Leslie Lemke is a musical virtuoso. At the age of 14 he played, flawlessly and without hesitation, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 after hearing it for the first time while listening to a television movie several hours earlier. Lemke had never had a piano lesson—and he still has not had one. He is blind and developmentally disabled, and he has cerebral palsy. Lemke plays and sings thousands of pieces at concerts in the U.S. and abroad, and he improvises and composes as well.

Richard Wawro’s artwork is internationally renowned, collected by Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, among others. A London art professor was “thunderstruck” by the oil crayon drawings that Wawro did as a child, describing them as an “incredible phenomenon rendered with the precision of a mechanic and the vision of a poet.” Wawro, who lives in Scotland, is autistic.

Kim Peek is a walking encyclopedia. He has memorized more than 7,600 books. He can recite the highways that go to each American city, town or county, along with the area and zip codes, television stations and telephone networks that serve them. If you tell him your date of birth, he can tell you what day of the week it fell on and what day of the week it will be when you turn 65 “and can retire.” Peek can identify most classical compositions and knows the date the music was published or first performed as well as the composer’s birthplace and dates of birth and death. He is also developmentally disabled and depends on his father for many of his basic daily needs. His abilities provided the inspiration for the character Raymond Babbitt, whom Dustin Hoffman played in the 1988 movie Rain Man.

Lemke, Wawro and Peek all have savant syndrome, an uncommon but spectacular condition in which people with various developmental disabilities, including autism, possess astonishing islands of ability and brilliance that stand in jarring juxtaposition to their overall mental handicap. Savant syndrome is seen in about one in 10 people with autism and in approximately one in 2,000 people with brain damage or mental retardation. Of the known savants, at least half are autistic and the remainder have some other kind of developmental disorder.

…More than a century has passed since Down’s original description. Today we know a great deal more about this perplexing set of abilities from the 100 or so cases described in the scientific literature. It is now clear that savant syndrome generally occurs in people with IQs 40–70—although it can occur in some with IQs as high as 114. It disproportionately affects males, with 4–6 male savants for every one female. And it can be congenital or acquired later in life following disease (such as encephalitis) or brain injury.

…Most musical savants have perfect pitch and perform with amazing ease, most often on the piano. Some are able to create complex compositions. And for some reason, musical genius often seems to accompany blindness and mental retardation, as it does for Lemke. One of the most famous savants was “Blind Tom” Bethune, who lived 1849^–₅₉1908_116ya. In his time, he was referred to as “the 8^th wonder of the world.” Although he could speak fewer than 100 words, he could play beautifully more than 7,000 pieces on the piano, including many of his own works. (Some of his compositions were recently recorded by musician John Davis and released on CD.) For their part, savant visual artists use a variety of media, although they most frequently express themselves through drawing and sculpture. Artistic savant Alonzo Clemons, for example, can see a fleeting image of an animal on a television screen and in less than 20 minutes sculpt a perfect replica of that animal. His wax model will be correct in every detail, every fiber and muscle and proportion.

Mathematical savants calculate incredibly rapidly and often have a particular facility with prime numbers. Curiously, the obscure skill of calendar calculating that Peek demonstrates is not confined to mathematical savants; it seems to coexist with many different skills. Several other abilities appear less frequently. A rare savant may have extensive language ability—that is, the capacity to memorize many languages but not to understand them. Other unusual traits include heightened olfactory, tactile and visual sensitivity; outstanding knowledge in fields such as history, neurophysiology, statistics or navigation; and spatial ability…Savant skills are always linked to a remarkable memory. This memory is deep, focused and based on habitual recitation. But it entails little understanding of what is being described.

…Although they share many talents, including memory, savants vary enormously in their levels of ability. So-called splinter-skill savants have a preoccupation and mild expertise with, say, the memorization of sports trivia and license plate numbers. Talented savants have musical or artistic gifts that are conspicuously above what would be expected of someone with their handicaps. And prodigious savants are those very uncommon people whose abilities are so advanced that they would be distinctive even if they were to occur in a normal person. Probably fewer than 50 prodigious savants are alive at the moment.

Whatever their talents, savants usually maintain them over the course of their life. With continued use, the abilities are sustained and sometimes even improve.

And in almost all cases, there is no dreaded trade-off of these wonderful abilities with the acquisition of language, socialization or daily living skills. [An ambiguous statement. Given how developmentally disabled they usually are, how could you tell?]

…Looking to the Left Hemisphere: … A 1975 pneumoencephalogram study found left hemispheric damage in 15⁄17 autistic patients; 4 of them had savant skills…A dramatic study published by T. L. Brink in 1980 lent further credence to the possibility that changes to the left hemisphere were important to savant syndrome. Brink, a psychologist at Crafton Hills College in California, described a normal 9-year-old boy who had become mute, deaf and paralyzed on the right side when a bullet damaged his left hemisphere. After the accident, unusual savant mechanical skills emerged. He was able to repair multi-geared bicycles and to design contraptions, such as a punching bag that would weave and bob like a real opponent. The findings of Bernard Rimland of the Autism Research Institute in San Diego support this idea as well. Rimland maintains the largest database in the world on people with autism; he has information on more than 34,000 individuals. He has observed that the savant skills most often present in autistic people are those associated with right hemisphere functions and the most deficient abilities are associated with left hemisphere functions. In the late 1980s Norman Geschwind and Albert M. Galaburda of Harvard University offered an explanation for some 82 causes of left hemispheric damage—and for the higher number of male savants. In their book Cerebral Lateralization, the two neurologists point out that the left hemisphere of the brain normally completes its development later than the right and is therefore subject to prenatal influences—some of them detrimental—for a longer period. In the male fetus, circulating testosterone can act as one of these detrimental influences by slowing growth and impairing neuronal function in the more vulnerable left hemisphere. As a result, the right brain often compensates, becoming larger and more dominant in males. The greater male-to-female ratio is seen not just in savant syndrome but in other forms of central nervous system dysfunction, such as dyslexia, delayed speech, stuttering, hyperactivity and autism.

…the fact that DB and older frontotemporal dementia patients with newfound savant skills have the same pathology is quite striking

…The seemingly limitless memory of savants will mostly likely be harder to pinpoint physiologically. Mortimer Mishkin of the NIMH has proposed different neural circuits for memory, including a higher-level corticolimbic circuit for what is generally referred to as semantic or cognitive memory, and a lower-level corticostriatal circuit for the more primitive habit memory that is most often referred to as procedural memory. The memory of savants seems to be the noncognitive habit form.

The same factors that produce left hemispheric damage may be instrumental in producing damage to higher-level memory circuits. As a result, savants may be forced to rely on more primitive, but spared, habit memory circuits. Perhaps brain injuries—whether they result from hormones, disease, or prenatal or subsequent injury—produce in some instances certain right brain skills linked with habit memory function. In those situations, savant syndrome may appear.

…Nevertheless, many experts believe that real potential exists to tap into islands of savant intelligence. Allan Snyder and John Mitchell of the Centre for the Mind in Canberra, Australia, argue that savant brain processes occur in each of us but are overwhelmed by more sophisticated conceptual cognition. Autistic savants, they conclude, “have privileged access to lower levels of information not normally available through introspection.” Our view is also that all of us have some of the same circuitry and pathways intrinsic to savant functioning but that these are less accessible—in part because we tend to be a left-brain society. Sometimes, though, we can find elements of the savant in ourselves. At certain moments, we just “get” something or discover a new ability. And some procedures—including hypnosis; interviews of subjects under the influence of the barbiturate sodium amytal, which induces relaxation; and brain stimulation during neurosurgery—provide evidence that a huge reservoir of memories lies dormant in every individual. Dreams can also revive those memories or trigger new abilities.

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