Are we all born savants?

Oliver Sacks, in several of his books (Musicophilia, _The Mind's Eye,****_ etc.) has pointed out that certain "savant" abilities often associated with individuals on the autistic spectrum have also been found to appear spontaneously in people following a stroke causing a lesion in the speech areas of the left hemisphere of the brain. These abilities (among others) are sometimes perfect pitch, abilities to seemingly effortlessly perform complicated numerical calculations, and abilities to reproduce graphically scenes individuals have only briefly viewed-even much later on, often with amazing precision. 

It is striking that these "savant" qualities, when appearing in those having suffered left-hemisphere brain lesions, appear all at once immediately following the injury, suggesting that the abilities have not been learned after the brain damage as a compensation, but rather have been there all along, and have been somehow "uncovered" or "revealed" by the suppression (through damage) of the speech areas in the brain's left hemisphere. 

Neuroscientists can only speculate at this point as to the specific mechanisms involved, but it may well be that the speech centers are (normally) suppressing other areas so as to avoid competition for neural resources (connections, glial cells, even neurons) from other areas of the brain. If so, our ability to speak may have come at the cost of some other latent abilities-abilities we humans all are basically born with.