However, savants (idiots savants, prior to the PC revolution) are a different kettle of fish.
They require no learning (as we generally/commonly understand the term) and yet are capable, each according to his/her own "gift", of performing mathematical, musical, or other feats which are truly astounding.
Dance, Rain Man, dance.
I'm not quite sure that's true. Savants may not have to learn, say, musical skill the way someone who isn't a savant does, but nobody is born knowing how to play a piano! A savant who can play a piano the first time he sits in front of it has watched others play and has learned just from that--with an astonishing degree of fidelity--but he has still learned it.
Lack of hand-eye coordination pervades every aspect of my life (It's almost a miracle that I get the booze into the glass when I tend bar.), and no amount of practice will overcome that innate inability.
Sure, for physical skills there's some level of physical ability that's a prerequisite. I will never be a talented basketball player no matter how much I play, because I'm not physically able to excel.
But the point is that what we call "genius" isn't something innate. If you're physically or cognitively capable of performing a task, then ten thousand hours' practice will make you a genius at that task.
We worship genius like it's some strange thing that comes down from on high, without recognizing that it's actually a learned thing.
While that may be part of it, I don't think that's the most important factor. Most people's minds are tradeoffs. Good at this, bad at that, good at this, bad at that. I know I'm that way.
Yep, that's precisely the point. The tradeoff you make is in the attention you pay to something. It's not possible to spend ten thousand hours focused on something without neglecting other things. The things you are good at are the ones you focus on; the tradeoff is that you will not become good at the things you ignore while you're focused on the things you're good at.
Savant syndrome appears to be the extreme end of this kind of tradeoff; a savant becomes incredibly good at something, apparently incredibly easily, because he ignores the things that we all generally spend some degree of focus on without even being consciously aware of it--things like language acquisition, say, or learning to function in a social environment.
The fact that cognitive scientists now talk about "savant syndrome" rather than "idiot savants" is that savants aren't idiots. They aren't cognitively impaired the way someone with, say, Down's syndrome is cognitively impaired. Rather, they are so incredibly hyperfocused that they never learn the skills that most of us learn without even beig aware that we're learning them.
