Evidence of unusual capacities in autistic savants

In most case-histories of idiots savants it is apparent that the emergence of special skills is accompanied by obsessive interest and very high degrees of practice (see, for example Sloboda, Hermelin & O'Connor, 1985; Howe & Smith, 1988; Howe, 1989a; 1989b). There a few reports, however, of mentally handicapped children who display remarkable specific skills that seem to have been acquired in the absence of deliberate training or instruction. Among the well-documented cases are those of two child artists and a young musician; all three were described as being autistic.

From the age of four, one of the artists, a girl named Nadia, was unusually slow, clumsy, and unresponsive, and spoke hardly at all, but drew many remarkable pictures, usually of horses, birds and other animals. These pictures used advanced techniques to represent perspective, proportion, foreshortening and the illusion of movement; they also showed impressive manual dexterity (Selfe, 1977). The drawing skills of the other child artist, Stephen Wiltshire, are equally impressive (O'Connor & Hermelin, 1987; Sacks, 1995).

A five-year-old autistic boy was described in Leon Miller's (1989) study of musical abilities in the mentally handicapped. He too was largely unresponsive to his physical environment and very severely retarded in language development, with practically no speech. However, when confronted with a piano keyboard he could not only reproduce a heard melody but also transform the piece by transposing it to a different key. He could improvise in ways that conformed to the conventions of musical composition.

The abilities Miller observed seem to be based on a capacity to encode the fundamental units quickly and efficiently and to represent musical items in a complex knowledge system incorporating sensitivity to harmonic relationships, scale or key constraints, melodic structure, and stylistic norms.

The remarkable capacities of autistic musicians and artists may seem to call for something close to the talent account. At least in the cases of Nadia and the five-year-old boy described by Miller, their observed level of performance was beyond anything encountered in nonautistic children of comparable ages. Exactly why these children could do things that others cannot remains largely a matter for speculation, although it is noteworthy that in many documentated cases the individuals concerned spent many hours each day concentrating on their special interest. There is no direct evidence that the causes are innate, and if they do have an innate component its main direct effect may be to augment the individuals' obsessionality rather than their specific skills as such.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 993