Savant syndrome: everything you need to know about it

Savant’s syndrome is one of the still little known and not well classified cognitive disorders. Let’s find out more and see what the links are with autism.

Often associated with autism, Savant’s syndrome represents a kind of genius that stands out in specific fields. Discovered by physician John Langdon Down (the one who also defined Down syndrome) it was initially linked to autism, assuming a definition of its own only recently.
Although the causes that lead to having this syndrome are still unknown, over the years it has been seen that it is particularly present in conjunction with autism or brain injuries.

Links between Savant and autism

According to medicine, Savant syndrome and autism often go hand in hand.
And this although this is not always necessarily the case.

In fact, there may be autistic people who do not have the syndrome and people who have it even if they are not autistic. Nonetheless, Savant’s syndrome and the link with autism are always taken into consideration. Especially because in most cases there is a sort of connection between Savant’s syndrome and Asperger ‘s which is part of the various forms of autism.

To give a practical example, it is possible that a person with autism is not able to socialize but turns out to be a real prodigy in the musical field.

Savant syndrome: the symptoms to recognize

Typically, those with Savant syndrome have damage to the left brain and demonstrate artistic, musical or mathematical skills. One of the medical theories about it is that in the presence of damage or problems in the left hemisphere , the brain balances everything by exploiting the right one more.
In fact, throughout history there have been several cases of people who developed this syndrome in adulthood and after accidents that caused damage to the left hemisphere.

Going more specifically, among the qualities of those with this syndrome there are a strong memory, calculation skills, artistic skills, musical skills and, in some cases, language skills.
Savant’s syndrome , as a disability, therefore has yet to be fully understood. At the moment, in fact, there are more unanswered questions than notions about it. This has always made this syndrome particularly fascinating in the medical field, so much so that it is a common idea that one can say that one really understands how the brain works only when one knows exactly how Savant’s syndrome works.