Week 10 (Savants & Prodigious Talent)

Question 1

What is a savant?

Answer 1

Definitions
-Prodigious and outstanding talent can co-occur with learning or developmental disabilities
-This can include people who are autistic, but not all autistic people are savants
-Although highly unusual, some people can acquire savant abilities, usually through some form of brain trauma
-Very rare, not even recognised within the DSM-V
-Around 100 documented savants in the world

Question 2

Savant propensity relationship

Answer 2

Traits –> Behaviours –> Skill
-Personal traits may lead to behaviours that increase one’s ability to practise and master talents
-e.g. autistic people fixated on particular interests such as trains –> may lead to obsessive focus over long periods of time (e.g, trainspotting) –> may lead to encyclopaedic knowledge of train timetables.

Question 3

Savant correlational relationship

Answer 3

Neurological –> Learning difficulty
–> Skill
-The same biological/ neurological cause underpins both skills and learning difficulty
-e.g, a lack of social interest makes it hard to develop social cognitive skills, but also frees up capacity for other cognitive activities.

Question 4

Causal savant

Answer 4

Perceptual differences –> Skill
-Savant skills derive from cognitive and perceptual differences
-e.g. someone who has synaesthesia may have alternative way of remembering numbers.

Question 5

Challenges of measuring savant skills

Answer 5

-Incredibly small sample
-Each talent is unique
-Each learning difficulty may also be unique
-Communication with savants may be difficult
-It’s hard to imagine something you can’t yourself do

Question 6

Convergent thinking

Answer 6

-A term used to describe the ability to use accuracy, logic, and speed to develop a single well-established answer to a problem
-Will synthesise multiple points of information to derive an answer (e.g, an algorithm for calculating dates)
-Suited to deductive and factual endeavours

Question 7

Divergent thinking

Answer 7

-A term used to describe the ability to generate multiple possible solutions
-Personality traits associated with divergent thinking include openness and extraversion
-Suited to creative endeavours

Question 8

What does flow involve

Answer 8

1. Focus and concentration
2. A sense of ecstasy - or being outside of reality
3. Greater inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done and how well we are doing
4. Knowing that active is doable - that our skills are adequate to the task
5. A sense of serenity - no worries about oneself, a feeling of going beyond the boundaries of the ego
6. Timelessness - although focussed on the present the hours seem to pass by in minutes
7. Intrinsic motivations, whatever produces flow becomes its own rewards.

Question 9

How do we access flow

Answer 9

-People tend to enter into the flow more easily when a task has clear proximal goals and offers immediate informational feedback on one’s progress
-Flow need to be voluntary to be enjoyable
-FLow is a balance between task difficulty and level of ability. There are other states possible, such as anxiety and apathy.

Question 10

Monotropism theory (Dinah Murray)

Answer 10

-A mind that focuses on a small number of interests tends to miss things outside it’s attentional tunnel
-Hyperfocus can make it hard to redirect attention (executive functioning) and can lead to stereotypes.