savant,autism 60 Minutes - Brain Man (Savant) part 1

An autistic savant (historically described as idiot savant) is a person with both autism and Savant Syndrome. Savant Syndrome describes a person having both a severe developmental or mental handicap and extraordinary mental abilities not found in most people. The Savant Syndrome skills involve striking feats of memory and often include arithmetic calculation and sometimes unusual abilities in art or music.

Most autistic savants have very extensive mental abilities, called splinter skills. They can memorize facts, numbers, license plates, maps, and extensive lists of sports and weather statistics. Some savants can mentally note and then recall perfectly a very long sequence of music, numbers, or speech. Some, dubbed mental calculators, can do exceptionally fast arithmetic, including prime factorization. Other skills include precisely estimating distances and angles by sight, calculating the day of the week for any given date over the span of tens of thousands of years, and being able to accurately gauge the passing of time without a clock. Most autistic savants have a single special skill, while others have multiple skills. Usually these skills are concrete, non-symbolic, right hemisphere skills, rather than left hemisphere skills, which tend to be more sequential, logical, and symbolic.

PART 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-aT0NrSQTM

Other videos:
http://www.videosift.com/video/daniel-tammet-sees-numbers-in-his-head-to-100-decimal-places
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6097787318198018019&hl=en-CA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vs6R5YZQ3c&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%2F%3Fdomains%3Dwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%26search%3Dsavant
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-33723012366645931
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxAR9dnSuQM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%2F%3Fdomains%3Dwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%26search%3Dsavant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXG-1YLGAS0&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%2F%3Fdomains%3Dwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%26search%3Dsavant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95L-zmIBGd4&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%2F%3Fdomains%3Dwww%2Evideosift%2Ecom%26search%3Dsavant