Quote by Matt Kaplan

“If you could learn entire languages in a week, draw perfect pictures without thinking about it, and make complex calculations in your head in seconds, would you be willing to trade that for the ability to comfortably walk into a coffee shop and shake a stranger’s hand? My thoughts went racing to modern comic mythology such as X-Men: The Last Stand, in which mutants are presented with a drug that could make them normal by robbing them of their powers. Would purine treatment in autistic savants be the same sort of thing? I had to know, so I asked Dr. Naviaux, “Will savants lose their mutant powers if we cure them? “Treating an autistic savant with a purine inhibitor should not change his or her extraordinary abilities at all,” he said. The hyperconnected islands of neurons that were formed when an autism patient was young would still be there. The powers that the islands grant would still be available, but they would no longer be the only neural connections available. “In younger patients in particular, new connections, longer ones, stand a good chance of forming once the danger response is shut down by a purine blocker,” says Dr. Naviaux. The result? A superhuman mind without the burden of autism. Wow.”

Quote by Matt Kaplan