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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."
But he also is severely limited in other ways, like not being able to find the silverware drawer at home or dressing himself.
What's his
Trolling is a art,
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"?
Can we make a beowulf cluster of him?
Maybe NASA is too lazy to count stars in Hubble images for density studies, and hope this dude can do it in one shot.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe he could give Ken a run for his money. Also, I'd love to see some "rain man" style banter with Alex as an alternative to the usual tepid small talk.
I welcome our new autistic all-knowing overlords.
"The goal is to measure what happens in Kim's brain when he expresses things and when he thinks about them."
Personally I'd be curious to look at the difference in his brain activity when he is dealing with one of his specialities as opposed to when he is trying to find a spoon.
vampirical
Smarter or more knowlegeable? If he maintains his fascination in those areas, why would we imagine that he wouldn't gain knowlege?
Smarter would mean something like ``better able to reason with a given set of information.''
Since the article is on CNN, I suppose that we shouldn't expect any sort of detail or sense, and not much fact, either.
See what I've been reading.
Be your own savant for a little while... with magnets. Really! Maybe.
They really just want to play home version Jeopardy with him - they think they can win. As proof, notice that they didn't ask to study Ken Jennings!
There, I've run rings round you logically.
sigs, as if you care.
Hi
;-)
I have a eigenpoll for books on accelerated learning techniques,
in case there is anybody else which likes to get smarter as they get older
Dumper than average?
Dump chimp?
You fail English? That's unpossible!
As an interesting side note, both Ken Jenning and Kim Peek are Mormon. In fact, Mormon doctrine is one of the subjects that Kim has mastered in mind-dumbing detail.
Seriously, why is this being done by NASA? This is a neat thing happening with this guy but don't we have dozens of people who've actually been in space for extended periods of time? Why aren't CAT scans of them enough?
I can't see how this has any practical relevance to the space program from the viewpoint of manned space (we have more than enough data on that front) or unmanned where this is completely unrelated.
What ever happened to NASA being the Aeronautics and Space administration. Wasn't the VSE supposed to put the kibosh on all this science fair side issue stuff? Shouldn't this be relegated to some university psych program with a government grant?
Blaze a trail to the New World
how he can remember all these things but cannot remember simple things like the silverware drawer.
:unlimited knowledge:, no. :-\
maybe his brain catagorizes things as important/not important? truely interesting, maybe he has one of the secrets we need to further our learning abilties.
but would i trade the ability to do common day tasks for
So... where is this guy? I want to take him to the casinos. Two for good, one for bad. :)
Crack-head mods obviously haven't watched Rain Man.
Offtopic, indeed.
That's right. All your base.
Definately a waste of money. Big waste. yeah.
= Grow a brain...
According to the following link, Kim Peek is not autistic, he's just a savant:
i mp eek.cfm
http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/k
Along the way to its completion, the original script for the movie Rain Man underwent a number of modifications. While Kim Peek served as the initial inspiration for the story, Raymond Babbitt, as portrayed so admirably by Dustin Hoffman, is a composite savant with abilities drawn from a number of different real life individuals. The main character in that movie, Raymond Babbitt, was modified to be an autistic savant. The story thus is that of a person who is autistic but also has savant skills grafted on to that basic autistic disorder. It is important to remember, therefore, that not all autistic persons are savants, and not all savants are autistic. In preparation for his role, Dustin Hoffman spent time with several other autistic savants and their families, as well as with Kim.
Fran Peek describes his son this way: "Kim is not behaviorally autistic. He has a warm, loving personality. He truly cares for people and enjoys sharing his unique skills and knowledge capacity.
It is important to distringuish that Kim Peek does not demonstrate the disassociation portrayed in the Rain Man movie.
In fact, Kim Peek (along with his dad, Fran) spends a lot of time doing "charity work" with elderly people.
Supposedly, he's quite a nice guy to talk to, if a bit mentally retarded (or whatever the proper term is these days).
Probably not. Jennings has made it as far as he has because he knows a little bit about seemingly everything, whereas Peek effectively knows everything about a narrow set of fifteen subjects. Jeopardy covers a wide set of subjects in each game (sixteen categories per show, usually one or two of which is a sort of grab bag where all the answers have an O in them or something, but cover completely unrelated topics), with relatively little repeat subjects from show to show. Somebody with a lot of knowledge about a few subjects can win one or two shows if the topics go their way, but they'll lose in the long run because the topics change dramatically.
"I think it would be extremely naive of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Chinese savant-expansionist policy. I mean, we must be... increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other savant technology, in order to create savants more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out with superior savants!
Mr. President, we must not allow... a mega-savant gap!"
Free Flat Screens | Free iPod Photo | It really works!
ok, what does the mri show about his brain that's different than Mr. Normal Person? Are there different neuron interconnections, higher density, what? Any clue as to how his memory works?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I know I shouldn't respond to this troll. But I personally know many chinese, and can tell you they are not morally bankrupt.
Upon questioning them about Tibet, it is obviously apparant that their government has severily altered the truth. Basically the offical line is that the Tibetians (spelling?) are poor and need Chinas help. Tibet is basically viewed as a welfare state by the rest of China. Many Chinese only want Tibet to be part of their country because they feel compasion and want to help them.
Sadly I could not convense the chinese I talked to that Tibet was anything different, as they assumed that different views were lies by the Western Media. Oh well. Now the Chinese Government being morally corrupt, I could definatly agree. But, I would not be so quick to assume that the civilians are such.
At the risk of sounding like a troll.. Try reading up on paragraphs!
Interesting that he can describe driving directions and specific geography but can't apply the same skills to locating the silverware - they seem like very similar tasks.
I find it increasingly distrubing that the level of racist remarks on /. has increased of late.
/. does have a history of really mind-numbing trolls, but this is just overt racism, and in no way acceptable.
I realize that not everyone has the capacity for expressing their xenophobic tendencies in hopes to confront and thereby conquering them. But there are some who feel this is funny/mind-fsck'n, and is 'ok' for them.
--
I probably would have gotten something out of your posting but the way you wrote it, running on and on with no paragraphs run-on sentences no capitalization and lots of elipses...and so forth...I couldn't follow it and it's really hard to learn stuff when you have to read and read and read and what a burden to learn it's just easier to ask people to help you and to do the minimum to get by and eat and watch a lot of TV and...
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
That's dates as in "When was Christopher Columbus born" not "Take me in your strong arms and make passionate love to me"?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
After all he is an excellent driver!
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
Personally I'd be curious to look at the difference in his brain activity when he is dealing with one of his specialities as opposed to when he is trying to find a spoon.
Well, the CNN article is characteristically light on details, but it says the tests will include MRI and "computerized tomography" (i.e., a PET scan). The PET scan can be used for examining things like flow of blood and oxygen, as well as which parts of the brain are utilized for a given task. Unfortunately, even though PET research can focus on a specific "task", it can't really be used for monitoring tasks that last very long.
I think I would actually be more interested in EEG test results. One can monitor EEG during longer tasks, but I'm especially interested in what kind of "zone" Peek is in when he's consuming information. Certain states of consciousness or "arousal levels" are conducive to super-learning, but are ill-suited to other tasks.
Btw, if you're interested in what Peek looks like, check this page from CSU Fresno's University Journal.
.
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"?
No wonder he can't find the silverware drawer at home. That requires coordination of the parietal lobe via the corpus callosum.
No wonder he can't dress himself, that requires a cerebellum for detailed motor movements.
Now what can he do, this modern day human with a massive conjoined cortical apparatus?
Kim Peek sounds like he is probably the only person that will be able to take down Ken Jennings before he breaks the bank.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
Is that 15 grand ("thousand") subjects then? Well, that's much more than a monkey or a ton of subjects!
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
There, I've run rings round you logically.
"Oh, intercourse the penguin!"
Ya know, that came from a Monty Python sketch but it takes on a slightly different meaning here. Eeww.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
In soviet Russia, Russian thinks in YOU!
The most interesting part of the session was the question and answer portion at the end. For about 30 - 45 minutes Kim fielded various "trivia" questions from the audience. They ranged from obscure baseball facts from 50 years ago, to a student standing up, stating his name and hometown and asking for his address and phone number. No-one succeeded in stumping Peek.
Peek's visit was certainly one of two most interesting speakers to visit my college while I was there. (the other would be Desmond Tutu)
Because autistic children and people don't learn the way we do. Most autistic people are lucky if they can spell their name. A few happen to be autistic-savant as this person is, and his learning is incredible because it's not normal for an autistic person to be able to learn like that.
MOD PARENT UP!!! Very interesting post.
Anyone have a link to research which shows elevated levels of heavy metals?
You didn't happen to notice by any chance that he had blue hands, did you?
Ken's real mastery is the timing, not his knowledge. On most Jeopardy questions, all three contestants know the answer. It is simply a matter of who buzzes in first. On Jeopardy, you get penalized for buzzing in early: your buzzer will be locked out for a moment or two. Ken has mastered the timing and is able to buzz in at the perfect moment on almost every question. Check out his opponents. Some of them will get visibly pissed off at the buzzer.
Ken does have a vast knowledge and in many cases is able to answer the $2000 questions when the other 2 contestants cannot, but he generally has the game wrapped up by the end of the Jeopardy Round due to his timing, imo.
Why don't they put in in a room with ALL the available data on HIS condition (autism), let him make autism his latest subject to be a "mega-savant" about; then ASK HIM ABOUT HIS OWN CONDITION ?
I doubt that this comment was meant to be racist but more a condemnation of the Chinese government. It often sounds like a condemnation of the people because in most democratic countries the people for the most part identify with themselves with there government. That parent statement should have read " the morally bankrupt Chinese government". My question is can the average Chinese person read slashdot?
Maybe the new metric should be this. If your government will not let you read Slashdot it is moral bankrupt. If you read Slashdot you are morally bankrupt? Just kidding.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Dude, he's memorized 6,700 books. I don't think my local libary HAS that many books. I'd think that with all that knoledge he's got enough memorized to make a few bucks on jeopardy.
--Forest C. Adcock--
namely, that there is no spoon.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I just assumed that since my parents get smarter as I get older, I must be getting dumber as I grow old.
OK, can someone tell me why this is surprising?
I probably couldn't 10 years ago. Now, I'm not so sure.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
You're right....
;)
Only when someone starts to display incredible knowledge of potent potables will Mr. Jennings have to really worry.
Kim Peek Versus Ken Jennings on Jepordy.... Wow that would be an episode to remember. Put that on prime time.
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
I fail to see where the letters f,u,n ever were in the name Jeopardy. I don't think it was called Jeofunpardy before Ken started to play.
He's obviously not married with children.
Ad on the article...
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A small town might have that many books. A large city could easily run to more than that. The Vatican, Amazon.com, or the Library of Congress easily runs into the tens of thousands of volumes.
But separate out the fiction from the nonfiction and I'm sure you'd limit the number of volumes needed greatly.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
is it based on a chemical reaction we can isolate in the lab?
Cause I might be willing to take a pill that makes me twice as smart. Think of what I could do with a 360 IQ!
heh
I'd rather take a pill that made me rich.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A lot of Europeans has told USians about Bush and the USA. Despite knowing the facts, the USians still elected Bush and kept their two-party lineup. ... etc.
Oh irony.
it's in my head
Man gets a LOT smarter as he gets older. His intellegence in certia arenas has probaly raised more then your total IQ. ;)
Pretty astounding.
What makes this guy different from other people with autism? Can we figure it out? can we isolate? duplicated? congigate?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
why is there soup?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... I just haven't found my savant yet.
Seriously. It's not worth the effort to try to read that.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
If you're more knowledgable, odds are you're going to be smarter.
That's because you'll have (in some ways) memorized large portions of what others will have to deduce. Sure, you could re-deduce it each time you need it, but why?
Of course, this line of reasoning completely fails if you don't take care to stuff your head with an accurate representation of what you're studying. Considering that one of the topics is History, where interpertation and point of view play major roles, I'd gather that Kim isn't some sort of super-encyclopedia, but someone actually processing and incorporating ideas into his internal visualization of the world.
... but he apparently is getting smarter in his specialty areas as he gets older...
Heh, don't we all?
Proverbs 21:19
42
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.)
It's lost on some people, but morality isn't a universal constant (like c) but is influenced by point of view.
The Chinese Government has constantly tolerated and even promoted the mass violation of most product protection laws. As a mainland Chinese why they are burning copies of MS Windows instead of buying it, and they'll look at you as if you've lost your mind. Only when the Government decides that it's no longer in their interest to promote this activity will the moral values of China shift.
But it's not just limited to China. Many Christians should remember that many of the Biblical characters were poligimists (Jacob, Leah, and Rachel, anyone?) and had less than perfect lives (Noah exposing himself in a drunken stupor). But today's moral values don't permit any of this behavior.
Blaming someone about their lack of your moral values makes little sense, especially across culture divides as great as those in the U.S.A. and China.
What I'm curious about, it while he may be a walking encyclopedia of fact, how good is he at reasoning? I Googled the name, 'Kim Peek', to read some articles about him, but they are not clinical descriptions of his abilities and limitations.
.00001% greater chance of dying on one carrier over another. Most people would see this point very quickly, and simply buy a ticket on the fastest flight, or cheapest fair. How is the real Kim at this sort of reasoning?
For example, if we can take Dunstin's performance as a roughly accurate description of how he might behave, an interesting scene is the 'Quantis is Safer' bit. Tom and Dustin are trying to get somewhere. Dustin's character insists on flying on Quantis, on the grounds that it has the best safety record, having never crashed a plane. That is a fact that has a bivalent value that can be checked as being true or false. However, the scene illustrates that the character portraied by Dustin cannot deal with relative 'Fuzzy' concepts very well. Since major Airlines are very safe, and the relative numbers of accidents are so low, nobody worries if you have a
I mentioned 'Fuzzy' concepts above; there happens to be a branch of logic called 'Fuzzy Logic' that deals with set logic, and vague concepts. Things like getting a computer to work out how tall you have to be before you can be called 'tall'. It would be interesting to give Kim a book on the topic and have a discussion with him about it.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
That's great. Perhaps you should try learning some English next.
Proverbs 21:19
Why do people completely discount other people's point of view strictly on the basis of grammer or spelling. It is the same as judging someone based on their race, no difference, (Maybe we should gas all of the people how can't spell well on the fly or don't know what a BR tag is.)
Get over it.
I hear he's an excellent driver.
--Residential Interior Design
Dude....
NASA's the country's leading expert in PROBES....
Makes perfect sense to me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Bush won! four more years of rape, pillage, burn and rape!
You said rape twice!
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The point was to be general, that any person has higher intellectual capablities then they focus on developing. I would like you to point out where I said I can compete with any of his skills, becuase I didn't. "There is no amount of learning or practice that would allow you to beat either one, ever." Is a ridiculious statement, as if your such a limited mind to think that nobody on earth who studies math for their whole life could EVER compete in math against kim, then thats your problem. Skils and talents are differnt, people are better at differnt things, my point IS you yourself would probably be alot more intelligent if you didn't spend so much idle time. And again, I don't know how much time you might or might not waste, But the average person my age spends more then half of every day literally doing NOTHING. If that time was spent studying you can be ASSURED that the average level of intelligence amoung them would be higher..,. My point wasn't that anyone can be Kim Peek, or better then, but that they can be alot more then they are. And that becuase of his autism, he is more focused in those areas then other people.
TO ALL READING THIS POST, I USED PARAGAPHS AND LINE BREAKS, and /. Is formatting most posts to remove them, Do i have to include HTML or some other tag to make it work? I put the paragaphs and linebreaks in when typing it, and in the textbox looked correctly, but no matter what I do when I click submit it goes back to lineless and paragraphless fromatting...
This is informative? Sheesh - you guys are taking all the fun out of the parents patent troll.
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
I now just noticed the HTML formmated option and realized I had it on instead of Plain text, being the cause of thus...
In the fictional Dune universe, there was a Matrix-like AI revolt, followed by an extended war between humans and AI. After the war was resolved, the humans decided to use human computers known as Mentats, which were "giga-savants", that had their minds altered by injesting a special form of the spice.
Well that is an intersting except things like censorship, Tibet, and Tiawan are not considered foreign policy in China. Also I would not trust polls in China. They do not have a free press or political system. Again can the average english speaking chinese read slashdot?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The 53-year-old Peek is called a "mega-savant" because he is a genius in about 15 different subjects, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports, music and dates.
Wow! Slashdotters, this guy could probably help us out with the girls!
I'm surprised nobody has said this yet. We just have this guy count all the votes!
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Autistic children who are helped by this diet often crave milk and wheat, sometimes refusing to eat almost anything else.
--- There are two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it
Maybe 'funny'... Is this supposed to mean he could cure himself? Oh, wait, he would just know what everyone else knows about the disease and not how to cure it...
Maybe they just don't like you.
All this requires is a talent for memory- anybody can learn to memorize. The key with Kim is that his brain is hardwired for memorization in a way yours and mine isn't.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The USA president appears to a man of limited intelligence on the surface. Yet his college entrance test scores give him an IQ of 128. And he manages to win elections and run the country, more or less.
Whoah... this has been modded from 2 to -1 since I loaded the page. But I'll reply anyway.
My personal belief is that Bush probably has some form of undiagnosed dyslexia (*). The "humorous" mistakes he makes remind me of a dyslexic flatmate I had at university. Smart enough guy, who occasionally made incongruous mistakes with his speech. I later found out that some dyslexics are known to do this- IIRC this was at the same time it was suggested that Bush was dyslexic (**).
This doesn't dampen my view that Bush is anti-intellectual, insular and not particularly intelligent where it matters, who serving as a tool for corporate America and the Christian right-wing.
Just that we don't need to laugh at what might be a mild form of dyslexia.
(*) Or maybe it *was* diagnosed, and hushed up. Who knows?
(**) OTOH, I had another flatmate (in the *same* flat) who was also dyslexic, but never did this.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Mega-complexioned
"January 12, 1965. Very snowy that day. 12.2 inches of snow that day."
-- "Life's not fair, but the root password helps."
I am not Chinese. Actually I belong to one of many groups that are oppressed by the Chinese government. You are without a doubt a mindless little racist I am guessing about 13 years old, without the guts or integrity to post as anything but an AC. I suggest you stop playing Evercrack, get out of your parents basement, and look around at the real world. You are no better and actually a bit worse then most of the people in China. If you where over there why would think the way that they do? What slanted information would make you give the same level of approval that they do? Only then you might understand what conditions they are living under and why the feel the way they do.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Couldn't we get him to study the election figures, by county for the last 10 elections and see if he noticed patterns indicating corruption (for instance, if electronic voting has helped any one canidate more than others relative to exit polls)?
He should be able to visualize patterns better than any computer because the program has to be pre-programmed to look for a pattern related to a specific cause, he should see it as easily as we would a peak in a graph.
If only we could get this guy to study neurology or something like it to such detail - maybe he could tell us what makes him so smart?
memory capacity does not equate intelligence. that is why these folks are "savants" he can recall everything he reads, but he can't really extrapolate new data from it. that's the issue.
Maybe we should resurrect William Sidis then, and ask him?
They ranged from obscure baseball facts from 50 years ago, to a student standing up, stating his name and hometown and asking for his address and phone number. No-one succeeded in stumping Peek.
So, what I want to know is, if I had several of this guy's brain, could I form a RAID array from them?
We should apply for a research grant.
This thread makes me want to order take-out.
I noticed that some people mentioned MMR (Measles Mumps Rubella vaccination) as a possible cause for autism. Looks like it has just recently been retracted - Controversial MMR and autism study retracted
MindStalker says that he has told many Chinese folks what the real situation in Tibet is. Despite knowing the facts, the Chinese still support Beijing's policy of occupation and suppression in Tibet.
OK, let's swap the situation around. A Chinese person tells you that the real reason the USA gives aid to Mexico is because they do military research there and keep many underground missile bases in the Mexican desert. Naturally, because you're being told this by a foreigner, who reads their own media about your country, you believe them wholeheartedly. Right?
I apologise for the example, if you are not an American. But I think it's ridiculous to insist that someone in another country believe what others say is happening in their country, as if it's morally bankrupt not to do so. Not saying they can't or shouldn't believe what someone told them about Tibet, but you simply have to put yourself in that position, as I have suggested above - would you believe everything a foreigner told you about your government? I bet you'd do exactly what the Chinese person has done - nothing.
"But he also is severely limited in other ways, like not being able to find the silverware drawer at home or dressing himself."
So, apparently he has exceptional abilities ONLY in things which are interesting.
And everything else, someone else has to do it for him.
How conveeeeeeeenient...
Slickest scam I've ever seen.
I Implied that People can learn MORE then they do, if they applied more effort, not that they can ALL obtain equal status.
Even if your reffering to just me, it's still closed minded of you to think that I couldnt excel in one single topic in comparisson to a 10 year old kim.
EVERYONE is capable of learning to some extent, and I didnt imply to 'stuff their brain' with something beyond their limit. I didn't IMPLY anyone can do anything if they just have some effort. I directly said anyone has a chance to be more then they are, YOU took the initaitive to perceive that as 'Anyone can do anything if they try'.
Of course there are limits to how much each person can learn, and of course they are differnt from person to person, but if you insist that the common person isnt capable of learning more if they tried harder, again, thats your closed mindedness.
Or are they trying to figure out why they can put a man on the moon in the 60's but can barely keep things in orbit in the 21st century.
>I propose that we catch trolls like you and use them for medical expeirments. These experiments will produce far better results than rat experiments.
/. discussion (snicker!) Can you imagine lab trolls escaping and wreaking havoc? No bridge would be safe to walk under; no goat would go unmollested! No one would be able to converse without starting a flame war. It'd be the end of civilization! :-(
But then we might accidentally unleash a new breed of troll savants! Cabable of ruining even the most enlightened
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Well, it seems to lead to oppression. I mean, the government locked up thousands of people post-9/11, and hate crimes went up, and racism rose to some of the mainstream.
I thought the Tom Cruise character in the film Rain Main was loosely based on Dr Oliver Sacks. Turned out I was wrong. However, there are many similar cases of autism described in his great book "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat".
This is a fascinating and slightly frightening book. One of the cases there WAS made into a film, Awakenings with Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams.
Some of the other cases include the title character; a man who keeps adressing his hat as if it was his wife, a woman who has lost all "sense" of her body and feels as if she is trapped in a tomb of someone elses dead flesh, people who can see only details and not wholes, people who are unable to form new memories (exactly like in Memento), people who seem to have lost "nodes" in the "tree" of knowledge that they use to experience and interpret the world.
Great book, defenitely worth a read.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
But the average person my age spends more then half of every day literally doing NOTHING. If that time was spent studying you can be ASSURED that the average level of intelligence amoung them would be higher..,.
There isn't "NOOP" for the brain.. Just becaue somebody isn't learning something you consider useful doesn't mean they're not learning something.
However I do agree most people tend to spend alot of time on things I consider useless.
That's what I mean, It could be just me, but the average person I know dosen't work or study outside of when they ABSOLUTELY have to.
The average middle aged person I know, dosen't intake any new knoweldge other then daily news, and they work as much as they have to, get home, and spend the rest of the time watching tv and just vegging.
The average person I know from 15-28, either works a average job or goes to school, although looks at them both as burdens, and dosen't make any attempt to work or learn outside of those.
And yes, it is understandbale that not everyone wants to 'constantly' be engaged in these activites, but thats not my point, its that most people avoid them whenever possible when they are the most bennificial things in exsistance (imo).
Im not trying to critize peoples lifestyles, they work, and they go to school, and they are welcome to spend their time doing whatever else they want.
My point, is more about the general idealism's in america about education in work, how we are raised to see them as ONLY tasks and burdens... Im sure it is to different extents depending on how your rasied, but myself and general everyone ive met was raised with that mindset...
EXACTLY, its the same thing, if the US government told us someone needed our help (iraq sound framilier) the country tends to generally take their word for it. And while both Iraq and Tibet are in considerable conditions (while in far differnt ways) its easy to say you want to help but doing it in a way the people of the area your 'helping' would rather not be helped by... I mean, if you can't turst your government... oh wait....