"When one has an extraordinary skill in an otherwise unexceptional intellect, he or she may be simply described as a savant. It is a rare phenomenon which occurs in some autistic people and/or certain people with developmental disorders. Autistic savantism is usually recognised during childhood and is often but not always found in autistic children. However it is also sometimes acquired in an accident or illness, typically one that impairs the left side of the brain. There is some research that suggests that it can be induced, which might support the view that unusual savant abilities are innate within all of us but obscured by normal functioning intellect. Most autistic savants have very extensive mental abilites, called splinter skills. they can memorise facts, numbers, license plates, maps, and extensive lists of sports and weather statistics. Some savants can mentally note and then recall back perfectly a very long series of music, numbers or speech. Why autistic savants are capable of this sort of astonishing ability is not quite clear. Some savants have obvious neurological abnormalities, but the brains of most such individual savants are anatomically and physiologically normal."
above is a summary of what i found in wikipedia. but anyway, i was watching a documentary on savants and this got me very interested in this subject so i decided to post something on it and my feelings of it.
some researchers point out that the left lobe of the brains of savants are more active and this can be used to explain why savants excel with activities connected to the left brain such as memory work and are normally weak in activities connected to the right brain such as logic thinking. other researchers also point out that it is because of the lack of logic thinking that allows savants to be able to memorise such huge amounts of facts which means that unlike us, savants do not process the information that they receive and retain only parts of the info in their memory but, instead, they just accept the whole set of information without processing it. this sets me thinking that maybe life would be simpler if we were all like savants, without having to think so much about any information presented to us. i also read that this savant-like ability will sometimes occur in people who develop alzheimer's disease in the later stages of their lifes.
however maybe in the future, we will be able to induce such savant-like abilities in humans that it may no longer be such a far off dream for me already...

buzzed...