David Hughes
442291: ENGL 030 Section 009
Judith McKelvey
11/3/10
FINAL DRAFT
Savantism: Desirable?
Savantism is a curious natural phenomenon. In the 1989 film Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman
plays the character of Raymond, an autistic savant. In the film, Raymond is able to do extraordinary
things such as read the phone book (through the letter G) and memorize it with perfect recall of the
names and phone numbers. However, for all this prodigious ability, he cannot function in everyday
life without the help of his brother Charlie. In fact, there are people like Rain Man in the real world.
They have mental disorders or disabilities, but for an unknown reason, they are extremely talented in
one certain subject area such as music, reading, or mental calculation (Heaton and Wallace 902). At
first look, savantism seems wonderful. Who wouldn’t want to be able to read at a rate of four
hundred pages per hour with perfect recall of the text? Who wouldn’t want to be able to be able to
immediately remember and play any piece of music that you have ever heard? If I had the chance, I
would of course choose to have these talents if I did not have to sacrifice anything. It may be
possible as well—according to some, “savant skills are latent in us all” and can be evoked through
magnetic stimulation of the brain (Snyder 1399). But savantism is more than just a special talent.
Upon further research, I realized that the “gift” of savantism has massive costs. Thus, even if savant
skills are hidden within me and I had the chance to unlock them, I would not take that chance. For
me, the cost is too great, but you, reader, can decide for yourself.
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At first look, savantism seems like something that would be extremely desirable. The mental
capacity of savants is beyond what is considered the normal scope of intelligence—“A savant’s feats
provide one form of evidence contradicting everyday assumptions about… measured intelligence”
(Howe 4). Although they cannot function in society, savants have mental abilities that go beyond
normal assumptions of what is possible. Their talents are many and varied, including phenomenal
musical talent, perfect recall of all information that is read, impressive mental arithmetic, and
stunning artistic abilities (Howe 5). All savants, however, have superior memory (Treffert 165).
According to Treffert, a “savant uses a highly developed, non-cognitive “habit” memory… to
compensate for injury or absence of the more usual and more frequently used cognitive memory seen
in the nonsavant. The memory function …is more automatic than volitional” (219-220). For
example, one savant, through habit memory, knows the population of every town in the United
States, the distance from New York City to every other city in the United States, the distance from
every town in the United States to the largest city in that state, the names of all the counties in the
United States, the names and number of rooms of the top 2000 hotels in the country, as well as
geographic statistics for over 3000 mountains and rivers (Howe 8). Think of what I could learn and
the possibilities that could be explored if I had that type of effortless mental capacity! It would seem
that with a memory as good as that man has, one could do almost anything. But sadly, in savants,
great ability comes with great cost.
By definition, savants focus on one skill with an “obsessive and restricted interest” to the
almost complete exclusion of everything else in life (Heaton and Wallace 909). If I were to become
a savant, I would become an expert in one thing and give up my talent in every other area of my life.
Although it would be amazing to have a skill that no one else in the world can rival, I consider the
cost to be too high. Savants have difficulty doing anything other than their special skill, including
living on their own (Heaton and Wallace 902). I am an extremely independent person and I hate
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asking help for things that I should be able to do. To become a savant and give up the ability to
function independently—to dress and feed myself for example— would be too much for me to bear.
Additionally, savant skills require what is known as cortical rededication, that is, the social
functioning part of the savant’s brain switches its function to aid pattern recognition and increase the
skill level of the savant in his or her talent area (Heaton and Wallace 907). Thus, savants are literally
single-minded. In fact, the specialization can be so extreme that, for example, a savant who is able to
tell the day of the week of any date in history—known as a calendar calculator— cannot multiply
seven times four but is able to find the number of days in four weeks (Heaton and Wallace 900). In
essence, it is “memory without understanding” (Snyder 1399). This single-mindedness is another
thing that helps convince me I would not want to be a savant. When I visualize my knowledge, I
think about its breadth and depth, that is, how much variety my knowledge has and how much
knowledge I have in each specific subject. Having one specific skill without understanding it does
not particularly appeal to me because I value having varied knowledge and having a depth of
understanding for the things I am passionate about. Although a savant is very good at what they do,
they have no breadth or depth of knowledge. This is why it is sad but not surprising that “for the
majority [of savants], the isolated skill remained just that, leading neither to employment nor greater
social integration” (Howlin, Goode, Hutton, and Rutter 1367). Thus, I would not become a savant
because I would have to give up all breadth and depth of my knowledge for a skill, such as calendar
calculating, that is usually not practically useful.
Additionally, savantism does not appeal to me because I value creativity and the creation of
brand new things. Savants are almost always drawn to “human codes” such as mathematics, music,
or language because the pattern processing part of their brain is more fully developed and they can
detect patterns easily (Mottron, Dawson, and Soulieres 1385). However, their skills are in the most
part merely perceptual. Savants are able to identify existing patterns but they lack the creative nature
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to make their own (Mottron, Dawson, and Soulieres 1391). Although I think it would be amazing to
be able to recognize hidden patterns in our world, I value creativity and the act of making something
new to the world more highly. Although being able to recognize and evaluate the underlying patterns
of human creations like mathematics has a massive draw for me, I could not bring myself to give up
the creative spirit to gain that insight. The ability to contribute something new to the world is one of
the things I value most highly, so I would not want to become someone who imitates things already
in existence.
Savants also have a very different outlook on the world than neurotypicals. According to the
Weak Central Coherence theory, savants function by shifting their brain function to processing
details of the world rather than general ideas and concepts (Heaton and Wallace 906). This is a result
of their enhanced low-level cognitive operations and greater conscious access to what is normally the
subconscious detail processing mechanisms of the brain (Snyder 1400). This perception of the
details of the world, although it seems beneficial, is actually one of the reasons I would not choose to
be a savant. I value the ability to see the overarching ideas of my world more than the ability to
catalog the small details. Additionally, I value my decision-making abilities highly. In my opinion,
good decisions are the main thing that leads to a satisfied life, and if I was able to process more
details, I would quickly become overloaded with input and paralyzed in my decision making. This is
something that often happens to autistics and savants in particular. I value quick and competent
decision making, however, so I would choose not to be a savant.
Finally, savants do not have a worldview that encompasses much emotion, instead, they are
“typically rather constricted emotionally. What they do or say seems to have little excitement,
passion, sentiment, or feeling attached to it” (Treffert 260). This would not appeal to me because
although they are protected from the emotional lows that come along with life, they are also denied
the emotional high points of life. To me, emotion is an essential part of life—living with emotional
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constriction is like watching a movie the sound turned almost all the way down. I could never
choose to give up the emotional high points of life like vacation with my family at the lake. And in a
way, I could never give up the emotional low points either, because they are part of what I think it
means to live life and be human. One of my deepest desires is to live life to the fullest, but with
muted emotions, I do not think I could experience all that life has to offer to me.
Although the good things about being a savant quickly caught my attention and made it seem
desirable to me, I quickly learned that savantism has a high cost as well. The price of effortless
expertise is that it is almost the only thing that a savant does their entire life. The off-the-charts
pattern recognition of savants comes with strings in the form of too much attention to detail. This
leads to social dysfunction, learning disabilities, and slow decision making. However, it also shows
that mentally handicapped people can have skills that no one else in the world can match—in
essence, that “intelligence test scores… provide only the crudest of guides to the level of individuals’
mental functioning” (Howe 13). Savants are amazing individuals, and I am sure that many people in
the world would jump at the chance to have effortless expertise in a skill area. For me, however,
learning more about savantism has made me more able to empathize with the real-world Rain Men
(and Women), but I no longer have the desire to become a savant myself.
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Works Cited
Heaton, Pamela, and Gregory L. Wallace. "Annotation: The Savant Syndrome." Journal of Child
Psychology and Psychiatry 45.5 (2004): 899-911. Wiley Online Library. 14 June 2004. Web.
03 Nov. 2010. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2004.t01-100284.x/full>.
Howe, Michael. Fragments of Genius: the Strange Feats of Idiots Savants. London: Routledge, 1989.
Print.
Howlin, P., S. Goode, J. Hutton, and M. Rutter. "Savant Skills in Autism: Psychometric Approaches
and Parental Reports." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences 364.1522 (2009): 1359-367. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The
Royal Society, 27 May 2009. Web. 03 Nov. 2010.
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677586/>.
Mottron, L., M. Dawson, and I. Soulieres. "Enhanced Perception in Savant Syndrome: Patterns,
Structure and Creativity." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences 364.1522 (2009): 1385-391. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The
Royal Society, 27 May 2009. Web. 3 Nov. 2010.
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2677591/?tool=pmcentrez>.
Snyder, A. "Explaining and Inducing Savant Skills: Privileged Access to Lower Level, Lessprocessed Information." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences 364.1522 (2009): 1399-405. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The
Royal Society, 27 May 2009. Web. 03 Nov. 2010.
<http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1522/1399.full>.
Treffert, Darold A. Extraordinary People: Understanding "idiot Savants" New York: Harper & Row,
1989. Print.