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Savant Skills in Asperger Syndrome

© Barbara Fowler

For a very long time my husband and I thought that we were raising an eccentric, absent minded genius because of my son's behavior. On the one hand, he can't cross the street without remembering to look to see if cars are coming, and on the other hand, there doesn't appear to be a word in the English language that he cannot spell. In fact, I don't bother with a dictionary anymore, I just ask my son.

My son's love of words started in his first year. By the time he was 1 - he had a 500 word vocabulary. By the time he was 2, when he should have been speaking in three or five word sentences, we marvelled at his 20 word sentences and wondered where this ability came from. He seemed to pick up on the English grammar very quickly and loved word play, puns and jokes. The spelling ability appears to have come from nowhere. Both my husband and myself are good spellers but my son appears to have memorized all the sounds that the letters of the alphabet make and has the ability to correctly spell words that he has never seen before. In fact, his teachers and the neuropsychologist are amazed at his spelling ability.

There seems to be a correlation between autism, asperger syndrome and savant skills. The meaning of the French word savant is "learned one" and researchers have been puzzled for years over why some people have savant skills and why some people don't. In the general population, the ratio is about 1%, but in the autism population, the ratio rises to approximately 10%. The savant skills are often in the area of music, mathematics, memory feats and artistic abilities.

Many people think that the famous musician Glenn Gould had Asperger Syndrome. He had an amazing musical talent, starting from the age of 3 and composing his first piece of classical music at the age of 6. He also had some of the characteristics of Asperger Syndrome: limited diet, lack of social skills, odd body posture and movements, and certainly an all consuming interest in music. There are several movies such as the "Rainman" which portray savants with unusual skill, although the exceptional math ability that this character portrayed is not commonly found in autistic individuals. Often there is an unusual development of skills with one or two skills becoming predominant in the individual.