DEVELOPMENTAL CONDITIONShas designed humane livestock-facilities by drawing on her ability to
identify details which can cause animals distress. In 2010, her life story
was turned into an HBO feature-length biopic. Wiltshire, a celebrated
British artist, started producing accurate and photo-realistic depictions
of buildings and cityscapes from the age of eight. Many of his works
are produced from memory, and in 2006 he was appointed MBE for his
services to art.
Some experts have suggested that these kind of talents lie within us all.
In 2006, Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the Univer-
sity of Sydney, showed a way to improve people’s ability to count large
numbers of discrete objects in an instant – in this case 50 to 150 blobs on
a computer screen. Snyder found that by applying transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS) to their left temporal lobe, he was able to significantly
improve participants’ performance. Before TMS, one participant had
twenty guesses with twenty different displays and was always more than
Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in the Oscar-winning film Rain Man. The
inspiration for the autistic savant character in the film was Kim Peek, who died
in December 2009, aged 58. Nicknamed “Kim-puter” by his friends, Peek was
a non-autistic savant born with brain abnormalities including a malformed
cerebellum and an absent corpus callosum (the thick bundle of nerve fibres that
joins the two hemispheres). Peek struggled with abstract and conceptual thinking,
but his savant skills were astonishing, and included an encyclopaedic knowledge
of history, literature, classical music, US zip codes and travel routes.