Mental health problems >>>> Who is Savant?

Who is Savant?

Sometimes a person's abilities amaze those around them with an unprecedented scale, but for some reason they are detected in people with deviations from mental health from the norm. A person may be untenable in learning, in everyday life, in communication, but he is exceptionally brilliant in a certain area. For example, it has a phenomenal visual memory, that is, it is able to reproduce once seen with a high degree of accuracy. Or flawless in mathematical calculations. Or endowed with the ability to play a piece of music from memory, only once heard. Or has supernatural (not human) sensitivity of hearing. There are many examples of genius that has nothing to do with the general level of mental development of a person. Such people with an extraordinary ability to do something, called savants.

Savants are an exceptional natural phenomenon, as their abilities (there may be several abilities) cannot be intentionally reproduced. This is a gift of nature, an anomaly or the result of a brain injury, which, according to the statistics of studies of cases of savantism, is a very common hypothesized cause of its development.

In principle, savants do not use their inimitable abilities in any way, but simply demonstrate them. This is due to the fact that they cannot conduct intellectual activity outside the area of their genius due to disturbances in the functioning of the central nervous system. So signs of savantism or "savant syndrome" are seen in people with autism, Down syndrome and other congenital or acquired abnormalities in the brain.

For the savant, an “island of genius” is typical against the background of an almost complete impossibility of mental adaptation to the surrounding reality.

But, despite the fact that the savant is unable to find the practical use of his outstanding abilities, he, with a certain training system and with outside guidance, can further develop his phenomenality. People with the usual structure of the brain have only to find the area of application of the savant's genius.

Where does the "savant syndrome" come from? The physiology of the brain determines the work of both hemispheres of the brain synchronously and in conjunction, but each hemisphere has its own functional responsibilities - it controls the opposite half of the human body and part of his mental abilities. For example: analytical thinking, mathematical abilities, speech, memory, stage-by-stage information processing are under the control of the left hemisphere; the right hemisphere is responsible for intuition, spatial orientation, creativity, imagination, figurative thinking, emotions, and simultaneously processes different streams of information.

An ordinary person with well-developed functions of both hemispheres actually "can do everything, but little by little." But as a result of abnormal development of the brain or its injury, the work of the hemispheres is in a sense out of sync. And then, as a result of the bias, one of the functions of the brain begins to prevail, which in the practical understanding of this issue boils down to the emergence of an ability in a certain area of the brain: flawless memory, flawless hearing, flawless accuracy of movements, flawless thinking, etc. metamorphosis also occurs with people who are called savants.