Aspie Savant?

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Glider,

Thanks for clarifying this. That's what I believed must be the case. By the strict definition of "spectrum," savant characteristics appear to be a spectrum of sorts. On that spectrum I'd put myself somewhere around talented or splinter skill, depending on which skill we are talking about. (But then on other dimensions, I'd have to say I fall in a range from "average" to "disfunctional" ... )

FWIW, I've also recently run across a variety of other diagnoses that are being described as "spectrum disorders." For clarity, they are not "autism spectrum disorders." Rather, they are "disorders" of other types, such as "depression spectrum disorders," "anxiety spectrum disorders," and "obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders," to name just a few.

I am a teacher. That is a whole separate area of how I do that being Aspish. Anyway, I taught hfa kids and had one kid in my class with savant drawing skills. He is 12 and draws very complex trains, planes, trucks, ships with perfect 2- point perspective. Reminds me of Steven Wiltshire, who I saw on 60 Minutes. He is just amazing, and I haven't seen any ASD kids that were at all similar. OTOH, I read at 3 years old without any instruction.My cousin, now in his 20s, took apart mechanical things at 2 or 3. I think that sort of thing is pretty similar on the spectrum.But these things seem a little different than this kid's ability.

--des

That is called talent which many (but not a high number of) people have, not savant.

I remember an NT kid in my class from grade 7-9 who was a exceptional artist in that age - just like the kid you described. It is "nothing" special.

Savants have ABNORMAL skills:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXG-1YLGAS0[/youtube]

Largely I think they seem different due to the ease with which one can objectively rate skill or talent in the performance of the feat. Imagine you could build a working cold fusion reactor that could power the entire planet using one carload of fuel a week. But you don't know how to put the spatial diagram in your head and the models of the principles involved into a form that anybody else would understand. All anybody sees when they look at you is a low functioning autistic.

Is skill defined by what one outwardly projects only? An external party needs to validate a performance before it becomes a skill? Validation of a performance requires somebody else who is close enough to the performer to understand the context in which things happen. Think about seeing people play a sport for the first time. Your sensory organs know how to take in sensory data, but your brain has to decide the context with which to interpret it. How do you judge which players are better than others if you don't have any understanding of the context? You might create your own value system just to keep yourself engaged. Or finding yourself not engaged, you dismiss the whole affair as without merit.

When you have an audience to perform for, who attempt to evaluate your performance externally and who support and encourage you in your development even if they mainly engage with the performer rather than what they perform, the constructive environment may escalate what might have stayed dormant into something that gets called savantism.

Savants have ABNORMAL skills but what he demonstrates in the clip you post are well developed party tricks. The performance he does for the Late Show is related, even shows glimpses of it, but is that the savantism? No. The ability of the savant is in the ease with which they absorb data related to the things they take a strong interest in and the accuracy it retains over time. The ability the savant has to intuitively predict new rules about the system with a higher degree of accuracy than the normal learning range.