What is an Idiot Savant?
An idiot savant is a somewhat derogatory term for a person who has significant mental impairment, such as in autism or retardation. At the same time, the person also exhibits some extraordinary skills, which are unusual for most people. The skills of the savant may vary from being exceptionally gifted in music or in mathematics, or having a photographic memory. Most often, the savant is a person who suffers from extreme autism. In autism, the idiot savant cannot reach out to other people in a normal way. He or she may find it extremely difficult to express emotions, to communicate through spoken language, or to use inflection while speaking. Severe autistics function best when they have predictable routines. Not every person who is autistic has idiot savant abilities. Some appear to be more intelligent than others, but few autistic people are mentally retarded. In fact because of the dependence on the brain’s right-sided functioning, facility for certain things, like mathematics, memor
An idiot savant is a person with autism that has extraordinary skills in certain domains in spite of cognitive deficiencies in most others. If you think about it, that description characterizes most people – probably even you. You know a little bit about a lot of stuff, but for the most part you’re clueless about the way most things actually work. Try to explain to someone how a computer functions or what makes plants green or how airplanes resist gravity. We take these things for granted with only a cursory knowledge of the underlying principles. We’re all dullards when you come right down to it. But you also probably have intimate knowledge on something that intrigues you or something you collect or do. You know the lines from your favorite movie verbatim. You remember the statistics of every player on your favorite team. You excel at a certain sport. You’re a master at what you do. It’s what makes you unique. That’s what the Internet is all about. The net is teeming with idiot savan
Current research theories show that intelligence is non-local and not bound to the brain. Sometimes nature offers insight into a particular subject by presenting a baffling enigma and contradictory example. Intelligence’s contradictory enigma is the idiot-savant. The word idiot usually refers to a simpleton, in contrast to the word “savant” in French that means “learned one.” Idiot savants are a subgroup of a class of people called idiots with an IQ of about 25. Idiot savants are a group of humans that are incapable of learning, writing or reading, yet they have unlimited access to specific, accurate knowledge in the fields of mathematics, music, and other precise areas. Now the irony of an idiot-savant is that this group of individuals does not acquire knowledge by learning as the average human does. They mysteriously ‘know’ explicit, exact, correct information. One may wonder: “How do idiots savants know certain information or possess certain skills?” By whatever means they obtain th
