NEUROTYPICAL SYNDROME
Neurotypical is a label for nonautistic people. Neurotypical syndrome (NT) is a neurobiological disorder characterized by a preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity. By autistic standards, the “normal” brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Normal people are good at “folk psychology” (social interactions), and people with Asperger’s are interested in “folk physics” (how things work). Neurotypical is only one kind of brain wiring, and, when it comes to hi-tech, quite possibly an inferior one.
Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space. Autistics find most neurotypical people annoying and illogical.
There is no known cure for neurotypical syndrome.
The general public and the hiring companies don’t understand autistic people. Many fall through the cracks due to their “odd” behaviours despite having so much to contribute if given the chance.
Traits associated with Asperger’s syndrome are observed, in milder versions, in many so-called neurotypical people. One often sees Asperger-like traits in family members of people with autism: a father who is a computer programmer with poor social skills, an eccentric uncle, and other family members with depression or anxiety. Often, these “shadow syndromes” acquire no specific label or diagnosis.
ASPERGER INTELLIGENCE
Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk — what unites these exceptional individuals? It is widely accepted that all were/are geniuses, but there is something else. Neuroscientists believe that all suffered/suffer from Asperger’s syndrome. Applying these characteristics to famous or historical figures may allow a better understanding of the significant positive impact great Asperger’s ancestors have left behind toward an enlightened and improved society and world.
The whole definition of the term “neurological disorder” implies that something is going wrong in the brain. However, there is a growing recognition of the fact that when it comes to the processes in our brain, “going wrong” does not necessarily mean “going bad”. Our brain is too complicated a mechanism to be interpreted in simplistic terms. Some neurological disorders produce a peculiar state of mind often associated with high artistic and scientific achievements.
A distinctive cluster of aptitudes, skills, attitudes, and abilities are part of autistic intelligence. They can see things and events around them from a new point of view. This ability can, in favourable cases, lead to exceptional achievements which others may never attain. Hans Asperger may have been the first clinician to notice that his patient’s imaginations occasionally anticipated developments in science by decades, forcing him to amend his statements that their interests were “remote” from real-world concerns.
Children with autism have trouble relating and interacting with the world around them. However, they may also possess unique strengths which may help them thrive in their chosen careers later on. Some areas in which children with autism commonly have average or above-average skills are specialist knowledge in a particular area, good visual and spatial memory, methodical and organized, ability to understand abstract concepts, and problem-solving/logical reasoning.
Some people with Asperger’s are visual thinkers and others are math, music, or number thinkers, but all think in specifics. The Asperger’s mind enjoys and focuses on details, while the normal mind is more skilled at assembling whole concepts from details. Individuals with Asperger’s syndrome may do poorly in school, but their interests are likely very narrowed and focused.
Autistic children want to figure out how things work, rather than art, they study biology, chemistry, and physics. Kids formerly ridiculed as nerds and brainiacs have grown up to become the architects of our future. People with autism, dyslexia and other cognitive differences make contributions to society that so-called normal people are incapable of making. The tribe of industrious hermits invented the modern digital world.
These activities focus their minds and provide a sense of comfort for them. If they are forced to leave their projects, they may become distressed. Likewise, if their projects are failing. Fostering these narrowed interests is important for emotional and mental support.
Rather than being considered a normal child trapped within an “autistic shell,” waiting to be rescued, Asperger’s is “a way of being” that colours every experience, sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter, every aspect of existence.
1. Hyperfocus. Hyperfocus is an inherent neurophysiological anomaly – the perpetual and unrelenting state of intense single-minded concentration fixated on one thought pattern at a time, to the exclusion of everything else, including one’s own feelings. Hyperfocus is the underlying factor responsible for the autistic person’s withdrawal into an inner world that is entirely mental.
Hyperfocus keeps a person’s awareness trapped in the intellectual/analytical left frontal lobe with little ability to access whatever may be happening in the right frontal lobe, where emotions and social connectivity are felt. Autistic hyperfocus explains most traits of Asperger syndrome.
The connection of autism and genius implies that children with the syndrome inherit a double dose of the extreme ability to concentrate – to narrow their attention to a very fine point, like a searchlight, to illuminate with great intensity a very small matter.
Hyperfocus produces an excellent rote memory and intense interest in one or two subjects. They absorb every available fact concerning their chosen field and talk about it at length, regardless of the listener’s interest.
2. Abstraction ability is a prerequisite for scientific endeavours. For success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential. For success, the necessary ingredient may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simply practical, an ability to rethink a subject with originality to create in new untrodden ways.
The autistic mind is like a vehicle streamlined for rapid passage through the fluid of thought, capable of maneuvering with little outside friction. But in the social terrain, streamlined concentration became awkward and unwieldy.
3. Pattern recognition. Another symptom of Asperger’s syndrome is the amazing ability to recognize patterns. Often these individuals’ brains are trying to make sense of their surroundings, so a break in the pattern may show itself quite clearly.
This ability may be evident in childhood, as early schooling develops the neural pathways of pattern recognition. While children with Asperger’s syndrome may find the school setting difficult and struggle with their grades, pattern problems like math and art may be very enriching. Fostering this natural talent is a great idea
4. Photorealistic thinking. In her book, The Autistic Brain, Temple Grandin presents three types of specialized thinking. They are the photorealistic visual thinkers who think the way she does, math/pattern thinkers, and word thinkers. For autistic and photo-realistic visual thinkers, such as Grandin, understanding comes from being able to see and work through a concept in images, creating what is in effect, a virtual reality program that plays out in the brain. In this manner, Grandin, who didn’t speak until she was almost 4, conceptualized down to minute details her design for a humane livestock restraint system now used on nearly half of the cattle in the U.S.
“When I said that early stuff, I didn’t realize how different my thinking was. I was doing a lot of construction projects in the early 90s. Before I attempt any construction, I draw something and test-run the equipment in my imagination. I could draw the layout for a meat-cutting line and could make the conveyors move. I visualize my designs being used in every possible situation, with different sizes and breeds of cattle and in different weather conditions. Doing this enables me to correct mistakes before construction”.
”Visual thinking is an asset for an equipment designer. I am able to ‘see’ how all the parts of a project fit together and see potential problems”. She began to think of herself as having a powerful digital workstation in her head, capable of running instantaneous searches through a massive library of stored images and generating 3-D videos from the sketches on her drafting table.
Likewise, Nicola Tesla, possibly the greatest inventor of all time, was a photorealistic visual thinker. He embarked on his career as an inventor when he discovered that he could visualize theoretical machines in minute detail and even set them running in his mind, tweaking his design as parts wore out. “I needed no models, drawings, or experiments,” Tesla recalled in his memoir. “I could picture them all as real . . . It is absolutely immaterial to me whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop. I even note if it is out of balance.”
5. Use of logic. Thought processes are confined to a pedantic, literal, and logical chain of reasoning. Temple Grandin said “I like the really logical way that I think. I’m totally logical. In fact, it kind of blows my mind how irrational human beings are,” She said. “If you totally get rid of autism, you’d have nobody to fix your computer in the future.”
6. Quantifiable data, highly organized systems, and complex machines fascinate many autistic people. It runs like a half-hidden thread through autism.
7. Intense curiosity. Autistics have a distinctive persona – that of an irrepressibly curious observer of society from the outside, an “anthropologist on Mars,” as Temple Grandin put it.
8. Accept nothing on faith. Asperger’s people have the potential to become innovators in their field of interest precisely because they were constitutionally unable to take things on faith.
9. Imagination. Some autistic people use imagination and a fantasy life to create another world in which they are more successful. In their imaginary worlds with imaginary friends, children with AS are understood, and successful socially and academically. Another advantage is the responses of the imaginary friends are under the child’s control and the friends are instantly available. Imaginary friends can prevent the child from feeling lonely. The child with AS may only have imaginary friends, and the intensity and duration can be qualitatively unusual.
Searching for an alternative world can lead some children to develop an interest in another country, culture, period of history, or the world of animals.
Sometimes the degree of imaginative thought can lead to an interest in fiction, both as a reader and author. Some children, especially girls, with AS can develop the ability to use imaginary friends, characters, and worlds to write some remarkable fiction. This could lead to success as an author of fiction for children or adults. For example, both Hans Christian Anderson and Lewis Carrol had Asperger’s syndrome.
The escape into imagination can be a psychologically constructive adaptation, but there are risks of other people misinterpreting the child’s intentions or state of mind. They may be seen as an inveterate ‘liar’. They do not lie to get out of something that they had done – this is not the problem, as they always told the truth very brazenly – but they tell long, fantastic stories, their confabulations becoming ever more strange and incoherent. In the fantastic stories, they may always be the hero.
THE WORLD WITHOUT ASPERGER’S PEOPLE
The world needs Asperger’s people. After all, the social people who sat around the campfire talking were probably not the makers of the first stone spear. It is also likely that most social people did not create the great culture of our civilization, such as literature, art, engineering, music, science, and mathematics. Genetics and biology provide the world with different kinds of minds. Whether or not these minds make great contributions to society is determined by both biology and the environment.
However, if the genes that caused autism were eliminated, there might be a terrible price to pay. Efforts to eradicate autism from the gene pool could put humankind’s future at risk by purging the same qualities that had advanced culture, science, and technological innovation for millennia. Persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses. If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants.
Most cases of autism are not rooted in rare de novo mutations but in very old genes that are shared widely in the general population while being concentrated more in certain families than others. Whatever autism is, it is not a unique product of modern civilization. It is a strange gift from our deep past, passed down through millions of years of evolution.
This is a list of famous people known or strongly suspected of having Asperger’s syndrome. It reads like a “who’s-who” of anyone who has made a significant contribution to science or the arts. Where would society be if none of these people lived?
Mathematicians, Physicists, Chemists, Biologists: Sir Isaac Newton, Henry Cavendish, Charles Darwin, Nikola Tesla, Marie-Curie, Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Barbara McClintock. Alan Turing, Carl Sagan.
Inventors, and Businessmen: Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, Temple Grandin, Steve Jobs. Bill Gates, Elon Musk.
Authors: Emily Dickinson, George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Isaac Asimov.
Children’s authors: Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll.
Artists: Michelangelo, Andy Warhol, Vincent Van Gogh, Wasily Kandinsky
Actors, and Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Hopkins, Dan Akroyd, Jerry Seinfeld, Daryl Hannah, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Michael Palin, Robin Williams.
Musicians, Composers. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ludwig Van Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Glenn Gould, Courtney Love, Susan Boyle, Michael Jackson, Ladyhawke, Adam Young, Bela Bartok, John Denver, Bob Dylan, James Taylor.
Others: Bobby Fischer, Greta Thurnberg.
EDUCATION
What is the best teaching method for them? Teach these children how to put their autistic intelligence to work. Create a comprehensive intervention program that emphasizes music, movement, and techniques to help integrate the confusing barrage of information from his senses. Find individualized approaches to education that would enable these children to make the most of their innate gifts while ensuring that they have the resources to cope with the challenges of their disabilities.
Patience is key – instead of comparing the arc of development to an idealized set of milestones, the children have to unfold at their own pace. Two steps forward and three back – and then one day, a hurtling leap into their own future, as if they’d been saving up. Little tasks become self-rewarding because they play to a classic autistic strength: pattern recognition.
SAVANTS
Savant syndrome is a rare condition in which someone with significant mental disabilities demonstrates certain abilities far in excess of average. The skills that savants excel at are generally related to memory. This may include rapid calculation, artistic ability, map making, or musical ability. Usually, only one exceptional skill is present.
Those with the condition generally have a neurodevelopmental disorder such as autism spectrum disorder or a brain injury. About half of the cases are associated with autism, and these individuals may be known as “autistic savants”. While the condition usually becomes apparent in childhood, some cases develop later in life. It is not recognized as a mental disorder within the DSM-5.
Savant syndrome is estimated to affect around one in a million people. The condition affects more males than females, at a ratio of 6:1. The first medical account of the condition was in 1783. Among those with autism, 1 in 10 to 1 in 200 have savant syndrome to some degree. It is estimated that there are fewer than a hundred savants with extraordinary skills currently living.
Signs and Symptoms
Savant skills are usually found in one or more of five major areas: art, memory, arithmetic, musical abilities, and spatial skills. The most common kinds of savants are calendrical savants, “human calendars” who can calculate the day of the week for any given date with speed and accuracy, or recall personal memories from any given date. Advanced memory is the key “superpower” in savant abilities.
Approximately half of the savants are autistic; the other half often have some form of central nervous system injury or disease. It is estimated that up to 10% of those with autism have some form of savant abilities,
Calendrical Savants. A calendrical savant is someone who – despite having an intellectual disability – can name the day of the week of a date, or vice versa, on a limited range of decades or certain millennia. The rarity of human calendar calculators is possibly due to the lack of motivation to develop such skills among the general population, although mathematicians have developed formulas that allow them to obtain similar skills. Calendrical savants, on the other hand, may not be prone to invest in socially engaging skills.
Mechanism
PsychologicaL. No widely accepted cognitive theory explains savants’ combination of talent and deficit. It has been suggested that individuals with autism are biased toward detail-focused processing and that this cognitive style predisposes individuals either with or without autism to savant talents. Another hypothesis is that savants hyper-systemize, thereby giving an impression of talent. Hyper-systemizing is an extreme state in the empathizing–systemizing theory that classifies people based on their skills in empathizing with others versus systemizing facts about the external world, the attention to detail of savants is a consequence of enhanced perception or sensory hypersensitivity in these unique individuals. It has also been confirmed that some savants operate by directly accessing low-level, less-processed information that exists in all human brains that is not normally available to conscious awareness.
Neurological. In some cases, savant syndrome can be induced following severe head trauma to the left anterior temporal lobe. Savant syndrome has been artificially replicated using transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily disable this area of the brain.
♦ Kim Peek. Rainman, the 1988 film in which Dustin Hoffman plays a savant named Raymond Babbitt who can memorize phone books and count toothpicks at a glance. Autism was thought to be rare and exotic and savants like Raymond were even rarer than that.
Kim Peek had been born with cranial bones that had failed to fuse properly in the womb, so at birth, part of his cortical tissue protruded through a baseball-sized blister at the back of his head. His brain also lacked a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of white matter that usually coordinates communication between the left and right hemispheres. A doctor told his parents that he was hopelessly retarded and belonged in an institution. But his parents refused.
As an infant, Peek began developing extraordinary cognitive capacities. By 18 months, he was memorizing every book his parents read to him, word for word. At three, he was able to look up words in the dictionary and sound them out phonetically. He was equally adept with numbers. He would read telephone books for fun and total up numbers on passing license plates. He has read some 12,000 books and remembers everything about them. He was eventually able to read two pages of a book simultaneously – one with his right eye and one with his left – even if they were held upside down or reflected in a mirror. When he finally learned to shave, he would close his eyes in front of the mirror because he couldn’t stand seeing the sides of his face reversed.
Permanently excluded from school for being disruptive, he mastered the high school curriculum with the help of tutors by the time he was 14. Taking a job at a sheltered workshop for disabled people, he performed complex payroll calculations without the benefit of an adding machine; one of his nicknames was “the Kimputer”. But Peek’s special abilities were not restricted to one or two narrow domains. He also remembers every music he has ever heard. He could also recall classical music scores note for note.
Peek’s father invited the director of the Bill films (played by Mickey Rooney), Barry Morrow, to enlist him in raising public awareness of intellectual disability. Peek reeled off the closing credits from Bill verbatim. As they went over mailing lists, Peek began correcting erroneous zip codes on the fly and was able to recite step-by-step driving instructions between any two points in the United States and Canada.
Kim can recall facts and trivia from 15 subject areas from history to geography to sports. Tell him a date, and Kim can tell you what day of the week it is.
Yet he was severely disabled, was unable to dress himself, cannot button his shirt, or attend to many of his basic needs without help. He tests well below average on a general IQ test.
To his parents and a small circle of friends, Peek was an eccentric marvel who spent most of his time alone in his room. To Morrow, he seemed like an extraordinary protagonist in search of a plot. He came up with the script for Rain Man, United Pictures was excited to make the movie and Dustin Hoffman loved the script.
Since the movie Rain Man came out, Kim and his father have been traveling across the country for appearances. The interaction turns out to be beneficial for him, as he becomes less shy and more confident.
♦ The Finn Twins. Oliver Sachs was a neurologist who was a precise observer of the world. He met a pair of identical twins named George and Charles Finn who had been variously diagnosed as autistic, schizophrenic, and mentally retarded. “Give me a date!”, they would cry in unison, and they would instantly calculate the day of the week for any date in a multiple-thousand-year span. As they executed these seemingly impossible cognitions, they would focus their attention inward – their eyes darting back and forth behind thick glasses.
They would enjoy conversations that consisted solely of numbers. George would utter a string of digits, and Charles would turn them over in his mind and nod; then Charles would reply in a similar fashion, and George would smile approvingly. Sacks was shocked that the twins were instantly calculating six-digit prime numbers, a feat that even a computer would have found difficult to pull off at the time. Consulting a book of prime number tables, he casually dropped an eight-digit prime into the conversation. Surprised and delighted, they had no problem and raised him with even longer primes. Yet George and Charles were incapable of performing simple multiplication, reading, or even tying their own shoes.
♦ Leslie Lemke. Leslie Lemke didn’t have a great start in life. He was born with severe birth defects that required doctors to remove his eyes. His own mother gave him up for adoption, and a nurse named May Lemke (who at the time was 52 and was raising 5 children of her own) adopted him when he was six months old.
As a young child, Leslie had to be force-fed to teach him how to swallow. He could not stand until he was 12. At 15, Leslie finally learned how to walk (May had to strap his fragile body to hers to teach him, step by step, how to walk).
At 16 years of age, Leslie Lemke bloomed. In the middle of one night, May woke up to find Leslie playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Leslie, who has no classical music training, was playing the piece flawlessly after hearing it just once earlier on the television.
From then on, Leslie began playing all styles of music from ragtime to classical. Like the Tchaikovsky piece, he only has to hear the music once in order to play it again perfectly. He became famous after being portrayed in national television shows. Before his health started to deteriorate, Leslie gave many concerts around the world.
♦ Alonzo Clemons. As a toddler, Alonzo suffered a head injury in an accident that changed his life. He can’t feed himself or tie his shoelaces, but he can sculpt. And boy, can he sculpt: after seeing only a fleeting image of an animal on a TV screen, Alonzo could sculpt a perfect 3D figure of it, correct in each and every detail right down to the muscle fibres.
♦ Gottfried Mind: Cat’s Raphael. Gottfried Mind was one of the earliest savants in history. In 1776, the eight-year-old Gottfried was placed in an art academy, where his teachers noted that he was “very weak, incapable of hard work, full of talent for drawing, a strange creature, full of artist-caprices, along with a certain roguishness.”
One day, Gottfried’s mentor, a painter named Sigmund Hendenberger, was drawing a cat when Gottfried exclaimed “That is no cat!” The teacher asked whether he could do better and sent the child to a corner to draw. The cat that Gottfried drew was so lifelike that since then he became known as the Cat’s Raphael
♦ Gilles Trehin. Gilles Tréhin lives part-time in the city of Urville, on an island off the Côte d’Azur, between Cannes and St. Tropez. Never heard of it? That’s because Urville exists only in his mind. Since he was 5, Gilles taught himself to draw three-dimensional objects. By 12, he started building a city he called “Urville” (after Dumont d’Urville, a French scientific base in the Antarctic). At first, he used LEGO, but shortly thereafter, he realized that he could expand his imaginary city much easier with drawings.
Urville isn’t just an idle idea – Gilles has 250 detailed drawings, a complete “history” of the founding the city, and has even published a book detailing it. Visit Urville at Gilles’ official website here: http://urvillecity.free.fr/index.Urville-ENG.htm
♦ Jedediah Buxton. Jedediah Buxton, born in Derbyshire, England in 1707, couldn’t write. By all accounts, he had no knowledge of science or history or anything else for that matter except for numbers. Jedediah, as it turned out, was one of the world’s earliest mental calculators and savants.
Everything was numbered to Jedediah – in fact, he associated everything he saw or experienced with numbers. He measured the area of the village he was born in simply by walking around it. When he saw a dance, his whole attention was to count the number of steps of the dancers. At a play, Jedediah was consumed with counting the number of words uttered by the actors.
The mental feat of Jedediah Buxton was tested by the Royal Society in 1754 – his mathematical brain was able to calculate numbers up to 39 figures.
♦ Orlando Serrell. Orlando Serrell wasn’t born autistic – indeed, his savant skills only came about after a brain injury. In 1979, then ten-year-old Orlando was playing baseball when the ball struck him hard on the left side of his head. He fell to the ground but eventually got up to continue playing.
For a while, Orlando had headaches. When they went away, he realized he had new abilities: he could perform complex calendar calculations and remember the weather every day from the day of the accident.
♦ Stephen Wiltshire, the Human Camera. As a young child, Stephen Wiltshire was mute – he was diagnosed as autistic and was sent to a school for special needs children. There, he discovered a passion for drawing – first of animals, then London buses, then buildings, and the city’s landmarks. Throughout his childhood, Stephen communicated through his drawings. Slowly, aided by his teachers, he learned to speak by the age of nine (his first word was “paper.”)
Stephen has a particularly striking talent: he can draw an accurate and detailed landscape of a city after seeing it just once! He drew a 10-meter (~33 ft) long panorama of Tokyo following a short helicopter ride.
♦ Ellen Boudreaux. Like Leslie Lemke, Ellen Boudreaux is a blind autistic savant with exceptional musical abilities. She can play music perfectly after hearing it just once and has such a huge repertoire of songs in her head that a newspaper reporter once tried to “stump Ellen” by requesting that she play some obscure songs – and failed. Ellen knew them all.
Ellen has two other unusual savant skills. First, despite her blindness, she is able to walk around without ever running into things. As she walks, Ellen makes little chirping sounds that seem to act like a human sonar.
Second, Ellen has an extremely precise digital clock ticking in her mind. To help overcome her fear of the telephone, Ellen’s mom coaxed her to listen to the automatic time recording (the “time lady”) when she was 8. From then on, Ellen knows the exact hour and minute, any time of the day without ever having seen a clock nor have the concept of the passing of time explained to her.
♦ Daniel Tammet: Brainman. At first glance, you won’t be able to tell that Daniel Tammet is anything but normal. Daniel, 29, is a highly functioning autistic savant with exceptional mathematical and language abilities.
Daniel first became famous when he recited from memory Pi to 22,514 decimal places (on 3/14, the International Pi Day, of course) to raise funds for the National Society for Epilepsy.
Numbers, according to Daniel, are special to him. He has a rare form of synesthesia and sees each integer up to 10,000 as having its own unique shapes, colour, texture, and feel. He can “see” the result of a math calculation, and he can “sense” whether a number is prime. Daniel has since drawn what pi looks like a rolling landscape full of different shapes and colours.
Daniel speaks 11 languages, one of which is Icelandic. In 2007, a Channel Five documentary challenged him to learn the language in a week. Seven days later, Daniel was successfully interviewed on Icelandic television (in Icelandic, of course!).
When he was four years old, Daniel had bouts of epilepsy that, along with his autism, seemed to have brought about his savant abilities. Though he appears normal, Daniel contends that he actually had to will himself to learn how to talk to and behave around people: As he describes in his newly published memoir, “Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant” (Free Press), he has willed himself to learn what to do: offer a visitor a drink, look her in the eye; don’t stand in someone else’s space. These are all conscious decisions. Recently, some friends warned him that in his eagerness to make eye contact, he tended to stare too intently. “It’s like being on a tightrope,” he said. “If you try too hard, you’ll come off. But you have to try.”
There is a big difference between Daniel Tammet and all the other prodigious savants in the world: Daniel can tell you how he does it and that makes him invaluable to scientists trying to understand the savant syndrome: