Savants Quotes

No matter how much programming improves, however, media savants tend to see the medium living out numbered days. It's feared that the Internet will do to TV what TV did to the movies in the 1950s. But instead of panicking, the networks are finding ways to co-opt the Web.

I used to be treated like an idiot, now I'm treated like an idiot savant.

If, as some savants of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to moment, everything we perceive as real, then it stands to reason that we're also responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner.

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

Not everyone who has a savant skill I would equate with a genius.

Jay-Z is like a rap-savant, he doesn't have to write the rhymes down, he can create complex raps in his head. I mean he does memorize it, he just doesn't write it down on paper. He doesn't freestyle onto the track, it's all thought out.

The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.

With respect to why some acquired savants are musical, and some are good at the arts, and some are mathematical, why aren't they all the same; I think that has to do with this genetic endowment that all of us have.

I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

Savant syndrome, characteristically, consists of left hemisphere dysfunction coupled with right hemisphere emergence, and what you see in the savant are basically right brain skills.

There are estimated to be fewer that 50 prodigious savants worldwide. If we were brought together, it would be disappointing in the sense of us having different abilities. One thing that would make me feel united with them would be the sense of us having grown up in isolation.

When I met my first savant in 1962, I was impressed by the abilities in these youngsters who had severe disabilities. They appeared to me to be islands of genius in the sea of disability. So I've maintained that word picture since that time, of these islands of genius that are so striking and so jarring when you see them, especially in people who have severe disability.

There are some cases that have come to my attention where there's been a head injury, or getting struck by lightning and surviving, with really no disability or residual. So there are cases that I'm aware of where there's been some incident which triggered the acquired savant ability, but is not associated with long term disability, so that can occur. But I think that's probably the exception rather than the rule in that I think many of the acquired savants do end up with some residual disability.

Monsieur Franqulin, inventor of electricity. This illustrious savant, after having made several voyages around the world, died on the Sandwich Islands and was devoured by savages, of whom not a single fragment was ever recovered.

Some people seem to have extreme natural wiring - a talent that seems to come out of nowhere. Like a music savant or prodigy. The uplifting news, though, is that many talented people don't have such natural wiring - but they forge a talent through thousands of hours of what's known as deliberate practice or deliberate performance.

A savant, by definition, is somebody who has a disability and, along with that disability, has some remarkable ability. Prodigies and geniuses have the remarkable abilities that the savant shows, but they do not have a disability. So, by definition, a savant includes someone with a disability, and a prodigy or genius are people who have these remarkable skills but they do not have a disability.

The labours I devoted between 1888 to 1900 to the critical edition, translation and commentary of Kalhana's Rajatarangini, the only true historical text of Sanskrit literature, afforded me ample opportunities of gaining close contact with Sanskrit savants of Kashmir, the land where traditional learning of Hindu India had flourished in old times greatly and survived until recent years.

I object to being called a chess genius because I consider myself to be an all around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he's like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

We have preachers and savants who dilate endlessly on the sanctity of family and childhood but who tolerate a system in which a casual observer can correlate a child's social origin with its physical well-being.

Part of the function of memory is to forget; the omni-retentive mind will break down and produce at best an idiot savant who can recite a telephone book, and at worst a person to whom every grudge and slight is as yesterday's.

There are people at the extremes who aren't able to do anything musically, and then others sort of fall in the middle. And the same thing with math, and the same thing with art. You'll find people who are geniuses, or prodigies at the far end of the bell shaped curve, and I think you will find some of the acquired savants in that category who happened to have been endowed with that kind of talent, which explains why not everyone becomes an acquired savant.

The term syndrome generally appears to be a constellation, or collection, of similar traits or behaviors within an individual. So, savants do have sort of a constellation of symptoms, which is characterized by some spectacular skill, or skills, coupled with this massive memory which is grafted on to some underlying disability. So those three conditions quantify, in my mind, the term syndrome.

Babies have not yet chunked anything. They aren't doing any high level thinking. All they're doing is sucking in all the data they experience in the world around them, and remembering it, raw. It's basically what extreme savants have happen in their brains.

Animals are like autistic savants. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that animals might actually be autistic savants. Animals have special talents normal people don't, the same way autistic people have special talents normal people don't; and at least some animals have special forms of genius normal people don't, the same way some autistic savants have special forms of genius. I think most of the time animal genius probably happens for the same reason autistic genius does: a difference in the brain autistic people share with animals.

Some autistic people have savant skills. All autistic people do not have savant skills. Autism is a very variable disorder varying all the way from Einstein, emollient scientist, just a little bit of the trait, many scientist and engineers, down to somebody that's going to remain nonverbal.

Savant syndrome and autism, I think, are not disorders of brain structure, but they're disorders of brain function.

There is a small segment of people with autism that have savant skills, where they can memorize entire maps of whole entire city. They can do calendar calculations. And this is similar to some of the skills that animals have.

Savant syndrome is not a disorder in the same way as autism is a disorder or dementia is a disorder. Savant syndrome are some conditions that are superimposed and grafted on to some underlying disability. So savant syndrome is not a disease or disorder in and of itself. It is a collection of characteristics, or symptoms, or behaviors that have grafted on to the underlying disability.

There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant — sail for Asia and stumble on America — and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

The ways in which acquired savants show up are usually the same ways that congenital, or non-acquired, savant syndrome shows up. They tend to show up in the same areas: music, art, math, visual, spatial skills, and calendar calculating, although calendar calculating probably isn't quite as prominent in that group. They tend to show up quite quickly, or sort of explode on the scene and they then tend to have an obsessive sort of forceful quality about them in the same way as savant skills. So they tend to show up in the same ways.

I don't pretend to be a digital savant or even a digital apprentice.

Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.

Science in England is not a profession: its cultivators are scarcely recognised even as a class. Our language itself contains no single term by which their occupation can be expressed. We borrow a foreign word [Savant] from another country whose high ambition it is to advance science, and whose deeper policy, in accord with more generous feelings, gives to the intellectual labourer reward and honour, in return for services which crown the nation with imperishable renown, and ultimately enrich the human race.

I'm not sure I'm the only savant with high IQ or with an above average IQ. Again, it may just be that we don't know very many of the others.