Could Genius Be Evidence of Unlocked Access to the Collective Unconscious?
If not, how do we explain savants and their “islands of genius”?
Kim Peek (1951 — 2009), a real-life savant, served as the inspiration behind the character played by Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man”. He was born with severe mental disabilities due to macrocephaly, damage to the cerebellum, and absence of the corpus callosum, along with additional substantial central nervous system damage. Yet, some called him “Kimputer”. He has memorized about 12,000 books, and it took him about 3 seconds to read through two pages — his left eye read the left page, while his right eye read the right page. His calendar-calculating abilities were one-of-a-kind. If you gave him any date, he’d tell you what day of the week it was. He was also a human GPS. He’d memorize any map you showed him and then tell you precisely how to get from one city to another, and how to get around any city, street by street.
Originally coined “idiot savants”, they are very rare, but they do exist. Their several disabilities contrast with remarkable capabilities that far exceed those of the general population — Dr. Darold A. Treffert referred to these as ‘islands of genius’ in his work, The savant syndrome: an extraordinary condition. A synopsis: past, present, future. Thankfully, various researchers — especially Dr. Treffert — have suggested, for the sake of simplicity and dignity, replacing “idiot savants” with “savants”.
Savants are usually severely handicapped, with a lower IQ, and cognitive/physical disabilities. But they display one or a few exceptional traits, like calendar-calculating abilities, prodigious math skills (especially speed of calculation) in the absence of basic arithmetical skills, one-of-a-kind artistic abilities (especially drawing), above-average musical skills (mostly piano), an outstanding ability to recall books in a few minutes, and spatial skills (measuring distances with just one look, for instance). Impressive memory is not a separate skill, since it’s present in every savant, and it’s precisely this prodigious memory that makes these traits possible.
“…the first specific description of savant syndrome took place in London in 1887 when Dr J. Langdon Down gave that year’s prestigious Lettsomian Lecture at the invitation of the Medical Society of London. In that lecture, he reflected on his 30 years as a physician at the Earlswood Hospital and described ‘an interesting class of cases for which the term ‘idiot savants’ has been given, and of which a considerable number have come under my observation’. He then presented 10 cases of persons with ‘special faculties’ that read exactly similar to cases now 121 years later. One of his patients had memorized The rise and fall of the Roman Empire verbatim and could recite it backwards or forwards. Other children drew with remarkable skill but ‘had a comparative blank in all the other faculties of mind’. Still other children showed music ability, arithmetical genius or precise timekeeping skill, all of which, taken together, comprised a clinical picture of savant syndrome — special skills+phenomenal memory — which unfailingly reoccurs in case reports to this day.” — The savant syndrome: an extraordinary condition. A synopsis: past, present, future, Darold A. Treffert
Savants can not only replicate or reproduce what they see, they can also improvise and create. Leslie Lemke is another real-life savant with astonishing musical skill, who had to have his eyes surgically removed when he was born. He played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto №1 flawlessly at age 14 after having listened to it on TV once. Then he grew bored with just reproducing and started improvising and composing his own pieces.
Stephen Wiltshire is another savant who can perfectly depict square miles of a cityscape in a precise, detail-rich, huge drawing, entirely from his memory, after a helicopter ride over any city. He’s been able to retain entire streets and buildings — along with their windows. But, apart from rendering a drawing of a city that lives in his memory, he also adds imaginary details when he wants to.
Daniel Tammet is a highly functioning autistic savant with outstanding math and language skills. He has a special variant of synesthesia, whereby he can see and sense numbers. He says each integer has a unique color, feel, and texture. Besides, he speaks 11 languages and learned Icelandic in a week after he agreed to be interviewed by an Icelandic TV channel.
There are plenty more savant cases described in 10 Most Fascinating Savants in The World and the official Savant research and publications web. This website is populated with Dr.Treffert's published work, which spans over 50 years of research. He’s devoted his entire life and professional work to exploring the intriguing world of savants.
Research asserts that memory alone can’t be the sole responsible for savant abilities, especially when talking about musical skills (Nettlebeck & Young 1999; Hermelin 2001).
Savants are usually born with the syndrome, which might be found in Autistic people or people born with severe central nervous system damage. But there’s also an “acquired savant” as a result of a neurological illness or brain injury. There have been reported cases of savants with artistic and musical skills after an accidental fall or hemorrhage due to aneurysm. Although the phenomenon has been widely studied, the reasons that underlie it are still mostly unknown. There’re a few hints and theories around, but since it was first described more than a century ago, the phenomenon of the savant syndrome has remained mostly unexplained.
Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia, has done extensive research on savants. His work can be found at Centre for the Mind. Here, you’ll discover his fascinating studies and ideas regarding savants. Snyder has an interesting hypothesis that we all possess dormant savant traits. There’s a hidden genius within all of us. But we know little about it yet. Understanding these “islands of genius” would not only transform what we know about our minds, but it’d also affect the way we approach learning and reasoning.
An interesting work, published by Allan Snyder, is “Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower level, less-processed information”. Here’s the abstract:
“My hypothesis is that savants have privileged access to lower level, less-processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and meaningful labels. Owing to a failure in top-down inhibition, they can tap into information that exists in all of our brains, but is normally beyond conscious awareness. This suggests why savant skills might arise spontaneously in otherwise normal people, and why such skills might be artificially induced by low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation. It also suggests why autistic savants are atypically literal with a tendency to concentrate more on the parts than on the whole and why this offers advantages for particular classes of problem solving, such as those that necessitate breaking cognitive mindsets. A strategy of building from the parts to the whole could form the basis for the so-called autistic genius. Unlike the healthy mind, which has inbuilt expectations of the world (internal order), the autistic mind must simplify the world by adopting strict routines (external order).” — Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower level, less-processed information, Allan Snyder.
Kim Peek, the world’s most famous savant, lacked the corpus callosum, a structure that serves as a communication bridge between the two hemispheres of the brain. Others say that damage in the brain left anterior lobe might unlock Savant-like traits, especially artistic and musical. Left brain dysfunction combined with right brain compensation seems to be common in savants, as researched by Dr.Treffert.
Researchers are recreating these “lesions” with electrical devices to test the effect on people. These tests seek to inhibit part of the anterior frontal lobe. What most of these theories agree on is that, after an injury, the brain needs to rewire itself and create neural pathways and shortcuts that are new, so you might notice you lose old abilities (because those neural pathways are no longer accessible), but you discover newly acquired abilities, even some you thought were impossible for you to develop. Unexpected neural connections and associations are created.
However, scientists have not yet been able to pinpoint how it is exactly that you acquire an ability you never had. How a person who never played piano suddenly listens to a Tschaikovsky concert and flawlessly reproduces the pieces? There should’ve been a learning process that never took place there. How about muscle memory? How is that talent created? Where does it stem from? Is it derived from a special connection? Or better yet, from unlocking access to some dormant skills? We turn to another theory that many scientists discard, yet many others feel attracted to. Beyond tapping into a lower-level, unprocessed memory, savants could be accessing the collective unconscious — a term coined by Carl Jung which denotes structures of the unconscious mind that are shared among beings of the same species and don’t depend on personal experience. Dr. Treffert talks about genetic memory, which is a special memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and it’s incorporated into the genome over long spans of time. These two concepts seem to point in the same direction.
No matter which possible explanation seems more logical. What matters is that we can’t help but be left in awe by savant traits. Dating back from 1887, and still mostly unexplained, it’s clear that savant syndrome is an infinite mystery. At the very least, we have a lot to learn from savants. But in a broader sense, there’s something we might be missing. Maybe we’re not looking at the whole picture. Who knows? Savants might be the ones who teach us how to access and unlock our full potential.
Just like it happens with gifted kids, savants don’t seem to go through a conscious reasoning process to find the answers. They just seem “to know” the answers in mere seconds or just a few minutes, depending on the complexity of the question. It’s an intuitive approach, more than a rational one. Those “eureka” moments are really something.
But there’s no need to bash our heads against a wall to unleash these powers. Some studies have been trying to recreate the same traits in normal people, and these are the strategies that have worked so far:
- Meditation & Visualization
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation
- Developing intuition
While transcranial magnetic stimulation should be better left to the experts, meditation & visualization are within our reach. Being less in our minds, and more in touch with our intuition, which is the highest form of intelligence.
Savants have opened a new door to understanding our own minds. Could these “islands of genius” evidence some kind of access to the collective unconscious? How else could we explain them?