A Guy who Tought Himself Several Languages

This is really an intriguing topic. It came from this article on newscientist.com.

WHAT day of the week was 5 June 1963? Chances are you can't say without looking it up, but a calendar savant could name it in an instant.

It's just one of a multitude of uncanny abilities demonstrated by savants, who are often, but not always, autistic. Kim Peek, who inspired the 1988 film Rain Man (see picture), has memorised over 8600 books, can name all the US telephone area codes and city ZIP codes and can describe how to get from one city to any other in the US. Stephen Wiltshire, an architectural artist, can draw an entire landscape after seeing it just once and Derek Paravicini can play any piece of music after the first hearing.

Some have speculated that such savants are born with innate, uncanny abilities. Others claim that they are "made", through a combination of memory and dedicated practice. Now an 18-year-old girl with autism, who has been described as a "proto-savant", is allowing one of these theories to be tested.

The girl, from Connecticut, stands out because although she showed calendar savant ability early on in life, her mother discouraged her from practising, so she never fully honed her skills. Savant-researcher Marc Thioux at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands says that the girl, known as AVK, will enable him to study savant abilities quite literally "in the making".

Thioux, a proponent of the "made" theory, previously hypothesised that calendar-savant ability arises through memorising a large number of dates and applying certain rules to them, such as the fact that any two years 28 years apart will almost always have the same calendar. The rules allow the memorised dates to be transposed to any year, allowing any date to be calculated rapidly.

It was very difficult to test this theory, though, as a "full blown" savant who has learned these dates and rules would be indistinguishable from one with innate ability. What Thioux needed was someone who had learned some, but not all of the techniques, a kind of missing link.

He gave AVK a series of dates on a computer screen and asked her to name the corresponding day of the week, recording how long it took her to respond and any errors she made. He also asked her a series of questions designed to test her knowledge of calendrical rules.

He found that ... full article