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I'm quite intrigued by the "ability within disability" explanation for Wiltshire's amazing memory for drawing cityscapes, buildings, etc. I have begun to question, however, whether the mechanism he uses for memory is simply a heightened form of the one those people without exceptional memories use, or is it a different one entirely? One of the ways we try to remember numbers is by blocking - for example, we remember a phone number by grouping it into subsets of smaller, more manageable groups -- instead of "6108961000," we remember the number as 610-896-1000. Also, we can more easily remember characteristics or words by grouping them into categories: brown, high, green, blue, hazel, leafy, tall --> we would be better able to remember those words if we classified them according to eye color (brown, green, blue, hazel) and characteristics of trees (leafy, tall, high, green). Does Steven Wiltshire use these categorizing and blocking techniques to remember things more efficiently? Or is his seemingly "photographic" or eidetic memory an entirely different mechanism or phenomenon? I'm inclined to think that no matter how sophisticated a blocking technique I used, there would be no way I could remember even how to draw one building exactly, let alone a panorama of Rome or Tokyo. So at least in terms of photographic/eidetic memory within a disability, I think it occurs because of a different mechanism.

When we think about new found abilities within disabilities (i.e. savant syndrome), how and why are they occurring? Do they happen differently in different situations? Is memory of numbers (i.e. extreme digits of Pi) due to the blocking phenomenon, while Witshire-esque drawing reproductions require a different mechanism entirely from normal memory? And if certain new found abilities require different mechanism, how do these new mechanisms arise? Are they evolutionary artifacts that "normal" individuals just don't harness? Or are they a characteristic of the illness?