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By: By Dr. MARK KESTNER
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A savant is a rare individual that possesses an extraordinary ability to perform mental tasks that seem superhuman. Savants are typically autistic people that are limited in some aspects of intellectual capacity, but perform like a genius in others. The most widely known example of a savant is the real person that inspired the movie, “Rainman.”
The movie was based upon a real man named Kim Peek. Kim lives in Salt Lake City and was thought to be severely retarded as a child. According to his father, when Kim was a toddler, he was advised by a neurologist to “put Kim in an institution and forget about him, he will never be able to learn anything.” His father didn’t give up on Kim, and persisted in searching for ways to help his son. Now in his fifties, Kim is the most famous savant in the world. He can read a page of text in about 10 seconds. His father explains that he reads the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye and retains about 98 percent of the material. He averages reading eight to ten books daily. To watch a brief documentary about Kim Peek, go to www.youtube.com and type Kim Peek in the search bar.
Darold A. Treffert, a leading medical expert on autism, states that savants tend to have exceptional abilities in one of five areas: music, art, lightning calculations, calendar calculating and mechanical or spatial skills. Savants may be able to play a complete symphony after hearing it only once or draw an exact rendering of a city skyline with only a brief glance to record the vision. They may be able to tell exact time without a timepiece, or put together a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle in minutes… face down. Or, as with Kim Peek, may have perfect recall of hundreds of thousands of pages of facts. Yet, these individuals are typically very limited in relating to other humans and carrying out daily activities you and I take for granted.
It is even more astounding to realize that there is another type of savant … those known as acquired savants. These individuals were born and developed normally. They acquired astonishing skills usually after a traumatic brain injury. Often they are left with a mental impairment, but are able to do calculations and exhibit near perfect recall of certain types of memory.
A most unusual case involved Orlando Serrell. Orlando was a normal 10-yeaold boy until he was hit in the head with a baseball. Within a few months of that injury Orlando began recalling such things as every license plate of the cars that had passed. Or, if you mention a date since his accident, he can effortlessly recall the weather and his whereabouts for that day. Unlike many autistic savants, however, Orlando still retains normal brain function.
According to Allan Snyder, a researcher in mental cognition, each of us actually has a perfect recording of every thought and observation that has ever occurred during our lives. In other words, it really is all in there somewhere. The challenge is how to access all of that incredible data.
Memory recall depends on the interaction of our millions of brains cells with one another. One of the findings of neuroscientists is that the number of synapses (connections) between brain cells is indicative of learning capacity and memory ability. As we age, some of these synapses are lost due to degeneration. Other causes of synaptic decrease include alcohol or drug toxicity, traumatic brain injury, and not surprisingly, decreased mental activity. Mental function is another example of “use it or lose it”.
Fortunately for those of us that have begun having “senior moments,” there are quite a few ways to improve our mental acuity. For example, if you have a problem remembering phone numbers, make a game out of memorizing a new phone number each day. You will not recall all of the new numbers, but this little exercise may dramatically help your normal recall of numbers.
Next week this column will share several specific ways to increase your memory ability.
Until then, you may want to carry a pencil and paper with you.
Dr. Mark Kestner
mkestner@DrKestner.com
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