Savant syndrome is an extremely rare condition in which a person with a severe mental handicap has extraordinary abilities in a certain area, such as memorization, mathematics, or playing instruments. The first known case of savant syndrome was documented in a German scientific journal, Gnothi Sauton, in 1783. This article described the case of a man named Jedediah Buxton, who was talented in memorization and mathematics (Treffert 2009). Since this first account of Savant syndrome was recorded, scientists and doctors have sought to understand this unusual disorder. The best-known case of Savant syndrome is the fictional character; however, Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 film Rain Man, was inspired by a real person. The now fifty-seven-year-old has memorized over six thousand books and has an encyclopedic knowledge of over fourteen subjects, including geography, history, literature and sports. He can name all the US area codes and zip codes of major US cities, he has memorized maps from telephone books and can tell you exactly how to get from one city to another, he has calendar calculation skills and is quite an advanced musician (Treffert 2009). This man, however, cannot understand simple tasks and cannot even dress himself. One of the earliest accounts of Savant syndrome is that of Thomas Fuller's extraordinary calculating ability. Thomas “who could understand almost nothing, both theoretical and practical, more complex than counting” was asked how many seconds it had taken a man of seventy years, seventeen days and twelve hours and answered the correct number of 2210500800 less than ninety seconds. He also explained the seventeenth leap year… middle of the paper… causing autism, labeling autism as a “signal processing” disorder with reduction of information through compression (Fabricius 2010). Basically, compression is the process in which the brain takes an image and remembers the basics of the image but not the finer details. Fabricius explained Savant syndrome using the theory of compression: normal people work with a compressed image while Savants retain one hundred percent of the original details. This is known as the “Savant Hypothesis (Fabricius 2010)”. For cognitively normal individuals, the finer details are often lost in a process known as “prototyping.” When a cognitively normal individual views an image, unimportant details, such as, in Fabricius' example, an embedded triangle, are lost. For the autistic Savant, these details stand out and the Savant has difficulty seeing the big picture. Below is the example from Fabricius' work: