Originally Posted by 22B
Originally Posted by Quantum2003
I think what is more confounding is that such signs can be both mild ASD and brain immaturity/slow development. In particular, I am thinking about the child of a family friend who appeared to me clearly mild (beyond borderline) ASD and was classified with an IEP for ASD by the school district in K. Interestingly, this child also had a couple of savant traits (give him any date and he can give you the day of the week immdediately, etc.) that disappeared after the ASD signs improved substantially many years down the road. It struck me as odd that the savant ability disappeared as his behavior improved substantially into the "borderline" range - one of those mysteries of the brain.

I don't think this is mysterious. It is just two cases of developmentally normal growing up. The linked article already describes how various behaviors that look autistic are often really just various forms of immaturity that are grown out of.

In the case of disappearing savant skills (and there was a thread here a while back with several examples of this, e.g. our DSthen3 could rattle off the elements from memory but has long since forgotten them, and can't even remember doing it) my theory is the gifted toddler's mind is in high gear, but unsophisticated, so they may display savant-like skills. As they grow up and become relatively more sophisticated their brains have a lot more skills than "mere" memory/calculation feats, so basically their brains have better things to do, and so the savant-like skills seem to fall by the wayside (imho).

Actually, this child still does not appear completely normal and probably never will; his father still exhibits some odd behaviors as well. Even after reading a substantial amount of research over the last two decades, I still find this topic mysterious, but that is just me.

Perhaps just like opinions regarding what constitutes giftedness, opinions regarding what constitutes savant abilities vary widely as well. It would never occur to me to consider memorization of a table or even a map as a savant ability. While not common, these kinds of memorization feats are not rare in very young children. The one savant ability that I described was still exhibited at a much older age and it wasn't an issue of memorization or obvious computation as it was pretty instantaneous. This child never had access to calendars centuries in the past or decades in the future.