The 1988 Jansson memorial lecture. The performance of the 'idiot-savant': implicit and explicit

'Idiots-savants' are people of low intelligence who have one or two outstanding talents such as calendrical calculation, drawing or musical performance. Such people are mostly male and occur with high frequency among the autistic population. Do they perform their amazing feats because of an outstanding memory or do they draw on some faculty of reasoning to help them? Although they cannot easily make clear how they carry out their tasks by using speech, experiments reveal that they follow simple rules which they use to aid them in recalling correct dates and sequences in classical music. It has been said that they cannot abstract but this turns out not to be true: all can abstract to some degree and some are more at home with abstract than with concrete material. Whatever else is true of these handicapped but gifted people their gift becomes apparent at an early age and is apparently not improved by practice. Perhaps the most important conclusion from work with these groups is that their gifts force us to think again about the concept of general intelligence. How far is it possible to have low intelligence and yet be an outstanding musician or artist? Speculation on this idea may force us to revise our concepts of intelligence, neuropsychology and handicap.