Actual Experiment to Stimulate Savant Skills

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This is a link to an article from Wired Magazine about an actual experiment that stimulates the brain to simulate savant skills: >LINK<

Before you assume anything, I already know that autism does not usually include savant skills. What are your thoughts?

if there is any usefulness to this at all, it will be milked for all its worth by business and intellligentsia.

I think a big part of savant skills is a matter of your focus.

This is probably one of the main reasons why autism is linked to savant skills - because of intense interests and a long attention span, which encourages an autistic person to expend a great deal of effort to develop a fairly unusual area of ability.

Similarly, the link between frontotemporal dementia and creativity is because people with FTD have a loss of inhibitions, and many people could be highly creative but they automatically inhibit 'irrelevant' thoughts.

I agree that it's a matter of long term focus. When I say long term I mean years and decades. I just don't understand why people who research this stuff fail to understand why people develop some of the these skills that really have little or no practical value in modern times. Why would someone calculate calendar days in their head when they can look up days of the week for any date on a cell phone? Or whip out your calculator and find the answer to 59385 x 93563 in 10 seconds instead of doing it in your head? Because the process of repetitive practice and arriving at the answer feels good. It feels better than the things that make most people feel good so they focus on it. Most people develop social skills. Why? Because of the intrinsic pleasure they derive from socialization.

Maybe they can zap the brain to simulate 'savant skills' but would the person still be neurotypical or something else? I guess zapped brain syndrome will have to be left to the folks who put together the DSM 8. Kind of funny if you think about it- A bunch of people trying to wipe out autism while others want to simulate autistic traits in 'normal' brains. Nothing is free, there is always a trade off.

Its nice to see that not all neuroscientists are willing to wipe away autism, but I think they need to spend less time researching the differences and more time understanding the similarities.

I.E. understand what makes NTs act like autistic Savants and vice versa. It's hard to diagnose anyone who died before the 50s only because we rely too much on the diagnosis itself. Autism branches out into spaces of science we are only beginning to understand as a whole, and most doctors are still using mostly speculation.

Its like when we didn't know what caused stomach aches, so we blamed an imp in the belly. We need to stop pondering over that imaginary imp(our differences) and start understanding biology a little bit better (and biology is a metaphor for the autistic spectrum and neuroscience.)

In simpler terms; why not research how people DON'T get autism? That might answer some more important questions.