Steven Wiltshire is autistic and has been diagnosed as having a condition known as savant syndrome. He has a phenomenal memory and communicates mainly through his artwork. This clip shows him drawing a 10m panorama of Tokyo (from memory) after a single, one hour sight-seeing trip. It took him seven days to complete and is full of detail, even down to the number of cars that were in each street, This clip shows a three day session after only a forty minute helicopter trip over Rome. I can't even draw my front door from memory, and I've used it every day for over twenty years.
I remember him being on TV when I was a kid in the 1980s. The funny thing is he sort of started a phenomena in the UK where lots of people think all autistic children are brilliant at drawing, or have uber memories etc. I've worked with autistic people a lot for the past 8 years, and people often ask me about their uber powers when I tell them I work with autistic children. A lot of them do have a very linear way of thinking though, or sort of very narrow concentrated beam of thought where everything has its proper place and sequence of events. I think it's a way for their brains to make sense of one aspect of their lives when, as a whole, the rest of the world makes virtually no sense at all. Many of them do like to follow precise patterns and routines and get extremely upset if you try to steer them away from those routines, which makes them very good at organising data, lists and categories of things as they get older - though the skill often manifests itself in ways that aren't immediately useful to the rest of us, like knowing the names of all the Thomas The Tank Engine characters - what they look like, everything they say and when they first appeared... or perhaps knowing all the words to every song that's ever been on The Simpsons. Thomas The Tank Engine is a very popular obsession in the UK for autistic children, as in trains in general everywhere else - I think they're attracted by the idea of parallel lines and the fact that trains can't move off their set course because they're stuck to the tracks, their movement is straight and predictable and not chaotic like people and cars etc.
Those videos were amazing! I am always fascinated by people who view the worl in a different way. It really shows us how much of our brains is untapped, and what we could be capable of if we could access some of those other areas. I did a presentation for uni a while back and it was on Daniel Tammet: The boy with the Incredible Brain and it was really brilliant just learning about his different perspective. For example, Wednesdays are Blue. There's a part where he meets Kim Peek (the basis of Dustin Hoffman's character in Rainman), and there are more videos of Kim Peek as well. He can read both pages of an open book at the same time! Imagine how much pressure PTerry would be under if we could all read like that!
The things the brain can do! All I can do a little bit differently from a lot of people I know is pretty much control my dreams.Not the start,i.e decide what I'm gonna dream about,but once they start I have a pretty good control over the "plot" and can go back in the sequence if I'm not satisfied with the way the story(for want of a better word) is progressing and change it to better suit my taste. Needless to say,I have an insomnia problem resulting from this
