The beautiful otherness of the autistic mind.

1. INTRODUCTION Of all the features of autism, none is more widely admired than the remarkable talent found so frequently with this condition. Yet special talents are still less researched and less well understood than other features of autism. In popular accounts of autism, the existence of extraordinary talent in art, music, maths, calendar calculation or memory, often referred to as savant skills, has become a stock in trade. As a result of this fascination, it is now very likely that any eccentric scientist or artist, living or dead, will come under scrutiny for having traits of autism or Asperger syndrome. But are geniuses, such as Newton or Einstein, personifications of the association of autism and talent? In our view, this notion misrepresents both autism and talent. Nevertheless, the association of autism with special talent, sometimes at the highest level, cannot be denied and provides one of the most tantalizing mysteries of this condition. Sacks (1985) was probably the first to raise popular awareness of people with severe brain abnormality who nonetheless showed extraordinary ability, in his famous account of 'the twins'. John and Michael, then 26, were living in an institution when Sacks met them. When a box of matches spilled on the floor, '111, they both cried simultaneously; and then, in a murmur, John said 37. Michael repeated this, John said it a third time and stopped. I counted the matches—it took me some time—and there were 111'. Amazingly, the twins could not only count the large number of matches within seconds, they were able to see the prime number 37 almost instantly, and saw it three times. While unable to communicate with John and Michael in the ordinary way, Sacks was able to engage with them by offering ever-larger prime numbers for their delight. Treffert (1989) described many more examples of staggering savant skills in his seminal book, Extraordinary people, in which he defined savantism as a rare condition that combines brilliance in one field with severe intellectual limitations in almost all others. What can science tell us about autistic savants? Twenty years ago, O'Connor & Hermelin (1988) published an annotation on 'Low intelligence and special abilities'. These pioneering researchers had, for the first time, moved research on savant skills beyond the descriptive case study, through innovative experimental designs and the use of appropriate control groups. They thus paved the way for modern cognitive psychological studies of …