The account of the savants suggests a different view of what learning means. Maybe learning is not so much about acquiring something succesively like we are building a house. It might rather be that learning is about removing the barriers which prevent us from using and accessing something which was there all the way through....like removing the jungle around the house which was already so that we can enter. What happens to the savants would then be a more effective way of removing these barriers, for example through some kind of accident that causes "brain damage". All this reminds me as well of the research by some people at Imperial College on neuro feedback....