ACCIDENTAL GENIUS

Better than Genius

I find it quite incongruous that savants are NOT considered geniuses. Although savants lack many skills, they are EXCEPTIONALLY good in one area.  They may be thought as “mentally retarded people,” but I think that they are remarkable, gifted people.

According to Dr. Darold Treffert, there are three types of savants: a normal savant (who has a skill that is not useful), a gifted savant (who has a conspicuous skill), and a prodigious savant (who has an amazing skill). George Widener, Leslie Lemke, and Tommy McHugh are all savants.

George is a “Calendar Calculator” - he can tell the day of the week of any date he is given. After Neurologist Joy Hirsch conducted an MRI on his brain, she discovered that George’s brain is unusually organized. Leslie Lemke is another inspirational savant; he is blind, but can play any piece of music on the piano after hearing it.

After Tommy McHugh had an accident that caused him brain impairment, he became a savant. He began to paint amazingly, but his wife was actually scared and left him. Tommy wanted help, so he wrote 60 letters in rhyme to doctors around the world. Dr. Alice Flaherty, from Harvard, understood his case because she herself had suffered from a trauma. She studied Tommy’s brain scans and discovered that bleeding had caused pressure in his frontal and temporal lobes, producing instability and creativity.

Cases like these ones have revealed that savants have a more dominant Right Hemisphere, the part of the brain that focuses on creative skills. Kim Peek and Daniel Tammet are staggeringly prodigious savants. I was shocked when I realized what their abilities were. Kim Peek memorized 9,000 books and can read 500 pages in 1 hour, reading two different pages at the same time. Daniel Tammet recited the first 22,514 digits of Pi. So how come savants are not considered geniuses?

I deeply reckon that savants don’t lack learning disabilities; on the contrary, they have a greater learning capacity than anyone. Whether savants are born that way, like George, or made that way, like Tommy, does not matter. Savants are better than geniuses.

Photos:

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