There's a fascinating posting at 2Blowhards, about why mental superpowers so often go hand in hand (brain location with brain location) with mental inadequacies of other sorts. Here's the bit that grabbed me:

The argument of Alan Snyder, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sydney, is that (1) the unusual mental abilities of savants (autistics who are capable of amazing mental feats) are actually present in all human beings, (2) that these abilities—such as the ability to do complex mental arithmetic rapidly, to remember with photographic detail and accuracy, to instantly spot proofreading errors, etc. – are actually just basic, lower-level brain processes that occur below the level of ordinary human consciousness, (3) that somehow our ordinary conscious processes mask these abilities or prevent us from accessing them, and (4) that these savant-like skills can be brought out by using TMS to turn down the volume on the "masking" processes.

That makes more sense of the "idiot savant" phenomenon than anything else I've ever read. I've never believed that savants possessed any powers I didn't have, merely that for some reason I couldn't get at my own similar powers, and that for some other reason, connected with their other mental problems, they could.

TMS, by the way, stands for "transcranial magnetic stimulation". Read more by following the link that Friedrich Blowhard supplies to this New York Times article.

They're learning more and more by the month about how the human brain actually works, as opposed to just recommending books to each other full of more or less sensible speculations on the subject, which is how things used to be. This knowledge is bound to have educational consequences sooner or later.