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I believe the answer lies in minicolumnar morphology in the neocortex. It's been shown that the minicolumns of autsitics and gifted individuals have narrower minicolumns, with greater spacing between each minicolumn. It's speculated that this creates an increased ability to distinguish percepts. Here is a paper on the topic: Casanova MF, Switala AE, Trippe ...

In general, no. People with excellent memories can just as easily misapply the availability heuristic as people with poor memories. To see why, consider a situation where a reasoner is asked to estimate the relative frequency of murder and suicide. Because examples of murder or more "available" (i.e., more easily recalled) than examples of suicide, the ...

How one performs quick mental calculations through tricks and shortcuts can easily be looked up on the internet. How some Savant's do it cannot because we don't know. There is some argument that some do those same tricks but others seem not to do so. Consider that a substantial amount of computational power goes into immediately recognizing that your ...

There are no other studies I can find where TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) was used in the same way, but there is a paper mentioning Snyder (2009) whilst discussing safety and other ethical considerations required regarding neural enhancement using noninvasive brain stimulation. Hamilton, et al. (2011) said the following about Snyder (2009)(...

Savant syndrome can be congenital or acquired.[1,2] The acquired savant syndrome can occur in people with stroke, head injury, and even some degenerative diseases (such as dementia) that affect the left fronto-temporal lobe. [1] Transcranial magnetic stimulations of this area, which can cause inhibition in this area, can also elicit these kinds of unusual ...

Sort of. Snyder togher with Chi have published a paper in 2012 in which they claim to have obtained a fairly similar result using tDCS to vastly improve the odds of solving the nine-dot problem, which certainly strengthens their case (although not as much as if this were replicated by others). The abstract of the latter paper doesn't quite let on how related ...

Disclaimer, this is less of an answer and more of a critique of the demographics behind Savant Syndrome. Currently there are very few issues with finding a decent answer to this question: This 10% of autistics being savants seems tenuous, there is no clear cut unambiguous research from current and respected journals analysing the prevalence of savant ...