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What does it take to be classed as a savant?
It is when some special talent is conspicuous because it stands out from the rest of the person鈥檚 ability levels; usually it is grafted onto intellectual disabilities or differences. I have started a of all the reported cases and it now has 319 people. About three-quarters of them are people with autism, but it can also come from rarer brain conditions.

What kind of skills do savants have?
The most common ones are in music, art, maths, memory or calendar calculating 鈥� the ability to tell you what day of the week any date in history or the future might be.

How do people calculate dates many years into the future?
I wish I knew! If you asked George Finn, who was a patient at a Bronx psychiatric hospital and had the ability to do this 40,000 years into the past and the future, he would say he didn鈥檛 know how he did it. There is an algorithm for calendar calculation and savants with this ability seem to have an unconscious installation of that algorithm. We do that ourselves sometimes 鈥� when we first learn something, we work it out in our head and then later on we inculcate that into a sort of unconscious algorithm. Calendar calculating is peculiar because it is seen so often in savants and it is out of proportion to how obscure that ability normally is.

How did you get interested in such abilities?
In 1962, I started a children鈥檚 unit at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute in Wisconsin, and I gathered together 25 youngsters with autism. One lad had memorised the bus system in the city of Milwaukee. Another had severe impairments, but could complete a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle with the picture side down, just from looking at the geometric shapes. Ever since then, I鈥檝e been interested in how it is possible to have severe limitations and yet islands of genius.

What other kinds of abilities do people on your register have?
I don鈥檛 think there has ever been a person with a memory as broad and deep as Kim Peek, who was the inspiration for the movie Rain Man. He memorised several thousand books 鈥� even the page numbers 鈥� and his ability to absorb and retain information was phenomenal.

And , in the UK, is able to fly above a city in a helicopter and then spend the next seven days drawing what he saw, window by window and tree by tree. If you take a digital photograph from the helicopter you can superimpose it on his drawing.

of Wisconsin was born prematurely and had brain damage; he has an IQ of 58 and yet he is a musical genius. You can play him a piece once and he plays it back, no matter how complex it is. He can even do it at the same time he鈥檚 still hearing it with a three-second delay. That is amazing.

Is savantism something people are born with?
Not always. Sometimes ordinary individuals have a head injury or a stroke, and suddenly an ability surfaces in art or music. For example, Tommy McHugh was a carpenter who had a stroke and after that he began to write poetry and to do this massive art work. On my register, I have about 50 such cases of acquired savantism. To me, that speaks to the buried potential within us all.

How does that potential show itself?
In those individuals there has been injury to one part of the brain, almost always the left hemisphere, and there is recruitment of intact brain tissue elsewhere. Within that tissue is this buried potential. An interesting example is frontotemporal dementia, which begins with degeneration in the frontal and temporal cortex.

There have been 12 cases reported of people with this condition who had either . In nine of them, their left side deteriorated first, and as the cortex was diminishing, this buried potential came out.

Why would damage to the left hemisphere lead to unusual talents?
It is too simplistic to say the right brain and left brain are neatly divided, but the hemispheres do specialise in certain functions. The left hemisphere is great at language and logical thinking, while the right hemisphere tends to govern creativity and the arts. This suppression of the left side of the brain could also be a factor in people who are born savants. When we are in the womb, the left hemisphere completes its development later than the right, so it is vulnerable for longer to anything that would be detrimental to neuronal tissue, like drugs or toxins.

This theory might explain why savant syndrome and autism are four times as common in men as in women. Testosterone is detrimental to neuronal tissue and when a male fetus is developing its sexual characteristics, the level of testosterone is almost as high as it is in adult males. The vulnerable left hemisphere is exposed to testosterone, so it鈥檚 not surprising you would see more damage in males than in females.

Is there any way of releasing that buried potential without brain damage?
That鈥檚 the major challenge. Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney in Australia is experimenting with trying to temporarily incapacitate the left anterior temporal area in volunteers using transcranial direct current stimulation. He started with the ability to draw and that鈥檚 pretty subjective. But now he鈥檚 gone on to problem-solving, which is more quantifiable. He鈥檚 demonstrated that there is a release of some potential although not at a prodigious level. I think in future we might be able to do this pharmacologically if we could find things that work without side effects.

鈥淗e memorised several thousand books, even the page numbers鈥�

Could any other methods release potential?
Some people are working with yoga and meditation to try to access brainwaves that are more desirable in terms of relieving stress and anxiety. I favour another route, which is to spend more time 鈥渞ummaging鈥� in our right hemisphere. By that I mean broadening our interests in life, perhaps taking up hobbies like cooking, painting or cultivating plants 鈥� anything that involves some creativity and new learning other than using our well-worn, logical, sequential, language-dependent left hemisphere. A lot of people wait until they retire before they start exploring these things. I think we can access some of those abilities earlier if we just make a conscious effort.

Do you do anything to draw out your own brain鈥檚 potential?
In the past I would only read medical books; now I鈥檒l also read novels or science fiction. If I drive to Chicago, I always used to take the freeway. It gets me there quickly but it鈥檚 not very interesting. Now if I have time, I鈥檒l take the side roads along Lake Michigan. Plus I spend some time meditating.

I haven鈥檛 composed any symphonies yet, but I think it has got me in touch with some possibilities within myself. From the very beginning, when I saw my first savant, I thought, 鈥渨hat does this say to us about the dormant potential within us all?鈥�.

(Image: Jerry Luterman)

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭here鈥檚 a savant in you鈥�