What happens is most of us are so busy in our lives with our families and our vocation which we should be, but we tend not to look at what I call these parallel interests, and they develop along the way. And sometimes one can say, well, you know, why should I grow my own garden and spend all that time when I can buy carrots cheaper at the supermarket and just put aside that kind of an interest.

I think that if I could do any sort of research of autism that I wanted to do, at this point I would take a sample of classic, early infantile autism persons and compare them with what I call "classic late onset autism", individuals. I think we will find that the cause of those youngsters with autism who have autism from birth is probably different than those who have late onset autism.

We should probably start searching around a little earlier in our lives for what I call parallel activities, because most of us get entrenched in our careers. And, of necessity, we're earning a living, and it's taking our time, and we're building our résumé, and we want our résumé generally to be our proficiency within our field, because chances are we're going to be applying for another position within the field. So we tend to put off a lot of this sort of what I call parallel discovery until we're either very successful and have the time to do that, or more often until we're retired.

Sometimes along the way, when people are actively working, they will start to do a search for their roots and maybe get really interested in ancestry and become very good at what was just a hobby. But I think that we shouldn't wait quite that long to develop and look for those parallel interests of ours and not sometimes see them as frivolous and take them a little more seriously, and spend some time and energy and maybe even capital in pursuing them.

There are some cases that have come to my attention where there's been a head injury, or getting struck by lightning and surviving, with really no disability or residual. So there are cases that I'm aware of where there's been some incident which triggered the acquired savant ability, but is not associated with long term disability, so that can occur. But I think that's probably the exception rather than the rule in that I think many of the acquired savants do end up with some residual disability.

The ways in which acquired savants show up are usually the same ways that congenital, or non-acquired, savant syndrome shows up. They tend to show up in the same areas: music, art, math, visual, spatial skills, and calendar calculating, although calendar calculating probably isn't quite as prominent in that group. They tend to show up quite quickly, or sort of explode on the scene and they then tend to have an obsessive sort of forceful quality about them in the same way as savant skills. So they tend to show up in the same ways.

When we come to research, if we want to find out the cause of autism, we're going to have to be much more specific, and that's why when it comes to research, I'm fairly strict with respect to criteria. When it comes to treatment, I'm much more open to not making that differentiation.