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Kim Peek, aka Rain Man Focus of NASA Study
Bob Vila's Hammer writes "Kim Peek - an autistic man who has been deemed a "mega-savant" for his astonishing knowledge of 15 grand subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers, to sports, music and dates - is a part of a new NASA study to explore the changes in his brain since MRI images were originally taken in 1988. Not only was he the basis of the main character in the movie Rain Man, but he apparently is getting smarter in his specialty areas as he gets older. The study has scientists hoping that technology used to study the effects of space travel on the brain will help explain his mental capabilities."
While definitely a "savant", Kim Peek is not behaviorally autistic; Rain Man's character was modified to be an autistic savant. (Autism, like many disorders, is merely a set of diagnostic criteria, and Kim may share some in common with classic autism. However, some critical benchmarks for autism are not shared, making Kim not strictly "autistic".)
The above article and the brief wikipedia story are very interesting reads. For example, did you know that Kim was born with "an enlarged head and missing corpus callosum, the connecting tissue between the brain hemispheres, damage to the cerebellum and no anterior commissure"?
I remember watching a documentary or two about autism and something that was repeatedly found was that as an autistic individual tried to remedy their problems with autism (usually getting better with age) their savant like knowledge began to deteriorate. I have always thought that there is almost a finite amount of brain capacity any one individual is able to have. Meaning, while a savant is able to have incredible knowledge of some things, their brain is so devoted to that knowledge that things, like knowing where the silverwear drawer is, get sacrificed. Specifically, I think that the autistic savant's brain begins to lose the amount of speicfic knowledge in their savant areas as they are adapting to a more social lifestyle and expanding the functionality of their brain. (Others have pointed out that Kim doesn't lack the social skills to be considered classically autistic. However I feel that this explaination may still be able to apply to some degree.)
[Proof elided.]
Your argument is not correct.
The paradox of the expert is this: How can experts have both (1) more knowledge of a domain and (2) faster access to each element of that knowledge?
Cognitive psychologists began answering this question forty years ago, with De Groot's work in the 1960s and Chase and Simon's work in the early 1970s on chess experts. The answer is to notice that the acquisition of knowledge is typically accompanied by the acquisition of better indices on that knowledge. Or, said another way, you get credit for knowing something when (1) you have stored it somewhere in your long-term memory and (2) you can recall it when it is appropriate. Research since the 1970s has applied these early insights to many other domains besides chess, such as reading X-rays.
Another way to think of this is that memories are more akin to hashtables than trees or lists. With the right hash function (i.e., indexing scheme), any single item can be retrieved in constant time. [Think also of radix sort versus comparison-based sorting algorithms.]