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Are superhuman savants real? — LessWrong

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[ Question ]

Are superhuman savants real?

16th Jun 2025

1 min read

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Savant syndrom indentifies people with general intellectual impairment who, in one specific field, reach ordinary or even exceptional performance.

In The Psychological Unity of Humankind, Eliezer argues that

So you can't have the X-Men. You can't have "mutants" running around with highly developed machinery that most of the human species doesn't have. And no, extra-powerful radiation does not produce extra-potent mutations, that's not how it works.
Again by the nature of sexual recombination, you're very unlikely to see two complexly different adaptations competing in the gene pool. Two individual alleles may compete. But if you somehow had two different complex adaptations built out of many non-universal alleles, they would usually assemble in scrambled form.

The argument behind this makes formal sense, but it's applicability strongly depends on how well we can judge what does and doesn't require complex adaptation. Reports of savants provide an interesting test of this; some of them seem like they are not merely an exceptional level of human skill, but not reachable by ordinary people. For example, in a recent post here that reminded me of this, the author claims:

Example 3: Stephen Wiltshire. He made a nineteen-foot-long drawing of New York City after flying on a helicopter for 20 minutes, and he got the number of windows and floors of all the buildings correct.

Other things I remember hearing are someone seeing at a glance that there are 163 peas on a plate, or remembering every word he ever heard. If these kinds of abilities can develop as a consequence of individual genetic quirks or possibly even brain injuries, then clearly we just don't have a good intuition about what's "close" in brain design space.

Now that I've made clear what kind of ability I'm talking about, has anyone done the relevant digging?

Are superhuman savants real?

10Steven Byrnes

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Jun 17, 2025

136

I looked into this a little a long time ago while in cog psych grad school, and concluded that each savant whose story I looked at actually practiced their special skill a ridiculous amount, and was bad at lots of other things because they hadn't spent time on those. I haven't looked at every story but I strongly suspect that different weird obsessions and time-on-task means they're specialized but not superhuman.

[-]Steven Byrnes1y102

Let’s distinguish “motivation theory” (savants spend a lot of time practicing X because they find it motivating, and get really good at X) from “learning algorithm hyperparameter theory” (savants have systematically different … ML learning rates? neural architectures (e.g. fiber densities, dendrite branching properties, etc.)? loss functions? etc.). (Needless to say, these are not mutually exclusive.)

I interpret your comment as endorsing motivation theory for explaining savants. Whereas it seems to me that at least for memory savants like Kim Peek (who memorized ≈10,000 books (almost?)-verbatim, including phone books) & Solomon Shereshevsky, it’s gotta be at least partly and maybe entirely learning algorithm hyperparameter theory.

I mean, we know there were unusual things about Kim Peek’s learning algorithm hyperparameters—he would memorize two opposite pages of the same book simultaneously (IIRC), and he was severely disabled in everyday life things like dressing himself (IIRC).

Also, I am highly skeptical that I could memorize an entire book in one sitting just from years of practice. For example, neurotypical “memory athletes” don’t just try to memorize, try to memorize, ... (read more)

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1Bunthut1y

To clarify the question: I agree that there is variation in talent and that some very talented people can do things most could never. My question is, if you look at the distribution of talent among normal people, and then check how many standard deviations out our savant candidate is, then what's the chance at least one person with that talent would exist? Basically, is this just the normal right tail that's expected from additive genetic reshuffling, or an "X-man".

You know the phenomenon where men tend to score higher on mathematics tests and women tend to score higher on tests of verbal ability?

That's because men have more real estate allocated to the space-processing cortical areas, while women have relatively more space allocated to the verbal-associative cortical areas. The two cortical areas aren't morphologically-functionally adaptable or interchangeable. They genuinely do different things, and they trade off with each other for space in your skull. It's said that Einstein had massive parietal lobes on autopsy... (read more)

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