Today, I learned that I have a savant skill

The other day, I was going through my individual scorings on the cognitive portion of my neuropsychological exam from when I was tested for autism back in September. It explicitly states that I have hyperlexia, but also dyscalculia.

I just thought hyperlexia meant that I prefer to use bigger words and have always had a gift for reading well (I was reading at a college level by second grade).

My husband was listening to The Telepathy Tapes podcast, and the host mentioned savant skills and listed hyperlexia as one of them.

I don’t know how to feel because I looked it up and it is, in fact, a savant skill. But I thought this was fairly common in autistics? But savant ‘syndrome’ (🙄) only occurs in about ten percent of us.

What is your opinion of this? Does anybody else here experience hyperlexia? Or have any other savant skills?

In all honestly I just wanted to discuss this, but I have nobody to talk to it about and I feel like this would be a great place to open the conversation.

EDIT: I wanted to add to this as I saw a couple people saying that either the thread is silly or that hyperlexia is kind of a nonsensical ‘savant’ skill.

The reason I even made this post is because I have never thought this ability I have had my entire life to be considered, for lack of a better term, ‘special’. I was confused by this, so I wanted to hear some other input.

This new discovery is not of my creation, this is simply a google search and the opinion of neuroscientist Dr. Dianne Hennacy Powell (the speaker on the podcast which sparked my interest).

Yes, hyperlexia has really helped me in a lot of places in life, but it also has its many challenges such as always coming off as condescending to others, and requiring me to mask almost at all times by fundamentally changing my speech patterns, which can be incredibly draining. It truly is more than just learning to read early/being self taught. I feel like I can’t stop talking sometimes, dominating conversations. I have an infatuation with correct pronunciation, patterns in linguistics, and even spellings. I could go on further but my brain is getting clogged with too many things to say at the moment, so I’ll leave it at that.

EDIT 2: fixed some typing errors