Article content continued

Even Jason would fall into the merely “talented” sub-group.

Probably the most famous savant is fictional: Raymond, Dustin Hoffman’s character in the 1988 film Rain Man. Raymond was, however, based on a real-life savant called Kim Peek who, despite having an IQ measuring just 72 (below normal), had a stunning memory and ability to read and recall information.

Unlike Raymond, Peek was not autistic but had suffered brain and possible chromosomal damage before birth. He did, though, exhibit similarly astonishing abilities, described as being able to recall information from 12,000 books, speed-reading through them at about an hour per book.

While Peek was known in the U.S., affectionately, as “Kimputer,” all savants boast a very deep memory, Treffert has reported. For example, on March 14, 2004, Daniel Tammet publicly recited, from memory, pi to 22,514 decimal places. It took him five hours and nine minutes. He explained how he had committed the sequence to memory in his book Thinking in Numbers.

“Printed out on crisp, letter-sized sheets of paper, a thousand digits to a page, I gazed on them as a painter gazes on a favourite landscape.” Sometimes called Brainman, Daniel has also taught himself 11 languages (including Icelandic in just a week).

But savants’ powers extend far beyond mere recall. Treffert has identified the most significant areas of savant skill — what he calls “islands of ability” — as taking in art, music, calendar calculation, maths and spatial skills. For instance, Leslie Lemke, from Wisconsin, born with such severe birth defects that doctors had to remove both his eyes, was put up for adoption and could not stand unaided until he was 12. Four years later, his adopted mother woke up one night to hear him playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1. Leslie, who had no classical music training, was playing the piece flawlessly after hearing it just once earlier on the television. His remarkable ability to play by ear saw him performing and recording until ill-health finally scuppered his talent.