Idiots Savants, Retarded Savants, Talented Aments, Mono-Savants, Autistic Savants, Just Plain Savants, People with Savant Syndrome, and Autistic People Who Are Good at Things: A View from Disability Studies

<p>People with a particular profile of strengths and weaknesses&mdash;typically involving prodigious skill in one area (such as calendar or arithmetical calculation, art, or music) and a general &ldquo;mental deficiency&rdquo;&mdash;have long been categorized as &ldquo;idiots savants,&rdquo; or with other, similar labels.&nbsp; It is the goal of this paper to dismantle this category in all of its terminological manifestations by deconstructing both the &ldquo;idiocy&rdquo; and the &ldquo;savantism&rdquo; that underpin it.&nbsp; In its place, I focus instead on people with autism, who typically have special interests and activities they pursue intensively and skillfully: people identified as savants are mostly autistic, and autistic people usually have some sort of special interest or skill.&nbsp; For the idiot savant, the savant skill is understood to emerge <em>in spite of</em> the general lack of intelligence.&nbsp; For the autistic person, the special interests or skills arise not in spite of the autism but precisely <em>because of it</em>: autism enables the skill; the skill makes the autism visible.&nbsp; Instead of enfreaking people as super-crips, I propose to celebrate them in a realistic mode, as autistic people who are good at things.</p><p>Keywords: Idiot savant,&nbsp;savant syndrome, autism.&nbsp;</p>

Peter Howard Fowler. 27 February 1923–8 November 1996

Peter Fowler was a distinguished physicist to whom physics was sheer enjoyment and this enjoyment brought delight to those around him. His students, associates and friends were inspired by his infectious enthusiasm, his agility at mental arithmetical calculation and his distinctive laugh. The fun of discovery, of seeking understanding of what was hidden, characterized all his work and indeed his approach to life generally.

DISMAL STATE OF SCIENTIFIC LITERACY

"Well under half of the American public and only one-third of the British know that the earth revolves around the sun once a year," Oxford University professor John Durant reported at the AAAS annual meeting in San Francisco. "Even fewer in Britain have much knowledge of medicine. Most of the people surveyed think that antibiotics kill viruses," he added. There is more. Jon D. Miller of Northern Illinois University reported that 12% of Americans, asked a survey question about scientific process, correctly recognized that astrology is "not at all scientific."A rapid arithmetical calculation shows that a whopping 88% got it wrong. About 35% of both Americans and British think that radioactive milk can be made safe by boiling. (It cannot.) But a reassuring 97% of people in both countries know that hot air rises.

The Fractionation of Arithmetical Skills: A Single Case Study

A single case study of a patient with a selective impairment of arithmetical calculation is reported. DRC became severely acalculic after sustaining a left parietal intra-cerebral haematoma. His numeracy skills were documented as fully as possible. It was found that his knowledge of the significance of individual numbers and his concept of quantity appeared to be intact, but simple addition, subtraction and multiplication were all performed laboriously and inaccurately and his performance was inconsistent from trial to trial. Further it was shown that it was his knowledge of arithmetical facts not his knowledge of arithmetical operations which was impaired. The findings are discussed in relation to models of arithmetical calculation and it is concluded that for DRC there was a deficit in accessing one category of verbal semantic knowledge systems, namely arithmetical facts.