaning

A man once gave the right answer to "how many seconds has someone lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old?" in 90 seconds, while reportedly able to understand almost nothing else that was complicated. [1]

Savant syndrome is a rare condition in which a person with a developmental disability or another central nervous system injury or disease has an "island of genius," a skill far above the rest of their abilities. Researcher Darold Treffert wrote in 2009 that as many as one in 10 autistic people have such skills, and that roughly half of all savants are autistic. Most autistic people are not savants. [1]

That's the short version. The movie version is better known and mostly wrong about the numbers.

Where did the Rain Man picture come from?

Treffert opens his 2009 review with a dry sentence: "the best-known autistic savant is a fictional one," Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 film Rain Man. [1]

The film had a real starting point. By Treffert's account, the savant who inspired the character had memorized over 6,000 books, could name every US area code, and could read a page with each eye at once. [1] That is a genuine person with a genuine, extremely rare mix of abilities. It's also one data point. One memorable character is a poor way to learn how a whole group of people works.

How common is savant syndrome?

Depends who you ask and how you count. The estimates run across a wide range:

[1][2] The spread isn't a scandal, just a reminder that "special skill" is a fuzzy line. Howlin's team defined it as "an outstanding skill/knowledge clearly above participant's general level of ability and above the population norm," and the answer shifts with the definition. [2] Their own conclusion: "unusual talents are found in at least a third of individuals with autism." [2]

What kinds of skills are we talking about?

Treffert says savant skills "generally narrow to five general categories": music (most often piano, with perfect pitch), art, calendar calculating, mathematics, and mechanical or spatial skills such as map making. [1] Whatever the skill, he wrote, "it is always linked to massive memory." [1]

Calendar calculating, which he calls "curiously an obscure skill in most persons," shows up a lot. Among 93 autistic adults whose parents answered Howlin's questionnaire, 24 had a parent-reported savant skill and 14 of those were calendrical calculators. [2]

Is savant syndrome only about autism?

No. In Treffert's words, "not all autistic persons have savant syndrome and not all persons with savant syndrome have autistic disorder." [1] The other half have other developmental disabilities or other kinds of brain injury or disease. [1]

The old name, coined by Dr J. Langdon Down in an 1887 London lecture, was a misnomer, Treffert writes, because almost all cases occur in people with an IQ above 40. "Savant syndrome" replaced it in the interest of accuracy and dignity. [1] Skills can also appear after the fact: Treffert describes "acquired" savant skills emerging in previously typical people after brain injury or disease, including older adults with frontotemporal dementia. [1]

What do we still not know?

Quite a lot. Treffert notes that memory alone cannot fully explain savant abilities, particularly calendar calculating and music, and that "many unanswered questions remain." [1] He estimated in 2009, "from my experience," that there were probably fewer than 100 known "prodigious savants," people whose skill would be spectacular in anyone, living worldwide. [1]

Howlin's study also trims a popular idea: contrary to earlier hypotheses, it found no indication that people with higher rates of stereotyped behaviours and interests were more likely to show savant skills. [2] That doesn't settle the question, but it cuts against a tidy story.

What does it look like in everyday life?

Savant skill is often much quieter than a film scene. The most common tier, Treffert writes, is "splinter skills": obsessive preoccupation with, and memorization of, things like music and sports trivia, license plate numbers, maps and historical facts. [1]

Plenty of us know the version where a friend can recite every route on the bus map, or you can name the year of every release in a series nobody else remembers. That's not a diagnosis, and it isn't what savant syndrome means, but it does sit in the same neighborhood as a narrow, bright beam of attention. Whatever the field, the pattern is the same: a lot of depth in one small place.

The cosmic part

Calendar calculators are reading a loop. The Gregorian calendar repeats exactly every 400 years, which contains 146,097 days. [3] Divide that by seven and you get 20,871 whole weeks, so every date lands on the same weekday it did 400 years earlier. That's arithmetic anyone can check.

If time is a flat circle, as a certain fictional detective keeps insisting, calendar calculators are people who can see where on the circle a day sits. The first account of savant syndrome in a scientific paper, published in a German journal in 1783, described the lightning calculator Jedediah Buxton, so numbers like these have been catching our attention for a long time. [1]

More long-form essays live at The Monotrope, our sister site, and more on science and what we're up to are close by.

Sources

1. Treffert, D. A. (2009). "The savant syndrome: an extraordinary condition. A synopsis: past, present, future." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364(1522), 1351-1357. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0326 (full text: PMC2677584)
2. Howlin, P., Goode, S., Hutton, J. & Rutter, M. (2009). "Savant skills in autism: psychometric approaches and parental reports." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364(1522), 1359-1367. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0328 (full text: PMC2677586)
3. Urban, S. E. & Seidelmann, P. K. (eds.) (2013). Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac, 3rd ed., chapter 15, U.S. Naval Observatory. https://aa.usno.navy.mil/downloads/c15_usb_online.pdf