Videos: Famous Autistic Savants
For some children and people with autism, they display special skills especially memory, artistic skills and musical skills amongst others, and are called autistic savants. Here, we are happy to show some videos of some of the well known autistic savants.
Autistic Savant Artist, Ping Lian Yeak aged 12. Dr Darold A Treffert M.D. speaks of Lian Yeak :
“I was delighted to learn about Ping Lian through the worldwide savant syndrome website which brought his remarkable work, and his dedicated family, to my attention. Ping Lian’s artwork stands on its own demonstrating a remarkable artistic ability in an 11 year old boy. His drawings are colorful, cheerful and impressive. Those drawings take on an added significance, however, when one sees that such a-bility co-exists with a dis-ability as described by his mother and teachers. Savant Syndrome is a rare condition in which remarkable skills and abilities-islands of genius-are seen in striking contrast to limitations from a variety of circumstances such as autism or other developmental disabilities. Such artistic prowess as Ping Lian demonstrates, in addition to providing us with beautiful art, serves as a source of satisfaction, development and growth for him, helping eventually to minimize whatever limitations might spring from his disabilities. Standing behind and beside each of the savants I have worked with as well, however, is a dedicated, patient, loving, determined and perpetually optimistic family which appreciates the special gift within their child, and wish to share it more widely with world. Thus we all become, then, the beneficiaries of that special giftedness, and that determination and optimism, while the artist himself continues to grow and flourish. ” ( courtesy from Ping Lian Yeak’s website )
Go to Ping Lian Yeak’s website to know more about him and his art work or to support him by purchasing prints of his drawings.
Autistic British Savant -Daniel Paul Tammet (born 31 January 1979) is a British high-functioning autistic savant gifted with a facility for mathematical and natural language learning. He was born the first of nine children to working class parents in London. In his memoir, Born on a Blue Day, he talks of how having epilepsy, synaesthesia, and Asperger Syndrome all deeply affected his childhood.Experiencing numbers as colors or sensations is a well-documented form of synaesthesia, but the detail and specificity of Tammet’s mental imagery of numbers is unusual. In his mind, he says, each integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, color, texture and feel. He can intuitively “see” results of calculations as synesthesic landscapes without using conscious mental effort, and that he can “sense” whether a number is prime or composite. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi as beautiful. 6 apparently has no distinct image. Tammet not only verbally describes these visions, but has also created artwork: a watercolor painting of Pi.
Tammet was the subject of a documentary in the UK entitled The Boy With The Incredible Brain, which was first broadcast on the British television channel Five on 23 May 2005.The documentary showed highlights of his pi recitation feat, studying the Icelandic language in one week and his meeting with Kim Peek, a world famous savant. In one moment of the show, Peek hugged Tammet and told him, “Some day you will be as great as I am,” to which Tammet replied that “that was a wonderful compliment, what an aspiration to have.”
British Stephen Wiltshire, the autistic Human Camera.
Wiltshire was mute and at the age of three was diagnosed as an autistic. The same year, his father died in a motorcycle accident. At the age of five, Stephen was sent to Queensmill School in London where he expressed interest in drawing. He began to communicate through his drawings. At the age of eight, he began to draw imaginary post-earthquake cityscapes and cars.
His teachers began to encourage his drawing and, with his aid, Wiltshire slowly learned to speak at the age of nine.When he was ten, Wiltshire drew a sequence of drawings of London landmarks, one for each letter, that he called a “London Alphabet”.
In 1987, Wiltshire was part of a BBC programme The Foolish Wise Ones. A collection of his works, named Drawings, was published that year. Wiltshire can look at a target once and then draw an accurate and detailed picture of it. He once drew the whole of central London after a helicopter trip above it. He can also make imaginary scenes like St. Paul’s Cathedral surrounded by flames. In 2003, there was a major retrospective in the Orleans House gallery in Twickenham, London.
Stephen’s work has been the subject of many TV documentaries; neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about him in the chapter “Prodigies”, in his book An Anthropologist on Mars.
Wiltshire’s books include Drawings (1987), Cities (1989), Floating Cities (1991), and Stephen Wiltshire’s American Dream (1993). His third book—Floating Cities (Michael Joseph, 1991)—was number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list.
In May 2005 Stephen produced his longest ever panoramic memory drawing of Tokyo on a 10-meter long canvas within seven days following a short helicopter ride over the city. Since then he has drawn Rome, Hong Kong and Frankfurt on giant canvasses, and is in the process of drawing Madrid, after taking a 30 minute helicopter ride on Saturday February 2, 2008. When Wiltshire took the helicopter ride over Rome, he drew it in such great detail that he drew the exact number of columns in the Colosseum.
In 2006, Stephen Wiltshire was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to art.In September 2006 Stephen opened his permanent gallery in the Royal Opera Arcade, Pall Mall, London.
