Content area
Full Text
Bright splinters of the mind: A personal story of research with autistic savants By Beate Hermelin. Foreword by Sir Michael Rutter. London:Jessica Kingsley. 2001. Hardback, L29.95. ISBN 1-85302-931-9.
What a pleasure it is to read the stories in Beate Hermelin's wonderful book. Stories about an artist who, despite having very little language, can produce stunningly accurate sketches of complex architecture. Stories about a mute man with autism who can signal to you, in lightning speed, whether a number is a prime number-no matter how big that number is. Stories about other people with autism who can compute faster than is believable what day of the week any date will fall, be it a date near the present, or far into the distant past or future. Stories about a person with autism who can simply hear a difficult piece of classical music once, and reproduce it with remarkable accuracy immediately. And all this in a person who has received no formal training in musicianship. Stories about a person with autism who can acquire vocabularies and grammars easily and quickly, and apparently without limit. And more.
But Ate Hermelin, as she is known, is much more than just a story-teller. This is a woman who, from the outset of her career, now spanning four decades, has combined her own wonderful artistic sensitivity with a detective-like rigour in experimental psychology. As a student, she studied at the...