Living a Savant

The Url at the bottom of the page links to a video segment from "Beautiful Minds: A Voyage Into the Brain", a BBC film which explores the "gift" of Stephen Wiltshire, AKA "The Living Camera". Stephen takes a 45 minute helocopter ride over Rome, followed by a 3 day marathon of drawing to recreate the entire city on a 4.5 yard canvas, successfully depicting over 200 buildings to per window accuracy.

"Savant Syndrome is a rare, but spectacular, condition in which persons with various developmental disorders, including autistic disorder, have astonishing islands of ability, brilliance or talent that stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to overall limitations. The condition can be congenital (genetic or inborn), or can be acquired later in childhood, or even in adults. The savant skills co-exist with, or are superimposed upon, various developmental disabilities including autistic disorder, or other conditions such as mental retardation or brain injury or disease that occurs before (pre-natal) during (peri-natal) or after birth (post-natal), or even later in childhood or adult life. The extraordinary skills are always linked with prodigious memory of a special type — exceedingly deep but very, very narrow."



"In February 1987, the BBC aired a program on Savant Syndrome entitled "The Foolish Wise Ones." One segment featured a then twelve-year old autistic boy, Stephen Wiltshire, drawing from memory on camera a remarkably accurate sketch of St. Pancras station which he had visited for the first time only briefly several hours before. As the camera recorded, he quickly and assuredly drew the elaborate and complicated building exactly as he had seen it with the clock hands set at precisely 11:20, the hour he had viewed them."

"Perhaps the most striking and astonishing display of Stephen's remarkable visual memory and drawing ability occurs in a segment on a 2001 BBC documentary entitled Fragments of Genius. In this segment Stephen is taken on a helicopter ride over the city of London. After a brief ride, he returns to the ground where, in three hours, he completes a stunningly detailed and remarkably accurate drawing of London from the air which spans four square miles with 12 major landmarks and 200 other buildings drawn to perfect perspective and scale. Words cannot describe the prodigious ability and visual memory that drawing documents; it needs to be seen to be appreciated."

http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/wiltshire.cfm