, stuttering, hyperactivity and learning disabilities as well. The movie Rain Man depicted an autistic savant and that term became almost a household word. It is important to remember, however, that not all autistic persons are savants, and not all savants are autistic. What one sees in Rain Man are savant skills (lightening calculating, memorization etc.) grafted on to autism (narrowed affect, obsessive sameness, rituals etc). It is also important to point out that the savant in the movie is a high functioning person with autistic disorder, but the disorder consists of an entire spectrum of disabilities ranging from profoundly disturbed to high functioning; not all autistic savants function at such a high level. For many years it was feared that helping the savant achieve a higher level of functioning with treatment--"eliminating the defect"--would result in a loss of special skills, i.e. there would be a trade-off of right brain special skills for left brain language acquisition, for example. That has not turned out to be the case. Quite to the contrary, "training the talent" is a valuable approach toward increasing socialization, language and independence. Thus the special skills of the savant, rather than being seen a odd, frivolous, trivial or distracting, become a useful treatment tool as a conduit toward normalization in these special persons. Some schools have begun to include persons with Savant Syndrome into classes for the gifted and talented as a method of enhancing further this conduit toward normalization. There are probably fewer than 25 prodigious savants living at the present time. Some of those include Leslie Lemke (music), Alonzo Clemens (sculpting), Richard Wawro (painting), Stephen Wiltshire (drawing), Tony DeBlois (music) to name some. Other prodigious savants more recently described are in England, Austrailia and Japan. A 1983 60 minutes program on Savant Syndrome was particularly useful in bringing this remarkabl...
