The "Island of Genius" (Autism & Prodigies)

Have I mentioned it's hot and dry?  Well, it's not quite so hot now but it's getting drier.  The littler trees are starting to drop their leaves.  There's a lot of yellow out there.  We're still leaving water out for the birds and animals, and watering a few very small/rare/important plants.



Here's an interesting article:
  http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/07/10/child_prodigies_autistic_new_study_suggests_a_link_between_autism_and_child_prodigies_.html

Apparently (and some of us have known this for many years) people who are prodigies are often born into families that have autism running through them, and even have autistic tendencies themselves.  I especially liked a quote that was included in the article, by Darold A. Treffert, who "poetically describes the savant mind as an "island of genius" lapped by waves of disability).

The author, Katy Waldman, stated:

"The prodigies were also given the most recent version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Not all of them cracked the genius threshold—some of the overall scores were pretty average—but the subtest scores were distinctive."

In all modesty (I have yet to prove that I am a 'prodigy'), this describes me pretty well.  An island in the middle of disability.

And what is our society doing to preserve these 'islands'?  We could be finding ways to educate these people to the best of their potential, we could be taking advantage of their talents to improve life on planet Earth, instead of throwing so many of them away in the trash.

Surely we can do better.