Neurodiversity Multiple Intelligences and Savant Syndrome |

As part of my promotion of my new book The Power of Neurodiversity: Unleashing the Advantages of Your Neurodivergent Brain (Completely Revised and Updated Second Edition), I’m sharing neurodiversity videos that I’ve done in the past. This video is from a virtual keynote that I did for an educational group in Hong Kong in 2023. It examines the links between neurodiversity and multiple intelligences through the medium of individuals with savant (Rain Man syndrome). In the mid-1980’s, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner wrote in his book Frames of Mind about the existence of savants as supporting evidence for his theory of multiple intelligences (e.g. individuals with high levels of one intelligence, and much lower levels in the others). I give examples of savants in six of the eight intelligences, including musical savants, logical savants, kinesthetic savants, linguistic savants, and visual-spatial savants, among others. I point out that Gardner’s work was actually a precursor of the neurodiversity movement that would emerge fifteen years later.