What is savant syndrome or sage syndrome?

Kim Peekit was a “walking encyclopedia” thatin their lifememorized more than 8,000 bookssince his parents started reading stories to him when he was only 18 months old. Peek was able to read and memorize a page in a record time of 10 seconds. And he still had plenty of room in his head to remember, for example, all the zip codes in the United States. His exceptional memory, which served as the inspiration for the filmRain Man, caused by the callsavant syndrome or sage syndrome, a disorder that paradoxically also made him unable to fend for himself in tasks as simple as fastening a button. Britain’s Stephen Wiltshire also has savant syndrome, although his genius manifests itself differently. This artist, better known as “the human camera”, is able to draw a complete city like Rome to scale and in great detail, without making any mistakes, after visiting it only once by helicopter in a 45-minute flight.

But how do they manage to develop such prodigious memories? The study of the brains of savants using neuroimaging techniques has revealed thatmost of those who suffer from the syndrome have alterations in the left hemisphere of their brain. That is why a large part of them are also autistic. For Darold Treffert, author of the bookExtraordinary people: understanding savant syndrome, a possible explanation for his genius is that when the left hemisphere does not work well, the right compensates for it by developing new skills, possibly recruiting neuronal tissue that is normally used for other functions. Another possibility, Treffert says, is thatinjury to the left hemisphere uncovers skills that had been dormantdue to what is known as the “tyranny of the dominant left brain”.

Psychologists Allan Snyder and John Mitchell go further and claim that “we all have a savant within”. Our brain, they affirm, gathers all the data that comes to us, processes them and suppresses the accessory information to create a single idea, which is the one that becomes conscious.In the brain of savants, information is not “edited”, and the result is similar to “seeing images in great detail, like individual pixels in a photograph,” explains Snyder. In other words, the savants would not have more mental power than us, quite the contrary.