![]() The most common types involve coloured letters or numbers and what are called mental “ number forms”. But in most cases the stimuli that induce synaesthesia are not sensory, but conceptual categories of learned objects, such as letters, numbers, days of the week, months of the year. Synaesthesia is commonly thought of as a cross-sensory phenomenon, where, for example, different sounds will induce the experience of particular colours, or tastes will induce the tactile experience of a shape. (The portrayal by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man is a good example, based on the late, well known savant Kim Peek).Ī new hypothesis proposes that savantism arises due to a combination of autism and another condition, synaesthesia. In congenital cases, savant abilities are often encountered against a background of the general intellectual, social or communicative symptoms of autism. These can arise due to brain injuries, or be apparently congenital. Common examples of savant abilities include prodigious mental calculations, calendar calculations and remarkable feats of memory. Part of what has fed into that idea is the existence of so-called “savants” – people who have some isolated area of special intellectual ability far beyond most other individuals. But it captures an idea that we humans have untapped intellectual potential – that in each of us individually, or at least in humans in general lies the potential for genius. It’s rubbish of course – you use more than that just to see. I don’t know where that idea originated but it certainly took off as a popular meme – taxi drivers seem particularly taken with it.
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