This just smells foul; can't help but be sceptical. Diana de Avila sounds like an arist who crafted a story to sell her work, and George Logothetis sounds like a genius who was approched by Treffert and convinced that actually he's smart because he had an infection at the age of 2.
> In Treffert’s response to de Avila’s outreach, he called her story “compelling, and your artwork amazing.”
> “He was like a father figure to us weird circus people. He was the ringleader of this beautiful circle of giftedness,”
Treffert sounds like grade A manipulator, though not sure who's using who here.
> He loved music and had played drums as a kid, but nothing more.
And from a Guardian article from 2012 about him:
> I'd played guitar in a couple of little rock bands when I was young but I'd never progressed beyond that on any instrument. Yet here I was, producing a fluid melody I'd never heard before.
It's not all lies. You can watch videos of Kim Peek who can memorise whole books and can answer questions from them but doesn't talk or act like normal people, Daniel Tammet who visualizes numbers, another guy who can sculpt and in a video he made a great looking horse with his bare hands in few minutes while the interviewer was talking but he is also not normal. There was another guy, don't remember if he was a savant but in a video they flew him over a city and he drew all buildings with there windows etc on a large sheet of paper. Just saying that not all of these people are fake.
But we're not discussing ordinary savants like Peek. Such savants often hone their skills over decades, sometimes inventing their own algorithms or tricks and memorizing vast reams of data. Those are amazing, but not sudden. To analogize: Arnold Schwarzenegger was an amazing bodybuilder, but you can understand how he was possible; but it would be even more amazing if a couple people out there woke up one day and literally overnight they had turned into Arnold, and you would very much like to know how that was possible.
I saw a demonstration of this in this very old documentary once. Not sure what the latest research says but it doesn't seem this kind of situation is entirely impossible.
Kim Peek is an outlier. Most of these 'savants' seem like disabled people who have a lot of free time to work on something obsessively, not that they possess special mental abilities.
I'm not saying this guy is one of them, but there's a special place in hell for adults who target gifted children. Many of the victims of Catholic priests were intelligent, sensitive children, children who became involved in church because they were interested in learning about life's meaning.
> In Treffert’s response to de Avila’s outreach, he called her story “compelling, and your artwork amazing.”
> “He was like a father figure to us weird circus people. He was the ringleader of this beautiful circle of giftedness,”
Treffert sounds like grade A manipulator, though not sure who's using who here.