IcyMonkey wrote:
Actually, scientists do kind of know why idiot savants are the way they are. It seems that almost all idiot savants have damage to the left side of their brain, the side dealing with mathematics, language and such. This somehow causes the right side of their brain, which deals with spatio-temporal reasoning, to be augmented.
Quite impressive that you knew this. It has been fun debating with you :) Just of of curiosity roundabouts how old are you?
IcyMonkey wrote:
...most idiot savants have talent in the arts and music, whereas there are very, very few who excel in linguistic or mathematical tasks.
The mathematical skills are relatively common, but not the extremely gifted ones.
(Source) Read some of the examples they are quite interesting. They
always have a prodigious memory.
IcyMonkey wrote:
Besides, social problems are way to complicated to be analyzed in the way you're proposing.
That is the point. Regular humans can't figured them out because they are mathematical in origin, they are logical. However it is a far far more complicated form of it than most are used to dealing with it. Hence we simply it, or assume it has no definite answer (I am speaking opinion here).
However I must also state that in my reading I found that sometimes, when people atempt to employ or hone the savant's abilites they relapse so to speak, causing their retardation to worsen and possibly loose their savant abilities.