this is simply amazing. the video is long (about 5:17), but worth it. enjoy. http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/wiltshire_highres.wmv
I've seen this kid on a special on the Discovery Channel I think a few years ago. In that one, they just flew him by Buckingham Palace... just flew by... not floated over for 10 minutes or anything. He drew it almost precisely. Another guy absolutely tripped me out. You give him any date of any year and he'll give you the day it fell on. Autism creates some unbelievable abilities. I've watched specials on it. Daniel Tammet was the coolest one I saw. He had no problems functioning socially (which is often a side-effect of autism). He said he can learn a new language within a week, so they tested him by asking him to learn one of the most difficult languages apparently : Icelandic. Within a week he was yapping with the natives. He can memorize something like 1000 digits in about 30-40 minutes. Supposedly his mathematical and memorization abilities were brought on after having an epileptic seizure as a kid. The most famous guy is Kim Peek, though. He's the guy the movie Rainman was based on. The craziest thing about him I remember reading was that he could read a page of a book every 10 seconds and that one eye would read one page, while the other eye would read the next page. On the Discovery Channel episode I watched, Peek and Tammet met up and Peek said something like "maybe some day you'll be as brilliant as I am" to Tammet. That was funny.
Right, autism is actually a broad category of diseases and the few that end up having incredible mental capabilities are called autistic savants. I've been somewhat fascinated with them for a while now. Not to downplay the savant but this actually isn't that hard (mathematical trick... like being able to estimate the natural log of any number). For the savant in Utah, you can pick almost any book in the library and a page and he'll read you the line. You can pick a section of most towns in the US and he'll give you the street roads. And that guy featured on the Discovery Channel can do up to two ten digit multiplication. Likewise he can determine if a ten digit number is prime just by seeing the "shape" in his head. Pretty incredible.
