Autism

From English 194 Wiki Site

Autistic individuals particularly associate to creativity through the type of autism known as "idiot savant" (Certain autistic individuals have extraordinary talents in one specific area or another):

Example: Thomas Fuller who had the ability to perform calendar computations.
Hou studied six artists avants only to find that each had a particular interest, and each was limited to this speciality.

Certain autistic individuals have extraordinary talents in one specific area or another. An example of this is seen in Thomas Fuller:

Fuller has the ability to perform calendar computations. Hou studied six artistic savants, only to find that each had a particular interest, and each was limited to this specialty.
Craig and Baron-Cohen also found there was a paucity of creativity despite each patient’s unique interest.
Direct association to creativity:
- Creativity is dependent upon manipulating stored information. Since savants cannot reorganize information and depend on memory or learned skill, they seemingly cannot be defined as creative. An explanation for this is that savants may have “all of their eggs in one basket”. Therefore, savants seem to lack creativity.
- On the other hand, one could reject the lack of creativity within an idiot savant by arguing that the savant’s creativity is placed only into one area. For example, an individual had the ability to dictate the amount of seconds any other person has been alive. Although, this individual was not creative through other means, there is a definite creativity seen within his ability. Since creativity is defined by a means of reorganizing already known information, this ability to count the seconds of life can be associated to this definition. The idiot savant reorganizes his knowledge about time as he figures out the seconds of each individual's life. This is to say that this example proves that the idiot savants are actually creative in some sort of way.

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