Savants

Savants are a different mind altogether.  They were brought into the world to illuminate the brilliance of our brains’ capacity.   There is no one type of Savant.  Yet all are incredible glimpses into how our minds operate.

Savant syndome is a condition in which someone with significant mental (cognitive) disabilities demonstrates certain abilities far in excess of average. The skills at which savants excel are generally related to memory. This can include rapid calculation, artistic ability, map making or musical ability.

Terms such as automatic, mechanical, concrete and habit-like have been applied to this extraordinary memory.

Savant expertise has been described as ‘habit-like’ in research

Communication with Savants

There is no one rule here since each savant is unique in their ability for memory, recall and cognition. However, in general.

·       A Polymath can see a Monomath

·       A Monomath can only see itself - it can’t always “see” the skills of either a Polymath or an Autistic Savant.

·       But a Savant of the right type, can see what makes both Polymaths and Monomaths work.   A savant mind is a pure representations of how different aspects of how a more completely formed mind functions. If you want a first-person account of how a Savant mind functions, read the books by Daniel Trammett.

Habits

:Like Polymaths, Savants innately create habits for efficiency of response to stimuli. The difference is that Polymaths have the quantum pattern-matching ability (cognition/associations) and Savants generally have a more pure trigger-response mechanism.

An Observation

While at a conference a recruiter was giving a presentation about how to make the perfect “elevator pitch”. A person on the autistic spectrum responded with a very clear answer about how she woked in DevOps to automate the human errors out of the server creation process. She used technical words such as YAML, and explained what she did at work in great detail.

With total rudeness, the recruiter said, “I am not sure what you just said, but that was not an elevator pitch”.

It was awful to watch. Because it was a perfectly fine elevator pitch. Simply because the recruiter did not understand the lingo, the recruiter negated the valuable dialogue that the person on the autistic spectrum presented. That recruiter had a pretty hefty one-way mirror. So the one-way mirror of a monomath also cannot comprehend someone on the autistic spectrum with savant abilities.

No wonder we have discrimination against thought-styles in the workplace!