High Functioning Savants and Psychedelics

[Psilosopher?]

Have there been any cases of a high functioning savant taking psychedelics? From non-savants, what are your theories about the perceived experience? I know that's a difficult question to answer, since the experience is so subjective.

All i found regarding this topic is this reddit post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LSD/comments/7pae50/lsd_and_the_autism_spectrum

And this article, which mentions both things, but the mixture of which isn't the focus of this piece.

Serotonergic Hyperactivity as a Potential Factor in Developmental, Acquired and Drug-Induced Synesthesia

Though synesthesia research has seen a huge growth in recent decades, and tremendous progress has been made in terms of understanding the mechanism and cause of synesthesia, we are still left mostly in the dark when it comes to the mechanistic commonalities (if any) among developmental, acquired...

www.frontiersin.org

 

[Nydex]

I have always been extremely fascinated by savants. The most recent thing that blew my mind is how they flew a savant over New York with a helicopter for 15 minutes and then he proceeded to draw the city as seen from bird's eye POV with 95% accuracy...every street and building and park he had it memorized perfectly. This only hints at the amazing capabilities of the human mind that lie beneath a locked door of perceived limitations.

I would love to hear more about this aspect, but I fear not much research has been done due to the questionable claim that psychedelics worsen an already unstable mental state.

Love & Light

 

[Jees]

Have there been any cases of a high functioning savant taking psychedelics?...

Not that, but there was that talented young savant painter, she got medication to become more social aware. The medicines worked, she did get more social aware but her painting talent just began to fade. This showed that disrupting her specific tuned balance led toward loss of that particular talent. Curious.

 

[padawan]

Super interesting topic. If you haven't already, check out The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks - really fascinating collection of case studies on different savants.

Savants on psychedelics... I can totally see that as a PhD thesis topic lol

 

[dreamer042]

It seems there are some pretty incredible ablities locked away in the human brain. The book Return to the Brain of Eden has collected a lot of the research on this phenomena and proposes some pretty interesting hypotheses both for how and why these phenomena exist and possible methods for accessing these abilities.

Here is a pdf of the book under it's previous title: Left in the Dark.

P.S. - It also delves deep into how psychedelics are involved in all this as well.

 

[universecannon]

It seems there are some pretty incredible ablities locked away in the human brain. The book Return to the Brain of Eden has collected a lot of the research on this phenomena and proposes some pretty interesting hypotheses both for how and why these phenomena exist and possible methods for accessing these abilities.

Here is a pdf of the book under it's previous title: Left in the Dark.

P.S. - It also delves deep into how psychedelics are involved in all this as well.

Can confirm: this book is mindblowing

 

[MachienDome]

Thanks for the pdf, I'll be reading it soon! Sounds like a great read...