Encefalus

I found this interview in scientific american the other day: Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker

This interview is with Daniel Tammet, a world-known savant.

Daniel Tammet

For those of you who don’t know what a savant is, they are autistic people with extraordinary abilities. If you’ve seen the film Rainman, then you’ll understand what we are talking about. Dustin Hoffman represents in the movie the archetype of a savant. In fact, this movie was based on a real savant, Kim Peek.

The savant syndrome is defined by wikipedia as follows

Savant syndrome—sometimes abbreviated as savantism—is not a recognized medical diagnosis, but researcher Darold Treffert defines it as a rare condition in which persons with developmental disorders (including autism spectrum disorders) have one or more areas of expertise, ability or brilliance that are in contrast with the individual’s overall limitations.^[1] Treffert says the condition can be genetic, but can also be acquired,^[1] and coexists with other developmental disabilities "such as mental retardation or brain injury or disease that occurs before (pre-natal) during (peri-natal) or after birth (post-natal), or even later in childhood or adult life."^[1]

According to Treffert, about half of persons with savant syndrome have autistic disorder, while the other half have another developmental disability, mental retardation, brain injury or disease. He says, "…  not all savants are autistic, and not all autistic persons are savants."^[1] Other researchers state that autistic traits and savant skills may be linked,^[2] or have challenged some earlier conclusions about savant syndrome as "hearsay, uncorroborated by independent scrutiny".^[3]

Random image I found by googling "savant", apparently referring to a pen and paper rpg

What is so interesting about savants, is that while they have deficits in some basic areas of functioning, they have abilities, that the average human, can never be able even to approach. So, for example, Daniel Tammet which we cited above, has completed the following feats

• He holds the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes
• Tammet claims to speak eleven languages including English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh, and Esperanto.
• He learned Icelandic in one week

He is also a synesthetic, which means he has some of his senses tangled together. To make things clearer, Tammet, actually, (citing wikipedia) "experiences every integer up to 10.000 as having its own color, shape, texture and feel". He can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite. In his interview in scientific american he says

TAMMET: I have always thought of abstract information—numbers for example—in visual, dynamic form. Numbers assume complex, multi-dimensional shapes in my head that I manipulate to form the solution to sums, or compare when determining whether they are prime or not.

For languages, I do something similar in terms of thinking of words as belonging to clusters of meaning so that each piece of vocabulary makes sense according to its place in my mental architecture for that language. In this way I can easily discern relationships between words, which helps me to remember them.

In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my “friends.” I think this is why my memory is very deep, because the information is not static. I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather, I dance with them.

None of this is particularly surprising for me. I have always thought in this way so it seems entirely natural. What I do find surprising is that other people do not think in the same way. I find it hard to imagine a world where numbers and words are not how I experience them!

Timothy B Layden-Synesthesia 2007 

So, in Tammet’s mind, information is not abstract, but visual, and, in some strange way, "concrete". What is so amazing about synaesthesia, is that we can have no clue about what it feels like to be like that. It is a phenomenon that belongs purely to the hard problem of consciousness(Split Brains, Consciousness and Michael Gazzaniga). The feelings and procedures that accompany Tammet’s mind are unaccessible to us in a direct level.

Daniel Tammet, however, as a highly function autistic, gives us some descriptions of what is going on inside his mind, as in the interview cited above, but in no-way can we ever really "feel" what it feels like to be him.

All these abilities, however, come with some disorders. Tammet also suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome and epilepsy. Asperger’s Syndrome is a highly functional form of autism. It so highly functional, in fact, that many people can suffer from this syndrome without them or the others, ever realizing it. People with it can just be considered as eccentrics or strange, while not knowing that they suffer from it, can make their lives more difficult, while, however, allowing them to function in a modern society.

Hans Asperger

The savant mind is one of those cases that you know you’ve just stumbled upon something important. Savant minds break many of the barriers of human intelligence, and of the limitations we think that exist, because most of us live with these limitations. While many geniuses throughout time, like pop icons like Albert Einstein, have made discoveries that to most of us seem difficult to grasp, the thing that is amazing about savants, whatsoever, is that their skills are not focused on discoveries, but on raw ability.

However, while the savant mind, obviously causes awe, there are almost no clues, on what is really going on inside their brain to produce such results. Daniel Tammet has a theory of his own which he presents in his interview in Scientific American

LEHRER: You advocate a theory of creativity defined by a cognitive property you call "hyper-connectivity." Could you explain?

TAMMET: I am unusually creative—from visualizing numerical landscapes composed of random strings of digits to the invention of my own words and concepts in numerous languages. Where does this creativity come from?

My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’.

In most people, the brain’s major functions are performed separately and not allowed to interfere with one another. Scientists have found that in some brain disorders however, including autism and epilepsy, cross-communication can occur between normally distinct brain regions. My theory is that rare forms of creative imagination are the result of an extraordinary convergence of normally disconnected thoughts, memories, feelings and ideas. Indeed, such “hyper-connectivity” within the brain may well lie at the heart of all forms of exceptional creativity.

Kim Peek, the real "Rain Man"

While the theory is a psychological one, and it is highly interesting, nevertheless, I believe that when we encounter such amazing feats we also have to look into the brain in a neuronal level.

Cognitive psychology has always proposed a module theory of mind, meaning that the mind (and the brain thereafter) is seperated into different modules, that complete different functions. This could explain why savants can show extraordinary abilities on one domain, while impaired on others, since these domains, according to the theory, are not connected.

However, this doesn’t explain how savant abilities are formed in the first place.

The only thing we can say for now, is that savantism, is one the most amazing phenomena of the human brain. We can only hope that future research will shed more light into this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2009 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Cognitive, Consciousness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.