A small girl sits quietly in front of a piano, fingers

Thus, it is possible that the atypical interplay of memory, emotion, and meaning in autistic savantism, and general autistic spectrum disorder, could be partially caused by broken connections and loss of access between the memory, emotion, and meaning areas of autistic brains. In the broader sense, Rozin's accessibility theory could account for loss of simultaneous access to language, emotion, senses, and any other abilities impaired in autistic savantism and general autism that could conceivably be localized to the brain and mind, such as Grandin's "emotional circuit" not being "hooked up." Thus, Rozin offers a means of explaining the absence of emotion and meaning in autistic savant's memories, and how that affects their ability to remember or forget. If the emotion center is not accessible, it can have no effect on what can be remembered or forgotten, as is the case in normal humans. Though it must be noted that is virtually impossible to know exactly why people with autism, such as Grandin, can remember the way they do, just as it is impossible now for us to know exactly how we do it. We must remember that for now, all is theory. However, it is interesting to note that, those for whom mind is nearly devoid of emotion and social confidence, memory seems to possess extraordinary capabilities.

"If I were a computer, I would have a huge hard drive that could hold 10 times as much information as an ordinary computer, but my processor chip would be small. To use 1999 computer terminology, I have a 1000-gigabyte hard drive and a little 286 processor. Normal people may have only 10 gigabytes of disc space on their hard drive and a Pentium for a processor. I cannot do two or three things at once (Grandin, 1999)."

It is likely that in all cases, the illocutionary force of a speaker's statement, perhaps more than the propositional content, is what gives a statement its emotional charge. For people with all levels of autism, whose theory of mind may not be developed to the point where they can recognize sarcasm, irony, or lies, might not be able to separate the illocutionary force from the propositional content. This might neutralize the emotional charge of every statement, thereby making no one statement more memorable than the next. This could eliminate a means of selectivity for what is to be remembered from the next, akin to putting the same price tag on every item in a store, whether it is a pair of socks or a lawnmower. If one thinks of memory as a type of "visual language", the absence of illocutionary force being recognized by an autistic savant, for example, leaves the memories in the realm of emotionless fact. This may partially explain the lack of a filtering system for memories exhibited by individuals with autistic savantism, leaving an all or none situation. This is further compounded by the more general problems of emotion perception in autism in general, such as the difficulty in understanding facial expressions and body language, nonverbal examples of illocutionary force.

Though, generally, many autistic individuals never learn to speak, or function on their own, there are some that are considered to be high functioning in the way that they are able to speak and interact well enough in social contexts to allow them to live unassisted and have a professional career. Many of these individuals are autistic savants. These high functioning savants are important to research, as they have the capabilities to give insight into how the disorder affects their lives and how their minds work. It must be noted that, though they may have fairly normal speech abilities, none of the extraordinary savant abilities that these autistic individuals demonstrate are based solely on the use of expressive language. More about the language abilities of autistic and autistic savants will be covered later in the paper. Music, numbers, and detailed memory are determined by different parts of the brain from those concerned with speec

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