I’ve never met a “glance at a plate and see that there are 163 peas on it” type savant, but I’ve met “autistic geniuses”, and the reality of that group of neurotypes seems pretty well recognized by normies who have little reason to make stuff up about it. Maybe you doubt the most extreme tales of savantism [ why? ] but dismissing marginal savantism as an artifact of practice is missing the forest.
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; it’s also said he was somewhat dyslexic. It would make sense to me if both of those were true.
I’ve never met a “glance at a plate and see that there are 163 peas on it” type savant, but I’ve met “autistic geniuses”, and the reality of that group of neurotypes seems pretty well recognized by normies who have little reason to make stuff up about it. Maybe you doubt the most extreme tales of savantism [ why? ] but dismissing marginal savantism as an artifact of practice is missing the forest.