Only 1 in 200 has a savant ability

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Earlier in another thread I used the term "savant" in relation to my own skills, as a tongue in cheek response to another post.

In reality, I have some very strange spikes of talent - where there is a complete effortless in relation to the performance of tasks in these areas.
I do not honestly view myself as "savant" but merely as an AS person who has some rather wonderful attributes.

I prefer a more conservative use of the word....where "spiked talent" is not confused with savantism.

I used to think i was a savant at playing dominoes, because i would beat everybody over and over again...and I am not even good at math...whenever we are going into a restaurant and asked "how many?"...I always think of there being one more....so if it's a party of 3, I will always think it is a party of 4...
But um...
Yeah...
With dominoes...even though i have had to re-learn it every time I played...I would always win...
But I haven't played in years...

lol, it reminds me of when there is a gay pride march and they have all these outrageous drag queens on the front page of the newspaper, when like 95% of the gay community went to the march in tennis shoes and khaki shorts. Yet that is the one thing that most commonly represents the community in people's minds.

There has been threads like that such as "What savant skill do you have?"

Spiked talent seems like a good term to use. I have such a spiked talent regarding the way I can solve certain types of very complex problems. A couple of other people on WP have implied a very similar mental ability - to think in graphical flows and patterns - virtually impossible to express in words. We literally see the problem transform into the solution graphically, a bit like analogue 3D mathematical graphs reshaping themselves. Other than that peculiar ability I'm fairly average in everything else.

Yes. It is a good term, I think. It implies the uneven pattern of abilities many of us present with. (I excel in some areas, but anything beyond basic maths is a complete struggle for me. It is as if the part of the brain that can cope with algebra and complex maths in the abstract, is completely non-existent. But in other areas i excel far beyond the norm.

Wow, that's kinda higher than I would've thought. And since NAS says that 1 in 100 people are autistic (or so I think I've heard that they said that), that means about 1 in 20,000 people have a savant ability.

1 in 10 only works if you use the broadest definition of "savant"--that is, someone who learns something with very little effort or at an unusually young age. Most of us would refer to these as "splinter skills", and quite a few of us have them, they're not the sort of thing you'd consider amazing. It's more like, "Hey, check this cool thing I can do."

The 1:200 ratio is for the obvious, extreme form of savant syndrome, where not only can they do something unusually easily and well at an early age, but the skill would be unusual for anybody, even with practice.

I doubt that I have a Savant ability, the only thing that could qualify is my ability to detect problems in the way people (including myself) write, words that aren't right, words that could be replaced. Things like that. I've always been able to do that. I think it's more "spiked talent" than a Savant ability. I'm not skilled enough in anything to qualify for that.

Tossing out statistics such as this, without any explanation of how they are derived, is meaningless. Different readers will have greatly differing concepts of what a savant actually is, and the BBC journalist provides (amateurishly) no description.

People have posted on WP, and I believe this is accurate, that in the general population 1 in 10,000 people have perfect pitch. If you are 1 in 10.000, are you a savant? Or do you need to be one in a million, or one in a billion? If 1 in 10,000 qualifies then already 1 in 20 autists are savants if the information presented here is correct, i.e., that 1 in 20 autists have perfect pitch.

In any event, I personally prefer the term gifted, because such talents seem to me to be gifts. Lord knows we have enough deficits.