One out of every two hundred people with autism has remarkable abilities. They can perform marvels of mental arithmetic or play accurately a tune they have heard only once. What is more, their abilities can help us to understand our unconscious minds.
Charles is autistic. He has an IQ of around 58 and the reasoning skills of a four-year-old. He has severe problems dealing with other people and needs to live in special accommodation. But he can do something few of the rest of us can do. Give him any date in this or the last century, and he can tell you on which day of the week it fell. Psychologist and autism expert Beate Hermeli n recalls: ‘When I first met Charles, he was 13 years old, and he immediately asked the date of m} birthday. When I told him it was 7 August, he said instantly, ” That was on a Wednesday in 1940, and in 2004 it will be on a Wednesday again.” I was stunned.’
Such ‘savant abilities’ are intriguing. How can they flourish in minds that otherwise seem so limited? Other autistic savants can accurately draw such complex buildings as London’s St. Pancras Station from memory or play a piece of music note-perfect after hearing it only once or twice. Because such remarkable skills stand out so dramatically, even scientists have tended to marvel at them and leave it at that. Explanations of how savants do it are usually in terms of memorizing and constant practice. But it seems that something else is going on that may help us to understand our minds better. Beate Hermelin suggests that autistic savants provide a glimpse of what happens when someone is totally governed by their unconscious abilities.
Autistic savants are severely retarded but have one outstanding skill, which comes from one of the processing units in the unconscious brain working overtime. Hermelin argues that what autistic savants lack is a ‘central executive’ to pull their abilities together. This idea is backed up by recent research in Australia, which suggests that savants may have access to perceptual processing at a level of detail that, in most of us, is covered up by normal consciousness. Researcher Allan Snyder argues that normal consciousness is rather like the tip of an iceberg. Below the level of awareness are thousands of subsystems that process small units of information, which are, in turn, patched together to form a conscious perception. As the information is converted into conscious experience, our brains filter out a lot of unnecessary detail. The abilities of autistic savants may come about because their mode of information processing is not so overlaid by the ‘higher’ conceptual consciousness that most people bring to bear on their perceptions.
Meaning and consciousness
This focus on detail accounts for the problems that autistics encounter, as well as the talents of the savant minority. Typically, autistics have great difficulty seeing the wood for the trees. While the rest of us go for the ‘gist’ of things and can summarise the central points of something we have heard or seen, autistics concentrate on the details. The result is that they are often good at tasks that involve manipulating the parts of a whole, such as the notes in a chord or the factors of large numbers. A greater understanding of what is going on here comes from Hermelin’s work with Cristopher, who- although socially inept with a low IQ – knows 16 languages, including Finnish, Greek, Hindi, and Welsh. His vocabulary is very impressive: in one test, he learned 300 new words in Hebrew in five days after being shown them just once, but he fell badly on grammar. ‘His translations are usually word for word, and he will often use English word order when translating into other languages,’ says Hermelin.
The significance of this is that while we are all genetically programmed to learn grammar from a very early age when we later learn a new language, we have to learn the new grammatical rules consciously. Because Christopher’s conscious thinking skills are so poor, he finds this almost impossible. Christopher’s abilities are a good example of both the power of our conscious processing abilities and their limitations. ‘He doesn’t use language to communicate or impart thoughts, like the rest of us,’ says Hermelin. For Christopher, languages are simply a form of acquisition – a kind of linguistic stamp collecting. While the rest of us may lack Christopher’s remarkable talents, our consciousness endows us with the precious ability to communicate with others.
Remarkable Abilities
- Someone who is 70 years, 17 days, and 12 hours old has been alive for 2,210,500,800 seconds. Peter, who is severely retarded, can work out such sums within half a minute.
- When autistic savant Paul was asked to play a 64-bar piece of music he had only heard twice, his version of the 798 notes was 92 percent correct.
- The favorite activity of a pair of autistic savant twins, each with a mental age of nine, was to identify prime numbers of up to 20 digits long.
