SAVANTS

Savant syndrome is a rare condition in which someone with significant mental disabilities demonstrates specific abilities far above average. The skills that savants excel at are generally related to memory. This may include rapid calculation, artistic, 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 develop later. 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 was in 1783. Among those with autism, 1 in 10 to 1 in 200 have savant syndrome to some degree. It is estimated that fewer than a hundred savants with extraordinary skills are currently living.

Signs
Savant skills are usually found in one or more of the 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 likely due to the lack of motivation to develop such skills among the general population. However, 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 the 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 in all human brains that is not ordinarily 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 disable this brain area temporarily.

KIM PEEK
Rainman is 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 had memorized every book his parents read him, word for word. At three, he could look up words in the dictionary and sound them out phonetically. He was equally adept with numbers. He read telephone books for fun and total numbers on passing license plates. He has read some 12,000 books and remembers everything about them. He could eventually 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”. However, 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 Barry Morrow, the director of the Bill films (played by Mickey Rooney), 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 subjects, from history to geography to sports. If you tell him a date, he can tell you what day of the week it is.
Yet he was severely disabled, was unable to dress himself, could not 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 searching for a plot. He came up with the script for Rain Man, United Artists was excited to make the movie, and Dustin Hoffman loved the script.
Since the movie Rain Man, Kim and his father have been travelling across the country for appearances, and the interaction benefits him, as he becomes less shy and more confident.

THE FINN TWINS
Oliver Sacks 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, instantly calculating 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 similarly, 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 could not perform simple multiplication, reading, or tying their shoes.

LESLIE LEMKE
Leslie Lemke didn’t have a great start in life. He was born with severe congenital disabilities that required doctors to remove his eyes. His mother gave him up for adoption, and a nurse named May Lemke (who at the time was 52 and was raising five children of her own) adopted him when he was six months old.
Leslie had to be force-fed as a young child 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).
At 16, Leslie Lemke blossomed. In the middle of one night, May woke up to find Leslie playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Leslie, who had no classical music training, played the piece flawlessly after hearing it just once earlier on 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 to play it again perfectly. He became famous after being portrayed on national television shows. Before his health started to deteriorate, Leslie gave many concerts worldwide.

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 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 every detail 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 Urville, between Cannes and St. Tropez, on an island off the Côte d’Azur. 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 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 more easily with drawings.
Urville isn’t just an idle idea – Gilles has 250 detailed drawings, a complete “history” of the city’s founding, and 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 1707, couldn’t write. By all accounts, he had no knowledge of science, history, or anything else except for numbers. As it turned out, Jedediah was one of the world’s earliest mental calculators and savants.
Everything was numbered to Jedediah – he associated everything he saw or experienced with numbers. He measured the village area where he was born by walking around it. When he saw a dance, his whole attention was on counting the number of steps of the dancers. At a play, Jedediah was consumed with counting the number of words uttered by the actors.
The Royal Society tested Jedediah Buxton’s mental feat in 1754—his mathematical brain could 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, when ten-year-old Orlando was playing baseball, the ball struck him hard on the left side of his head. He fell to the ground but eventually got up to continue playing.
Orlando had headaches for a while. When they left, 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 city landscape after seeing it just once! Following a short helicopter ride, he was treated to a 10-meter (~33 ft) long panorama of Tokyo.

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 vast 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 can 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 exact digital clock ticking in her mind. When she was 8, Ellen’s mom coaxed her to listen to the automatic time recording (the “time lady”) to help her overcome her fear of the telephone. From then on, Ellen knows the exact hour and minute at any time of the day without ever having seen a clock or having 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 typical. 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) 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 unique shapes, colours, textures, and smells. He can “see” the result of a math calculation and “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 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 he tended to stare too intently in his eagerness to make eye contact. “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, which makes him invaluable to scientists trying to understand the savant syndrome.

FLO and KAY LYMAN are the world’s only female autistic savant twins.
Birth date: 01.01.1956 in Irvington, New Jersey
Florence & Katherine’s remarkable ability relates to memory: they can name the day of the week for any date, past or future, since they were born. This phenomenon is also known as “calendrical savantism“. They also have prodigious autobiographical memory and can recall what they had for breakfast on any given morning, what they were wearing, what the weather was like, and what they did that day. The Lyman Twins are often called “the Rainman Twins”.
Their phenomenal memory is so unique that it concerns events that happened directly to them as well as general events. For example, they can name the release date of every version of a song they’ve heard. The twins also remember every fact they learned about the people they have met. What is even more impressive about the Lyman twins is that they seem to speak in an almost synchronic manner.
Children. As children, Flo and Kay’s abilities were neither recognized nor understood. Nobody around them attempted to discover what was happening in their minds. Like many mothers of other autistic children in the 1960s, Flo and Kay’s mother, Eve, felt embarrassed and tried to shelter her children at home in Irvington, New Jersey. The moment they fought back from the mistreatment by their mother, she would lock them in their room. Their father always pretended as if nothing had happened.
One night, their mother went to the kitchen and turned the gas on to kill her children. Their younger sister Jane Consoli managed to call the police, but the officers only let her off with a warning. Their mother did express great remorse at what she had done. All of the Lyman sisters describe Eve as being depressed, struggling with alcohol addiction and suffering from suicidal thoughts.
According to Consoli, their parents never spoke about the condition. Her sisters were ridiculed, and a lot of people would make fun of them. She was the one to come to their rescue. Flo and Kay say that there were a few people in the neighbourhood who weren’t mean to them. Since the death of their parents, Jane was the one looking after her sisters. Unlike their parents, Consoli decided to open Flo and Kay to the world.
Discovery. Since they were children, Flo and Kay have made charts that catalogue what their favourite celebrities wear every time they appear on television. According to the twins, they’ve kept somewhere between 900 and 10,000 charts over 34 years since 1974. One of the celebrities whom they followed was their local newsman, Dave Wagner. Flo and Kay have been cataloging Dave’s clothes ever since his first appearance on TV. They even kept the same charts for his wife and children.
Wagner was the man who discovered their talent and shared it with the world. Back in 1996, Dave made a news story about the sisters’ colour charts for his local news show. According to Wagner, the twins first contacted him when he was a disc jockey.  At that time, he believed he had a vast musical knowledge, however, Flo and Kay amazed Dave. They were able to recall information about any record he asked them about much faster than an ordinary human could.
Dave got a phone call from Flo and Kay one day and was bombarded with questions about his life. At first, he was taken aback by their manner of speech, but quickly befriended the twins. Dave personally took the sisters to the world expert on autistic Savantism – Dr. Darold Treffert. Darold confirmed their status as the only identical twin sisters Savants in recorded history.
Personality. The Lyman twins place a great deal of value on routine. According to Conoli, their daily activities are all strictly on time. For example, they get very upset if a program they are following doesn’t come up on time or doesn’t air at all. Any changes to the daily routine upset them greatly. When “The $ 100,000 Pyramid” show was unexpectedly taken off the air, Flo and Kay got depressed, wouldn’t talk to anybody, had no appetite and couldn’t fall asleep.
Darold Treffert says that the sisters have to listen to certain music, watch certain shows, and make certain phone calls. If someone tells them they can’t do that anymore, Flo and Kay will only become more anxious. When they wouldn’t get an answer from the channel about the return of the “The $ 100,000 Pyramid” program, the twins would pray for it in church. Sadly, their prayers weren’t answered.
Fascination with Dick Clark. The host of $25,000, Dick Clark was their idol and friend for many years. Flo and Kay’s obsession with Dick Clark was so intense that their brother-in-law once observed: “They need food, they need air, and they need Dick Clark”. Dick was a great friend who answered their letters and sent them cards every year on their birthday. He arranged to have the sisters visit him at his home and took their calls whenever they phoned. In 2004, Clark had a stroke and Flo and Kay were devastated and regularly prayed in their room for his recovery.
During that period, and before Dick was fully recovered, another tragedy struck the twins: their younger sister died suddenly of a heart attack. Jane’s death was an enormous pain for the tween as she was, as they put it, their guardian for much of their adult lives. The tweens phoned Dick Clark, who comforted them. Dick also mailed them a sympathy card encouraging them to keep their positive lives and remember that their sister is in heaven – watching over them.
Celebrity Status. Although Flo & Kay are not celebrities in the common meaning of the word, they gained a special public recognition, mostly after the documentary “The Rainman Twins” was released. Their fans and admirers hold pages on different social media channels, like this Facebook page, to track their lives and to express their appreciation for the twins. That being said, such pages are not just to celebrate the twin’s life but also to refute false claims about the twins, like the one which was spread during 2020, saying Flo & Kay have died.