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A Savant Explains His Abilities
numLocked writes "Of the few hundred autistic savants in the world, none have been able to explain their incredible mental abilities. Until now, that is. It seems that Daniel Tammet, a mathematical savant who holds the record for the most digits of pi recited from memory, is able to explain exactly how he intuits answers to mathematical problems. Tammet is quite articulate and speaks seven languages, including one he invented. The Guardian is running an article about his amazing abilities."
Of the few hundred autistic savants in the world, none have been able to explain their incredible mental abilities.
They're too busy counting...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Explanation: He imagines shapes/figures for the numbers and it just comes together. Hardly groundbreaking information.
I Encrypt My IM's
...if the savants' abilities are compensation for "ordinary" cognitive abilities.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Question: why is autism associated with this kind of savantism? Granted there are 'normal' geniuses, but it seems like this sort of genetic brilliance is exactly the sort of thing that could be developed--ideally without autism--using gener therapy and modern genomics. Anyone remember the Orson Scott Card novels where the planet of Path is ruled by a class of people genetically engineered for superintelligence and obsessive-compulsive disorder, although the one could be separated from the other?
too bad slashdot editors can't, do I really have to click through and read the whole thing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_savant
Now lets hear the slashdotters comment of how they too are misunderstood savants.
"I speak 4 languages too!" - Klingon, Perl, and Esperanto don't count my dear friends.
Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.
So presumably 69 is Jenifer Lopez, and 303 is the goatse guy?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Yes but does he use Emacs or Vi?
Keep the faith, share the code
Welcome our new autistic savant overlords
...a beowulf cluster of them.
FTA: "Savants have usually had some kind of brain damage. Whether it's an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head...
Item 1, check. Item 2, check.
So how come I aren't a genius now?
This is clearly false advertising.
Certainly I will explain it. Certainly certainly indeed. I will explain it, explain it I will certainly do...
Table-ized A.I.
The one he invented doesn't count.
That sounds like Synesthesia, which Horizon did a program about last year. People with synesthesia can see numbers as shapes (A woman described being able to see 1 to 10 in a line, 11-100 stacked above them, and then on and on in blocks of 100), words as colours (Monday is green) and someone could even smell words (His best friend's names made him feel sick).
The program seemed to conclude that we all, to an extent, are synesthetic. Quite a large number of people assosciate colours with days of the week, and we all use words like a "soft/sharp sound", a "bite" to a tase, and so on. Although these words are ones of touch, we use them in other contexts. Cross-referencing the senses in a similar war to more advanced synesthesia.
... this came in a context of chunking.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Neither, he uses Notepad! *dundundun*
Sure, he can count well, but if you ask him how much one of those new compact cars cost:
"About a hundred dollars."
Or how much a candy bar costs:
"About a hundred dollars."
Savant, indeed.
...first post savants
Table-ized A.I.
Why is multiplying large numbers considered mathematical genius? Or memorizing PI to 1,000 digits? Perhaps arithmetical genius
If he solved Fermat's theorem over breakfast, that would be mathematical genius!!
I don't really know a lot about autistic savants or encryption technologies, so this may sound idiotic, but if these guys can so easily factor large numbers why don't they have them working for NSA breaking public-key encryption?
Le français vous intéresse?
"When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think."
I don't understand. There is nothing intrinsic in the number 2 and the number 5 that will tell you what they will equal when they are multiplied.
The way we arrive at the solution is extrinsic, namely in the form of the operator (multiplication in this instance).
But if it's extrinsic, I don't understand what the author of the article means by "instinct" and "shapes" and that sort of thing. As far as I can understand, the only explanation would be the ability to compute those operations at much higher speed, then any "non-savant."
If that's the case, then, theoretically, would there not be a limit associated with the physical properties of the nervous system that would cap out at a certain number of such operations per unit time? So theoretically might we not be able to test such a thing by running him through a long list of operations? That'll let us know if he's really just making those calculations really, really fast, or if he really is viewing the mathematics in such a fundamentally different way (something I find rather unsettling).
Then again, how would we design such a test? I fear that the number of operations we can demand his brain to perform per unit time will be limited by his powers of cognition (i.e. by the time he reads/hears all the stuff he needs to hear, we'll already be beyond that critical operating time interval).
Eh, I think I come off as somewhat difficult to understand. Oh well, I wanted to make sure my question appeared in the main thread of discussion (rather than being posted after most people have moved on).
the seventh doesnt count if he is the only one using it
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
The upside is that this can make it easier to remember things- it means you've got more things about the thing to connect to other things- his description of how he remembered pi as a story is a *classic* description of the mnemonic technique for remembering things- you basically turn what you want to remember into a series of pictures that you string into a whacky story. It works really, really well; people easily get upwards of 90% recall using it. And he has a built in picture or sensation to help him with this; which is the hardest bit of the technique.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Now that Daniel is explaining how anyone can be a savant, Slashdot userids will become scarce enough to have value.
--
make install -not war
Me neither.
I think he is saying math is completely intuitive to him. He sees the two numbers being multiplied and the product comes to him in a private visual way he can readily translate to base 10 digits. The human brain is very parallel and associative, but to the WinTel guys it would be a machine with 10,000 cores completely interconnected with a clock rate of 100's to 1000's of Hz. Humans are not at their best when they think sequentially - savants are the postive proof.
"He was actually born with another surname, which he prefers to keep private, but decided to change it by deed poll.
(...)
They were thinking, 'This is the end of Daniel's life'."
Major disclosure of the private parts?
"He can't drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left."
Is it possible that knowing how to drive a car, wire a plug, tell right from left, and other banal things that we do require a ton of processing power? Since he cannot do these things, all that processing power goes to processing numbers and memorising words.
It we would be cool if on a math test we cold forget our ability to drive cars and concentrate on processing numbers.
The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder.
I'm wondering, do you think that perhaps if we could present someone with this man's abilities an interface to some kind for a programming language that he could also achieve amazing things?
maybe vocal recognition or a motion-capture interface? He did say he is making his own language.
For instance, if he combines these abstract ideas in his mind in a mechanical way he is showing the ability to visualize details of und use complex concepts with amazing precision.
what is a chunk of code if not merely an amazingly complex concept?
Yeah, but does he run Linux?
This man's abilities reminds me of a story, Funes, The Memorious.
Daniel's life story is not the same as Ireneo Funes' fictional life, but in a way they both lead to the same question - what does it mean to think?
Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.
In March 2001, there was an article in Science, "The Art of Forgetting" which touched on these issues, and more current research begins to detail the chemical methods of action for the brain's 'forgetting system'. Indeed, life would not be possible if we remembered everything. Human cognition seems to be defendant on removing details, as much of what we do is through abstracting away the differences... this allows us to generalize. Of course, over-generalization is a failure-point for human cognition as well, as we all know.
All of this will be very useful to AI research, especially if we are trying to model computer minds after the ones nature evolved.
... as "an idiot savant... without the savant part".
Unless he's the guy who made up Klingon. :D
I used to have a problem with it when I was in school. I would know the answer to a problem but I couldn't explain to the teacher the process by which I derived the answer.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Have you published reference grammars and lessons for your conlangs on a web page?
I once dated a girl who had synesthesia. She told me my voice had an almond color. Long story short, it didn't work out between us (her condition wasn't an issue with me, and I don't think she was self-conscious about it). I thought it was an interesting 'condition', she seemed to think of it as a gift.
Most people can pretty easily memorize song lyrics and the sounds of a song, but yet the digits of Pi are incredibly hard to memorize. Might the digits of Pi be to this guy be like memorizing a song to most of us? I equally can't explain in a nice rational way why it's easy to memorize a song, but to anyone that can it doesn't need any more explanation.
AccountKiller
... show him the Google logo - it'll blow his mind!
Btw, do you think if we put a bag of ice on his head he'll run faster?
is there any relation between savants and homesexuality?
from the article:
"Because I can't drive, Neil offered to pick me up at my parents' house, and drive me back to his house in Kent. He was silent all the way back. I thought, 'Oh dear, this isn't going well'. Just before we got to his house, he stopped the car. He reached over and pulled out a bouquet of flowers. I only found out later that he was quiet because he likes to concentrate when he's driving."
The "shyness about making eye contact" is a symptom of austim and is used as a dianostic criterion.
A good story about an interesting individual but where was the "how he does it" part?
m
A quick search reveals:
http://www.optimnem.co.uk/Media.htm
http://www.centreforthemind.com/director/index.cf
I don't know what to think about it, really.
Mänti = a type of tree = mänty (pine tree)
ema = mother = emo (usually of animals)
ela = life = elo / elämä
päive = day = päivä
Päike = sun (not as direct a counterpart in Finnish)
The ability to organize complex, structured data (which is basically all a jigsaw is) is a key requirement in database administration. Being able to visualize the optimal structure is a talent people will pay a LOT of money for.
As another person has noted, the ability to reassemble a randomly scrambled structure (such as a shredded document) would appeal very much to certain areas of law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security.
Being able to connect bits of image that are associated by some non-obvious connection may well be of interest to people studying image compression. There may be organizations which can yield better compression, which do not require too much meta-data to explain and which do not take significantly longer to uncompress.
If all else fails, she can simply put "massively parallel combinatorial logic" on the resume and apply as a maths lecturer.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was a savant as a child. No one could figure out how I could solve complex math problems in my head. They all assumed that I had some crazy innate ability to do complex things.
In reality, I was born with tourettes, and I spent a whole lot of time alone. In my free time I would figure out ways to solve problems. During the day, while most people were out and about, I was shaking my head and figuring out how to quickly add colums of numbers.
When I reached puberty, many of the symptoms of my tourettes went away and I was much more comfortable around other people - and I also discovered girls. While I was still interested in math, my attention was now focused on my new, shiny life.
At one time, it got so bad, that I got cat scans, and a load of other tests so that a group of researchers could figure out what was special about my brain - why I could easily solve complex math problems. They never seemed to consider that I was just lonely and looking for something to fill my time. Somehow, the tourettes was emphasized while the my lifestyle as a recluse was ignored.
I know that this is a bit off-topic, but I see so many times where people are held up as somehow naturally more gifted when they are probably pretty ordinary but with a whole lot of time on their hands. Look through history, Erdos, Newton - many people most consider to have natural genious are just people who, for whatever reason, had to find something to do with their time.
Bram Cohen is one...he seems to have integrated the "disease" into his life pretty well!
"He met the great love of his life, a software engineer called Neil, online. It began, as these things do, with emailed pictures, but ended up with a face-to-face meeting."
..? Oh right, he's gay."
and say "Wha
A gay, churchgoing autistic savant in fact. That's a tough call for someone trying not to stand out.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
It looks like there is a discovery science special on wednesday night with him in it. http://science.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp? episode=0&cpi=111524&gid=0&channel=SCI
News for Whiners!!
In case you haven't realized it already, a surname is a -last- name, not a first name. Daniel Tammet's first name has always been Daniel... it's only the Tammet part that was changed.
:D
I think this is the most interesting article I have ever seen on slashdot. Absolutely fascinating.
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
The language he claims to have made up, is actually just a rip-off of estonian with some mix of finnish...at least as far as the examples in the article go:
:)
The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day".
In estonian "ema" means mother, "ela" (or "elu" as a noun) means (to) live, "päike" means sun, and "päev" (or in finnish "päivä" - finnish is extremely similar to estonian) means day.
The name for the language (a type of tree), "mänti" sounds like pine in finnish, though I'm not sure about that. But "mänd" in estonian means pine.
So it seems he has more than one gift. Some people plagiarize a poem or a painting, he aims for a whole language
We used to call them IDIOT savants.
It's an unusual form of brain damage. Look at how he describes the way he does sums; he doesn't think about it consciously at all. He just sees two shapes morphing into another shape, which to him represents a number. He then simply recites the number out loud. On the conscious level, there is no "calculating" involved whatsoever. It's all done for him by the deep recesses of his brain, without him lifting a metaphorical finger.
I would say that this isn't any sort of "intelligence" in any conventional sense; it's simply that his damaged brain has given him the ability to access "hidden" subroutines of the neural wiring we all have.
For instance, it's no secret that the human brain can do maths in real-time with frightening speed. Just walking involves real-time feats of calculus that would choke a calculator. The problem is that it's all subconscious. Well, in Tammet's case, that "subroutine"-- which is supposed to be wholly subconscious-- now has a window into his conscious mind, expressed through pictures.
This is fascinating, but arguably it's no form of intelligence. At least, not in any conventional sense of "intelligence".
Mind you, I fully understand what it's like to be able to do something without mentally "lifting a finger". It's the way I've always been with language. I first spoke at age one, and I've been able to write and speak at an "adult" level since early childhood. My grammatical skills are quite high, but if you asked me to diagram a sentence, I'd choke. I usually can't describe why I know that a certain sentence structure is "right" or "wrong", since I can't consciously describe many of the rules of language.
I suppose this fellow is much the same way with the pictures in his head. He's described to us how he (as in the conscious entity known as Tammet) does sums: He just sits back and his brain feeds him the answer without any conscious sort of calculation. However, he hasn't described to us how his brain does the work, which is the really interesting question.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
He can, among other things, tell you how many bpms the metronome is set to by ear.
And it's not an answer like "around 70 or 80". It's an answer he gives with full authority, like "Oh, that's 78".
The examples given of Mänti bear an odd resemblance to finnish words with similar meaning. Might be that the point is the language structure etc. and he's knowingly using slight modification from existing languages but I found this rather interesting:
Mänti: This is close to the finnish word "mänty" which means a pine tree (the article noted that Mänti is a type of tree)
Ema: "Emo" is a finnish word for mother, usually used when speaking of animals
Ela: Elo is a word meaning life in Finnish
Päive: the finnish word for this is Päivä
the only one example not near a finnish word is Päike for sun. I'm thinking he might've gotten the words from Estonian since he mentions that he likes it. Estonian has a strong resemblance to finnish and I can read it somewhat if I try because a lot of the words can be deduced from finnish. Maybe someone from Estonia here might be able to tell if there's an even stronger resemblance to it. I hope the rest of the language isn't a subconscious rewrite on another language as well.
he doesnt hold the world record for memorization of pi. The record is currently strongly held by one Hiroyuki Goto of Japan. See this site for the list:. html
http://pi-world-ranking-list.com/lists/memo/index
In English the meaning is different, Savant means 'Idiot Savant', that is some sort of retard which has a specialized, limited extraordinary ability, such as solving differential equations mentally without knowing what a differential equation is, or how they actually do it.
Usually this extraordinary ability is a burden, not a gift, it does not lead to anything new or creative in science oir mathematics. There are no breaktroughs in science or mathematics produced by idiot savants.
Greatest scientists and mathematicians (like Newton, Leibnitz, Euler, Riemann,Einsten,Maxwell, Boltzmann,Boht, HYeisenberg, Darwin, Fisher, Kimura, etc) are usually normal people, not idiot savants.
Not for his abilities, but for the beautiful, peaceful-sounding world he lives in. To most of us, numbers are either an obstacle or a challenge or work or whatever. To him they're his friends. That's so unique. I envy him.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Satan is 666
God is 777
George W. Bush is 0
Especially when you are posting them as AC, right?
Little did you know... slashdot keeps track on all logged-in AC comments!
Marilyn
I definitely agree with the parent. Being able to multiply large numbers/tell if they are prime is nice, but it doesn't make you a mathematical genius. He hasn't proven any new theorems or developed a new field; why is he being called a genius?
Perhaps if he can solve a few NP-Complete problem or at least advances the state of mathematics somewhat, then I might reconsider my view. But as far as I know, he contributes nothing to the body of mathematics, besides maybe impressing the occassional person with multiplication.
At first, I thought he did have a typical savant language problem, or at least a speach impediment. I didn't figure out it was a British thing until the end of the article. That means I've already met half the requirements of being an idiot-savant myself!
Um, OK. Reminds me of the comedian who said "I can type 100 words per minute, but it's in my own languauge." I want to meet the idiot who invents his own language but CAN'T speak it.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen is Ali G's cousin.
Well, although I like the article, the summary up top is inaccurate. The Pi Memorization record has been above 30,000 for over a decade (not that nearly 23,000 isn't impressive). I used to work in a lab with the a friend who was the record holder for 5 years with a 30,000-35,000 span for Pi (he could recall that many digits, I can't even remember the single five-digit number to descibe his feat). A link to Rajan:/ shanks_e xpertise.html
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/david.shanks
I am a teacher and have had nearly a dozen autistic students (none of whom were savants). There is a huge increase in Silicon Valley, and it is a fascinating, frustrating, and a lot of work for most of the support staff.
For anyone interested, I'd also recommend the book "Thinking in Pictures" by Temple Grandin (an autistic woman who has redesigned livestock handling machinery). She is quite eloquent and probably the most famous autistic person (she has also been interviewed by Terry Gross, which I suppose is online).
Like Peek, Tammet will read anything and everything, but his favourite book is a good dictionary
Thats just too damn funny. Peek btw, is buddy from rain man.
that he's gay.... his love of his life Neil. I have nothing against gays i just find it interesting. Do think he counts the number of times his lover plows him in the butt?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
If this guy can describe the methods he uses to perform his math skills, I wonder if they could be used somehow in a curriculum for small children. If they can learn languages as easily as they do (they pick up that first language pretty fast, compared to any adult learning a second), a new way of perceiving numbers shouldn't be so hard to pick up. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new generation where everyone has access to those kind of skills that those of us taught and stuck in traditional methods and paradigms can't even comprehend.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day". Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.
Disregarding the misspellings, all those words are straight from a Finnish or Estonian dictionary. "Mänty" is a pine tree, "päivä" is day, "pälke" means glimmer or glint. "Emä" and "elä" are the root words of mother and life, respectively. And "tammi" (tammet) is oak.
Finnish is a weird but logical language with a lot of nuances and forms that are not present in other languages. I'm not sure what Tammet is trying to do, but he's apparently just exploring the relationships between words in Finnish. Anything else would either not make sense, or be simple plagiarism. Too bad the reporter got stuck on the words and made such a big issue of it.
Tammet's not the first one to ponder on the Finnish language. It's well known that J.R.R Tolkien got hooked on Finnish at an early age and re-used some ideas in his works.
--Bud
There has been some progress in studies dealing with a language's base components. Research is leaning towards the idea that most if not all languages have a common base at the syllable level (or below ... read the study a couple years ago and it isn't my field) and from there the mixing and matching of syllables fleshes out the entire language. To him it could represent just another long equation or number string with seemingly infinite combinations and permutations (if you throw in pronunciation, cadence, etc ...).
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
Applications for cryptography? Maybe. I tend to think that if there were, someone from the NSA would have already tried it. Going by the amount of time it took them with the eight, ten, and twelve digit numbers, I'm not sure how useful they'd be on 128-bit numbers. That's, what, 2^128, which is about 10^37 digits? Not sure about the math.... On the other hand, maybe it works, and there's lots of autistics on government payroll. Where'd I put that tin-foil hat?
BTW - the Sacks book is phenomenal. Some of the problems these people have - there's one person who doesn't have the concept of right (as in right v. left). For dinner, she eats the food on the left half of the plate. If a ball slowly rolls to her right, she will turn a full circle to the left to find it. If I recall, there's about 10-15 cases, each one different.
fsh
A year or two ago the New York Times had a neat article titled Savant for a Day about research by Prof. Allan Snyder. Basically, he uses a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily induce savant-like symptoms in volunteers. The journalist writing the story also acted as a volunteer, and experienced greatly-increased drawing ability while the device was turned on.
...
From the article:
As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general.
Snyder's work began with a curiosity about autism. Though there is little consensus about what causes this baffling -- and increasingly common -- disorder, it seems safe to say that autistic people share certain qualities: they tend to be rigid, mechanical and emotionally dissociated. They manifest what autism's great ''discoverer,'' Leo Kanner, called ''an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.'' And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral way, using ''a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve interpersonal communication.''
In a 1999 paper called ''Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing? The Mind's Secret Arithmetic,'' Snyder and D. John Mitchell considered the example of an autistic infant, whose mind ''is not concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals.'' These children, they wrote, seem ''to be aware of information in some raw or interim state prior to it being formed into the 'ultimate picture.''' Most astonishing, they went on, ''the mental machinery for performing lightning fast integer arithmetic calculations could be within us all.''
And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, ''to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.''
I don't see why these sort of mathematical abilities are seen as superhuman. They are normally due to some sort of damage to the brain and result in inability to lead a "normal" life, e.g. having to drink tea at the same time every day. This suggests that the human brain has powerful computational abilites, but in order to survive in the real world, another "thinking" layer is required on top of this. This "intelligence" is normally considered to make humans superior to computers. Seems to me that these individuals have damage to higher level thinkng and are accessing the lower level computational abilities directly.
I have a book by Oliver Sacks called 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' in the book he has a story called 'the twins', both of who are savants who dish out 20 figure primes, amongst other things.
He says, "What is not made clear, by Myers, and perhaps was not clear, is whether Dase had any method for the tables he made up, or whether, as hinted in his simple 'number-seeing' experiments, he somehow 'saw' these great primes, as apparently the twins did.
and goes into a little more detail later on in the book.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
lmao that was great.
He is obviously rather different from your usual autistic person. That means that it may be hard to draw conclusions from what he does about other autists. It's quite possible, for example, that his synaesthesia is not caused by his autism, but simply another manifestation of some underlying organic disease.
Likewise, the fact that he sees shapes when doing math doesn't mean that the shapes are responsible for doing the math, they may simply be cross-talk.
As for his social skills, it's also hard to know whether that's organic or learned; I mean, if you see the world completely differently from everybody else, it's not exactly surprising that the behavior of everybody else may be a bit counterintuitive to you.
Altogether, an interesting case that should remind us how much variety in intelligence and thought there is even among human beings. Just wait until we meet aliens.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
Cantide, re your sig: It's tea, not coffee. The quote is from an exchange between Lady Astor (sp?) and Sir Winston Churchill
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
When you get down to it, though, we do most of our "thinking" in sounds or visuals. Everything else is translation. For instance, LANGUAGE is incredibly complex, but we can do it with ease since our brain has such an amazing "processing chip" for sorting sounds. Reading is simply converting things to sounds (or visuals - when you "remember" a quote you will normally either remember it by sound or by a visual memory of the words.)
Even math is, at it's root, visual for all of us. Take 2 + 2 = 4. There is cold memorization of the result, but if you were learning math for the first time, you would break it down to:
|| + || = ||||
ie. a visual representation, or counting fingers etc. The reason many people have so much trouble with math is they end up doing too much cold memorization - the brain remembers associatively, so this doesn't work well (but it explains why mneumonic devices DO work well). Unfortunately, that's how they teach it.
I tend to believe that we have an amazing ability to remember sound and sight (makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint) but we're NOT hard drives and "cold memorization" just doesn't work. By knocking out some part of the brain, the brain is forced to take in math through the visual/sound process, inventing a network of logic that handles all the work in the subconscious.
"Most people can pretty easily memorize song lyrics and the sounds of a song, but yet the digits of Pi are incredibly hard to memorize. Might the digits of Pi be to this guy be like memorizing a song to most of us? I equally can't explain in a nice rational way why it's easy to memorize a song, but to anyone that can it doesn't need any more explanation."
You mean like this song?
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
That'd be very interesting and useful. A list of what games equate to what job skills. Especially since many are non-verbal standardized tests. ... So what are people who are good at chess good at?
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Wow. What a nitpick, he's less socially adaptible then you and has a higher computing power making you less geek.
Mod parent down.
Go sit in the corner and wear the conical hat this very instant!
I think the right word to describe this person's numerical abilities is "good calculator". Mathematics is something different.
I would perfer goatse to be 404.
An estimated 10% of the autistic population Bullshit. They must mean 10% of the low-functioning autism community. The rates of savantism are nowhere near that good for the Asperger/PDD crowd.
I can't explain it, it is just a natural ability I have.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these guys.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
This kind of makes me wonder if the emotional connection people have with music (or the aural sense basically, only we're dealing with organized sound specifically) could be explained in a similar way. Yes, it also has a lot to do with mental conditioning from what we've listened to and what we associate with it, but such an explanation as initially stated could possibly indicate that our tendancy to associate tonal structures with feelings like love, hate, and excitement, as opposed to say, hunger, might not simply be arbitrary.
Also, personally, I tend to associate certain chordal structures played on specific instruments with colors. For instance, a minor on an Electric Piano is Green, a minor 7th is bluish green, a major 9th is a dull light blue.
They need to have a placement agency targeted towards the unique needs (and disabilities) of Savants.
I'm sure it'd be welcome to many.
How do other savants get along with one another?
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
it's no secret that the human brain can do maths in real-time with frightening speed. Just walking involves real-time feats of calculus that would choke a calculator.
Just like when you catch a baseball you're actually solving differential equations, not just estimating where the ball will go.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
No you don't envy him. You're treating him like a dumb pet, like a dog is clueless but happy. It's not a good thing. No woman will ever want him.
Hi, my name is Robert Beck and you might call me a "savant". I'm currently working at the NSA and `(@#&&!^^#!@!>>~~NO CARRIER
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Now if only it were this trivial to solve them consciously ;)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Spoiler Alert: It turns out the zebra did it!
Crazykimchi linked it two days ago. Granted, I never thought of linking it myself. But since I'm never at fault, I blame you, yes you. You should have had RSS set up to monitor all news sites while bathing in a tub full of coffee. With 1,000 or so of you doing this in shifts you could cut down the response time to around a minute.
and I invented 7 of them!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I wonder what would happen if they could make a pill that eliminated boredom? What effect would that have on someone's mental processes?
What if you could remove that particular ward against obsessive compulsive behavior without destroying someone's mind?
There's an important difference between being very bored by a subject and being physically unable to do it.
People learn better if they find certain things interesting. And there's been precious little research done on why we find certain things interesting.
I'm going to get modded flamebait for this, but there was an interview on NPR about a woman who tried to get a chemical sex change to become a man (her plumbing didn't change.) She mentions how she wasn't interested in science before they pumped her full of testosterone. Not sure if there's anything to that, but it seems reasonable that a lot of what we're mentally rewarded for doing has a neurological basis.
i.e. I like math\sex\science\art, etc.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The number two, for instance, is a motion...
How apt!
The summary of the whole article can be summed up with this one quote: Caboose - "That guy tex is really a robot and you're his boyfriend so that makes you... a gay robot."
The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother"
The word "ema" is also mother in Hebrew.
If it follows a proper structure, as opposed to baby talk you might do around an infant, why shouldn't it count as a language? I imagine the only thing that so far invalidates it in your view is that Tammet so far is the only speaker of it.
Thousands of languages have gone extinct over the years. There are probably a number today where its body of speakers is down to a handful of people. Sometimes even two last speakers who got into a fight and no longer talk to one another. Do those languages no longer count?
Would you count Esperanto, Klingon (go ahead, laugh,) or even Tolkein's creations as languages? When did they become a language? Surely at some point, they were only known by their developers.
if you asked me to diagram a sentence, I'd choke
I couldn't diagram a sentnce if my life depended upon it. Having a large vocabulary (which I gather you obtained at an early age) is no replacement for an in depth understanding of the language itself.
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
I'm not a grammar savant, nor am I an english teacher. However, I would wager my grammar to be better than yours. I know you really wanted to have a complicated, well-thought post with incredible use of punctuation and such to show your great skill to the world -- unfortunately you have used a run-on sentence to do so:
"He just sits back and his brain feeds him the answer without any conscious sort of calculation."
I know, I know. I'm being extremely nitpicky, but, if you come on here claiming to be some grammatical genious who magically follows the rules, you can at least follow the rules for four or five short paragraphs.
can he get to the sixth wave on Donkey Kong?
How do us people who have this magic ability to come up with solutions in an instant without 12hrs of flowcharts and powerpoint slides and 12 cups of coffee put this down in a resume and a job interview as a 'skill' ??
It is a damn usefull skill but how can you qantify it and proove it. I am sure there are many many superuber skilled people with such automatic solution finding tricks in their minds, but overall could be graded as 'C average' joes who cannot get that top job.
Its sad that we must all get paper grades from universities.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The song has meaning. The digits of pi don't.
Are you (or your friends) a fan of anime or jpop? (or kpop, hkpop, etc...) Can you sing any of the songs? Do you know what the words mean?
I used to be heavy into jpop and could sing along with any of my favorite tunes, but aside from picking out a few words often had almost no idea what the lyrics meant.
hell, hum the tune of any classical music piece you may know. Those notes in and of themselves have no meaning do they?
I can imagine now, a whole subset of porn culture based on wierd disabilities.
Turets - swearing and being wacko during sex acts
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Yes, but not (necessarily) in the same sense that mathematicians (or Mathematica) solve differential equations. You don't (normally) say that the baseball is "solving a differential equation" to determine where to go -- and if you do, it doesn't mean that baseball isn't still as dumb as a rock.
Hmm.. Maybe one of the Dupe Savants could explain his abilities?
popular music
free (as in beer)
noodles
Many more, but those are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head. Did I mention that Japanese and Korean have similar grammar structures and have numerous words derived from Chinese?
Same out West too, I'm sure at some time in your life you've seen a tables of similar words between various European Languages.
-gko
that's not a run-on sentence.
I thought 3% seemed a little high. From http://www.autisticsociety.org/article130.html:
In this issue of THE JOURNAL, Yeargin-Allsopp et al1 report the findings of a survey, which was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that found a rate of 34 per 10 000 for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) among 3- to 10-year-old children in metropolitan Atlanta.
That's 0.34%, not 3%. Still a lot though.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
From the article they appear to be romantically in love (ie, exchanging flowers), but does this make them homosexual?
I guess it depends on what you mean by homosexual, but I would define it as being *sexually* attracted to one another. Which may or may not be the case here.
One could perhaps even hypothesize that due to their diminished emotional capabilities, women simply confuse the hell out of them, and therefore they find solace in each other as emotional compatibles.
Not that it matters one way or the other whether they are homosexual or not... but thought I'd point out that, from the article, we don't really know exactly what the nature of their relationship is.
For starters, they're not Savant's, they're "Idiot Savants". Due to the complications of political correctness, we can no longer acknowledge their cognitive deficiencies by invoking the legally defined status of idiot, mostly because the real idiots are offended by the term. A savant is someone who is highly knowledgable and educated, often part of a honors society.
But that technicality aside, some of these people don't deserve to be called savants. A classic savant is someone with severe functional handicaps who displays an indordinant aptitude in one area. Rainman is an example. I knew a black guy who could sculpt a statue from clay by memory, and showed tremendous adaptation and improvisation in his form. That's a savant. This guy is able to communicate, knows seven languages, and is a mathematical prodigy. If that makes him a savant, then there are alot of unrecognized savants roaming the campuses of this country. And lurking on slashdot.
How could you turn an article about an Australian Autistic Savant who happens to be gay into an "America sucks" comment?
I RTFA and I couldn't see anything about him being Australian, seems like he lives in Kent and was born in the UK. Anyway thats the inference I got from the article.
In case anyone is interested:
Invisible Algebra
This is a quick-start guide/excerpt of a book I wrote. It teaches how to solve algebra equations mentally.
Starting in my teens, I always had an ability to do abstract math in my head. (I've met lots of people who are better - no claims to savanthood here.) I liked to examine what I was doing internally that let me do integration by parts, 2d integrals, etc. in my head, so I could work to improve it. (Though with the heavier stuff I'm a little out of practice now :)
I'm working on another, more general book, that would cover algebra, calculus, maybe diff eqns, and the basics of extending it all to other areas of higher math. Describing it in words is HARD. Have you ever been able to do something, but had no clue how to describe how you do it? Or the other way, where you saw someone doing something neat, and asked them to teach you how, but they had a hard time doing so. That's what it is like, but I'm slowly making progress with it.
Some of the most beautiful experiences of my life have involved working equations out in my mind's eye. When I'm in "math mode" it can feel like I'm in another world.
Aaron Maxwell - redsymbol.net
Peek can read two pages simultaneously, one with each eye.
I didn't wanna say it before I read that, but Peek is a freak. In a good way!
There is at least some anecdotal evidence that some savants can factor very large numbers very quickly, i.e. within seconds. This could potentially be faster than results obtained with modern computing. Since factoring efficiency is dependant on algorithm efficiency as well as hardware power, it's conceivable that some human minds contain more efficient algorithms than available for digital computing.
"Or did I just blow your fucking mind?"
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They said he speaks lithuanian, but he loves the estonian language. In Finnish, paiva is Day, and I'm guessing in Estonian paive is probable the same thing, so it seems as though he is constructing a new language out of the parts of others, and working on verb forms? Let's hope he's making it easier - Icelandic and Estonian have enough crazy endings (from an American perspective anyway).
Could we prove P = NP with then?
That would be really interesting and would be a major break in the theoretical computer science.
But in reply to your comment, perhaps there already are many working for the NSA. It appears that from the Silberman article, there is a predominance of those with Asperger's syndrome attracted to the tech field, hence a localized concentration of them in Silicon Valley (and perhaps higher cases of new diagnoses in children, because after all, there is a hereditary component).
Linux at home
An average of all human behavior that exists?
Then it is obvious: "normal" is only a straight line that everyone deviates from!
Now that I have gotten your attention. Just shut off the part of the brain that thinks about sex, and we would all be savants!
Jerry Newport is a mathematical savant who has been able to talk about his abilities for a long time, and he has described talking to other savants so they must exist. He wrote a book called _Your Life Is Not A Label_ in which he devoted some space to the discussion of savant skills. Donna Williams, an autistic woman, has also described savant or savant-like abilities, for instance never sculpting and then the first time she took a sculpting class, being able to create expert-level detailed life-sized sculptures. She describes in some of her books what she believes the basis for these seemingly out-of-nowhere talents to be. I have known a few autistic people who are instant calculators or other kinds of savants and perfectly able to describe and talk about this. I know this person is not the only autistic savant to describe his abilities, so I have to wonder if he's more the only one certain aspects of the media could find who wanted to talk to them. Similar to how when Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay wrote a book relatively recently, it was hailed as the first book by a non-speaking autistic person, when in fact there had been several before him and the first book by any autistic person (who disclosed their autism at any rate) was by a person with a story very similar to Tito's.
He can speak a language he invented!
So can I, actually. Ooga booga jiggity jiggity.
Perfect pitch is another thing that some have. Not really autistic, but it's freaky if you know someone who has it. Ask them for an Eb, and they will hum it for you, etc.
I think you are making a false distinction. If I were to ask you to add 5+4 in your head, would you do something consciously to come up with the answer or would the answer just pop out of your mouth? I think it would be the latter. Now, if I asked you to solve some algebra problem, you might right out a couple steps on a piece of paper. But, this is really a memory technique isn't it? What to do between the steps still just pops out. People who are good at math tend to have good intuition when it comes to numbers. They can make bigger leaps without breaking things into steps. I remember in 8th grade, I had a math teacher who would give me on C on any test on which I didn't write down just one step. This drove me mad, because, of course, I would just look at the problems and know the answer, and she could not possibly understand this. Would you argue that I am not better at math because of my intuition? The deep secret about human intelligence is that it is all intuitive. Language is the perfect example. As you said, you can't say why something sounds wrong, it just does. You rarely think about a sentence before you say it. It just pops out.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Christians know from the Great Flood that God's favorite way to indiscriminately kill enormous swaths of children is by drowning them...
Interesting... Americans do it by eliminating sources of clean drinking water.
Being nice to someone and smiling when you can. It tends to brighten up a lot of people either genuinely or making them feel awkward for being rude toward you because others will look down on them. That's why the Bible tells you to love your enemies: the love will either help God make a good person out of them or show to the world the evil in the person and the righteousness in the believer and God who love them.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
So I could speak 2 languages if one is a language that I created? How does that work?
"Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation." - Richard Feynman
When you use the framebuffer memory to do ordinary calculations, seemingly random crap will appear on the screen when the program is run, and the answer will technically appear as an image as well.
If we think of our brains as highly sophisticated computers, it makes sense that somewhere inside exists the "circuitry" to do complex calulations like a computer in the blink of an eye, however, we somehow can't accesse these mechanisms, as hypothesized somewhere in the article. Perhaps (I'm just taking a random stab here) something happened to these people where some of the "wiring" of their brains got messed up so that they can actually use different parts of their brain. These "images" might not have anything "intrinsic", but might just be the effect of something else, like the example above.
... someone help me tie my shoes.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
To be fair, the brain isn't doing all that calculus. It uses fluid in your ear to balance your self. Just like you would balance a cup of water: If the water is too close to the edge, tilt the other way. It's not that you know the math behind it, but that you have learnt from experience. In fact, you have so much experience that you would not have to think about balancing your self or the cup. It's not really calculus, but memorization that leads to a shortcut around the hard math. I believe this is the same thing savants do. For some reason they have the ability to memorize lots of info. I think he somehow memorized the multiplication table up to very large numbers. His brain damage lets him create images out of everything (which isn't all that special, crossing of senses affects many people that aren't super intelligent)
Wow, that's quite a leap. Let me start off by saying that my goal is only to analyze this a bit and not attack you.
First, the nuclear family is a relatively modern concept in the grand scheme of Humanity's history. Second, how is a nuclear family more stable, than say, the larger extended family of your village, which is a more traditional family structure? Third, if the nuclear family is so "stable" why is it that we have a 60% divorce rate, lots of domestic violence, and other seriously family issues in this country? I can honestly say that I have yet to encounter a "stable" nuclear family. Fourth (I am going to make a leap of my own and delve into what I think you're implying), if nuclear families are so effective at raising quality individuals, why are advocates of nuclear families always complaining about social decay in a country where nuclear families are ubiquitous?
I cannot comprehend how so many people can advocate this family structure so adamantly. Where is the evidence?
Why bother.
I find the concept of the Savant to be fascinating. It's like someone's showing us, in small fragments, what we're really capable of. All of those amazing things are possible in the human mind, yet our limitations hold us back from it. It's incredible.
-Vendal Thornheart
Daniel Tammet's web site is here and looks quite nicely done.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I hate "showing my work" also. For a lot of that though, I do steps in my head, but I don't feel like writing them down.
For some reason I've always seen channels 1-10 in a straight left-to-right line, things curve upwards until about 15, and keep curving until they're a right to left line at about 25. By 30 they've curved straight up, and about 37 - 42 they make a quick left turn to be right to left again. After about 44 they make a slight 30 degree turn upwards, and continue to curve upwards somewhat though never above 70 degrees. Once you reach the audio - only programming channels, like the streaming christmas music channel, they head straight up.
I've never been able to explain exactly how this physical relationship formed in my mind, but it has been embedded in there for some time now, and doesn't seem likely to go away.
Ironically, I don't really watch television anymore.
The ______ Agenda
A relative of mine is such a savant. If he ever hears a phone number once in his life, he'll never forget it. Same with anything, license plates, credit card numbers, winning lottery numbers, etc. etc. whatever.
It's sort of impressive, but it's also a horrible condition. I'd rather lack that ability and at least be more able to function normally in the world. He's still a great person but obviously life is much more difficult for him.
Indeed, I have always been quite a horrendous student when it comes to language, even English, classes, but I understand if something "feels correct." I can't necessarily do it consciously; I don't think it out. It merely happens. I write poetry, which occasionally garners a compliment, but it's really no special work on my part.
Can you say, Alien Hybrid ? I thought so.
Nowhere have I been able to find a citation or clear reference to the paper that Snyder presumably was (going to?) publish about this TMS-creativity connection. The closest I find is his own page. This page is somewhat telling in my mind of the level of "seriousness" of this research. One would think from the "Autistic genius? Nature, 1 April 2004, by Allan Snyder" pseudo-citation that Mr. Snyder had an article published in Nature, but closer examination shows it to be a book review (follow the link to the pdf on the page above and see for yourself).
/ apr/01_snyder.shtml.
On the other hand it appears that he at least exists, and that his story is not fabricated from whole cloth: http://www.usyd.edu/news/newsevents/articles/2004
Finally, in reference to the Guardian article, I find the parroting of autistic savant folklore such as the tale of the savant able to play Tchaik 1 without having taken a piano lesson (or touched a piano depending on the retelling) extremely galling. Playing a piano concerto depends on technique, muscle memory, and many other things besides pure mental contortion. To think that someone who has never played scales would be able to wrap their untrained fingers around a concerto of non-negligible complexity is positively ridiculous in my mind. I suspect that the story arose as a vast but innocent exaggeration initially and has taken up a life of its own through repeated retellings by reporters too lazy to check the source material of their stories.
I do not know alot about savants but it seems to me that people who are able to instinctively perform arithmetic operations quickly suggest that mathematics is innate in humans, and possibly in nature, instead of being purely invented. Can anyone offer any further insite into this?
Yes. Tammet is GAY! Get over it.
In Virtually Normal, Andrew Sullivan writes that the Story of Soddom and Gamorrah was a tale about lack of hospitality rather than sex. Biblical scholars such as John Boswell, et al., have drawn similar conclusions after studying the original texts.
If God is infallible, then everything he makes must be good. God created homosexuals.
The primary biblical argument used today against homosexuality is that such a union cannot procreate. Yet we do not condemn male/female couples who are unable to produce children or those who have no desire. This singles out one group against all others. The Old Testament goes as far as condemning masturbation yet 97% of you males out there practice it regularly. That too is a mortal sin.
So we enter moral relativism where we humans rank the various sins against one another. As others have argued, Christians can pretty much ignore Leviticus because that comes from the Old Testament. Yet Jesus makes no mention of homosexuals in the four Gospels. He does spend a lot of time with the outcasts and chastises those who want to throw stones. He chastises the Rabbis who openly preach on the street corners. He has nothing to say about homosexuality.
In my conversations with Christians, I have found that nearly all believe it is more important to take the oath of accepting Jesus Christ than to live a "Christian life." In other words, what I say is more important than what I do. What a strange way to live one's life.
signature pending slashdot approval
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
This guy makes me pround of being human ;-).
I want to recommend Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark. It's sci fi (good /. tie-in), but actually draws on the author's own experience as the parent of an autistic child. Apart from the sci fi plot, which is decent, there are many insights into the thought processes of people with autism. It seems quite consistent with the Guardian article, and is based on current research that the author read about.
The sci fi classic, which is OT for this thread but will be of interest for folks thinking of how to "cure" mental "disabilities," is Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon. It's the diary of a man who starts with a very low IQ, but then is given a medical treatment to "cure" him. A control subject, a mouse named Algernon, is given a similar treatment. The diary follows his vastly increasing intelligence, but then complications set in. A movie called "Charly" was based on the book. Sci fi buffs, and other folks interested in these topics: these titles are highly recommended!
language he is "creating" is pure estonian language. At least those words in article were all same.
Did you even see Rainman before modding this post?
It was about an autistic guy... one of the things he says about 8 or 9 times (as a total non sequiter) is "I'm a very good driver."
F&%$#king moderators on crack.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
In other words, we don't know how our brains work.
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
I have synesthesia, and as a child I thought it was normal until I realized other people didn't see numbers and letters as colours. I believe synesthesia can link any kind of sensory input to abstract forms like letters and numbers, but in my case (and in most), it's simple colours. This makes it easy for me to remember trivial information like phone numbers, account numbers, historical dates, and pi (2.141592653589 is how far I remember without looking it up). Every string of numbers and letters forms a composite colour based on those of its individual characters. I've studied Japanese for a few years and now find that Japanese syllable characters also have colours for me now. I imagine that with extreme synesthesia, a person might understand abstract notions like numbers and math in a completely different way. I remember once showing my sister two Smarties (they're like M&Ms) and telling her they were "3" and "6" instead of yellow and green. It took me a moment to realize why she didn't understand.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
[no text]
I understood completely what the article was describing because to some (very much lesser) extent, I "see" math too. When I'm doing arithmetic, for example, the best way I can think to describe it is that it's like fitting together tetris pieces. It's the way that my brain visualizes the abstract concepts behind the numbers. I can sort of describe my thought processes when it comes to arithmetic, but as you get into increasingly complicated higher mathematics, I can still "see" it but there is no way that I can describe it in any way that people who don't think that way can understand.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
I doubt the brain models the trajectory as a differential equation.
><////>
Not for his abilities, but for the beautiful, peaceful-sounding world he lives in. To most of us, numbers are either an obstacle or a challenge or work or whatever. To him they're his friends. That's so unique. I envy him.
Don't forget the language genius. This guy seems a lot like somenone who might have been one of the inventors of Qabbala and influenced Judaic mysticism. There is no reason to expect that people of his kind weren't around back then.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
This language he is creating is Estonian or Finnish.
I'd prefer produce bug-free code unconsciously. Or at least compile to assembler.
Having a large vocabulary has nothing to do with the difference between a technical understanding of a language's grammatical structure (diagramming a sentence) and an innate understanding of the language structure, where you simply look at a sentence and *know* what needs to change, and why it needs to change. I share GP's view towards this; I can barely tell you the difference between the subject and the object of a sentence, but have always been able to write properly, and to do proofreading and editing to a standard acceptable for anything up to a full journal. I don't know if my standard is good enough for a journal, not having submitted anything to one, but I suspect it is.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
you sat down and made numbers your friends?
In the way he describes it, though, there are clues. We know, for example, that when you imagine yourself seeing some object, there are visual areas and connected "meaning" areas of the brain that will fire simultaneously, just as if you were actually looking at that thing.
Now that we know he's visualizing something, we can know which parts of the brain to pay special attention to. The way the visual centers of the brain fire, and what fires with them, will show us the physical connections that make this possible. And possibly give us a hint as to what connections in the "normal" brain are suboptimal.
And, just maybe, give us an idea as to how we can engineer it so everyone's brains are optimized. Provided we can figure out how to do it without breaking the shoe tying ability.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The point of this story is that modern medicine may develop a basis for understanding savantism and then maybe autism. The real goal with this guy is to get him to write a diary, so shrinks can pick his brain. This guy may be the greatest discovery made by psychology ever. And it seems to have been completely missed by everyone here on /.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
And why do you think that they already don't have all decryption algorithms they will ever need for the foreseeable future?
No, if you want to know the original meaning of ancient texts, you need to find at LEAST two copies of the earliest copies available, and learn as much as you can about the ancient languages they're written in. Then, you throw out anything they don't agree on, or interpolate the original text from the derivatives. Anything else is doomed to be someone else's interpretation, and even that is only a guide at best.
If you can't go back to the original texts, the best advice I've heard is to obtain twenty different translations and read them all to get a sense of the original.
KJV is quite famous for political and moral reinterpretation, if I recall correctly.
...but it looks like his language "Manti" has the same exact structure as Finish.
Mänti - Estonian - English
Mänti - Mänd - Evergreen Tree
Ema - Ema - Mother
Päike - Päike - Sun
päive - päev - Day
Not too much of a breakthrough
I find it interesting that the TMS device can shut down parts of a person's brain, and make some other part more active, leading to behavior that looks like autism or "autistic-savantism". This seems to imply that there are parts of the brain that can be switched on or off. (Beats Windoze, where shutting off a part leads to the blue screen of death.) So what if you took a autistic person and switched off the autistic part? (Perhaps for 2 hours a day over a period of months.) Would that strengthen the other parts over time?
The human brain seems to compensate; if one thing is broken, some other part takes over, but the new part can't really do the job perfectly. But it tries. So if a person is blind, his/her hearing improves to compensate. Perhaps autism is a matter of one part of the brain being strengthened at the expense of other parts. (This seems to be born out by some of the posters saying that a blow to the head can make one autistic.)
So maybe a partial answer is to say that a part of your brain is damaged, another part is taking over, but we'll shut down that other part so that the original part is pressed to recover. It might be something like the need for physical therapy to cause a person to relearn how to use a limb after a bad accident (even when the therapy is painful.)
Not that I know squat about any of this stuff, but TMS seems like a very interesting tool that should be thoroughly explored, not just on "normal" people but on people with some form of brain damage as well.
Altogether an interesting thread. Lots of thoughtful comments.
I think you're generally on the right track, but from what I understand the brain isn't a Von Neumann machine. It's "programmable", in a way, but it's not programmable in the sense of having fixed hardware and being able to load software that the hardware then executes. Instead, it's more like the really, really old computers where "programming" the computer meant taking it apart and rewiring it to perform some other purpose.
As I understand it, the way the brain works is that it is able dedicate a small portion of itself to a specific task. In effect, things that you learn to do unconsciously are all small portions that are implemented in hardware. It's somewhat like if you were the government of a new, uninhabited territory. The land would be empty, but as people came to you with requests for lands for things, you could dole out parcels as you saw fit and they could develop them. I think the brain has parts that are not yet programmed, and it doles them out as it realizes the need to implement something in hardware.
So, what I'm getting at here is that it seems there must be something that regulates that process. Some things are worth dedicating hardware too. Some things are not. Surely there is some mechanism that allows the brain to react to something and figure out whether dedicated neural pathways need to be formed, and if so, what kinds of resources it needs to devote to the problem.
I am going out on a limb here, but it almost seems to me that autism (especially autistic savants) have an irregularity with how the allocation and prioritization works. They obsess about one thing (or 10 things), and there seems to be this runaway process where the brain just devotes huge amounts of space to that thing. Then something else (like telling left from right) would be considered high priority by most people, but an autistic person's brain may decide not to focus on it, and not to form any neural pathways to creating a way of dealing with that problem.
The one thing that confuses me, though, is why it seems so common for emotional stuff and human interaction to be the thing that autistics can't handle. One possible explanation is that these are so complicated that to master them may require basic competency in 25 different areas. But the autistic brain may have devoted 0.01% of the necessary resources to some of those 25 areas, and 10000% of the necessary resources to other areas. If so, the 0.01% areas would be the weakest link in the chain, and human interaction would become difficult and frustrating. Of course, this last paragraph especially is just wild speculation.
It seems a basic feature about the existing memory techniques is that the things to remember are embedded in something richer(visually, spatially).
For example there is an old technique of visualizing a building with decorated rooms, where you place the data to remember.
With mindmaps, added colors and illustrations make remembering easier.
So 'Richer' does not mean "oh no, more things to remember!". It makes remembering easier. For anyone.
I suspect part of what Tammer does is natural ability, and part is natural ability allowing him to discover by himself what can also be taught to others.
Frances Yates' book
The Art of Memory
describes the history of methodologies of memory, from the Romans(when written records were still rare, trained memory was precious, and the training was fairly common good) till beginning of 18th century.
In modern day education, "learning by heart" has become unpopular.
True, it's much less needed, but maybe it would be worthwile to separate technique from the content, and have schools only teach technique. I think in recent times, only content was taught.
I always hate when people spice things up... Here is the list...
> Interesting... Americans do it by eliminating
> sources of clean drinking water.
Interesting... Europeans do it by standing around while genocide occurs, or by comitting the genocide themselves, or by allowing at least 10 billion dollars of "food for oil" mercy money to instead line the pockets of a murderous dictator, which is to say, help prop him up instead of buying food and medicine, said lack which, umm, leads to death of children.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
there are several problems with your post:
1) you're wrong; the sentence in question isn't a run-on;
2) your construct, "a well-thought post," is bogus ("well-thought-out" would have worked);
3) you misspelled "genius";
4) you failed to observe any of the several actual errors in the parent post (for example, the incorrect capitalization of the word "he" in the second sentence of the last paragraph);
5) the sentence, "However, I would wager my grammar to be better than yours" is grammatically weak (better: "I would nevertheless wager that my grammar is better than yours");
6) the comma after the word "but" is extraneous.
there are further errors and questionable usages in your post, but my point is made, so i leave them as an exercise.
you (baselessly) accuse the original poster of wanting to show off, but the truth is that it's you yourself who is guilty of that transgression. read your post again! consider: you actually wrote to a public forum to say "mine is better than yours." that sort of puerile and unproductive nonsense (which usually arises as a consequence of the speaker's insecurity and need to prove something) is better suited to a kindergarten playground than to slashdot. please refrain from posting unless you have something constructive to add. better yourself!
p.s. to nip your likely defensive responses in the bud:
1) don't try to claim that i've violated my own edict. *this* post *is* constructive; i'm trying to reason with you in order to prevent you wasting peoples' time and thus improve their quality of life;
2) don't waste any effort attacking the lack of capitalization in this post. it's not an error; it's a deliberate choice.
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at Cambridge University, is interested in what Mänti might teach us about savant ability.
Anyone know if this guy is a relation to Ali-G ? (Sacha Baron-Cohen) who also went to cambridge.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
These all seem to be Estonian words (my mother tongue) with small misspellings that may have been created by trying to apply finnish grammar to estonian root nouns.
:P
The words mentioned, in English, Estonian and Finnish:
Pine, Mänd, Mänty
Day, Päev, Päivä
Sun, Päike, Aurinko
Mother, Ema, Äiti
Life, Elu, Eläma
Oak, Tamm, Tammi
I believe I have the finnish words correct but hope to be corrected if there is misspellings in there.
As to what this guy is doing, only a true masochist would be learning Estonian of his own free will. It has a very complex grammar with very obscure rules, Im not sure how we manage to learn it ourselves
As a warning example: estonian nouns can have 14 different forms(cases) represented by suffixes added to word root. To make the matters nore difficult, those suffixes vary for same case, for different words.
Quick google turned out this page with following example:
1: Nominative (nimetav): kirik 'a church'
2: Genitive (omastav): kiriku 'of a church'
3: Partitive (osastav): kiriku-t 'a church'
4: Illative (sisseütlev): kiriku-sse 'into a church'
5: Inessive (seesütlev): kiriku-s 'in a church'
6: Elative (seestütlev): kiriku-st 'out of a church'
7: Allative (alaleütlev): kiriku-le '(on)to a church'
8: Adessive (alalütlev): kiriku-l 'on a church'
9: Ablative (alaltütlev): kiriku-lt 'from a church'
10: Translative (saav): kiriku-ks '(change) into a church'
11: Essive (olev): kiriku-na 'as a church'
12: Terminative (rajav): kiriku-ni 'up to a church'
13: Abessive (ilmaütlev): kiriku-ta 'without a church'
14: Comitative (kaasaütlev): kiriku-ga 'with a church'
But if this guy actually manages to come out with a simplified, reasonable grammar for Estonian, I would think it a Good Thing and be very interested.
Found his page about the language too. Its from 2001 though so it may have changed a lot. The language described there seems to be heavily based on Finnish indeed.
I agree. It's like having access to inner private parameters of an object/class that's normally not exposed publicly.
It is likely that people actually know exactly how many objects they see e.g. walk into a room and know instantly how many chairs there are.
However that info is abstracted away under layers and layers of abstraction - e.g. one, two, many, dozens, hundreds, thousands, enough, not enough - after all most people spot desks without chairs quite quickly, this is not necessarily such an easy thing.
These abstractions were probably very useful millenia ago. There's no point knowing that there are 23312 wildebeest on the plain if you don't even have a number system, much less express it to someone who doesn't. Just have to give the appropriate grunt(s) or clicks.
And these abstractions probably allow us to avoid the detail and focus on the big picture - the guy has problems going to the supermarket or the beach.
Even if you can count the number of hairs on a lioness instantly, I doubt the lioness bothers remembering how many bites of meat you make up - it's probably "enough for me and cubs, or need one more".
I suspect some of these people would be troubled and have difficult working if you gave them 1001 bolts and only 1000 nuts and told them to fasten stuff together. Most normal people won't even notice till the last one, and then they'll just shrug and go whatever...
Modern software can easily count how many light and dark pixels there are in picture. It has difficulty seeing how many chairs. But soon programs will count X chairs of type A, Y chairs of type B etc, but the next step then is "few, many, enough, not enough".
God is love and that's all there is.
If Love is all there is, there can be no opposite.
It is only our illusion that we are separate from God or that we are alone. In reality, we are one with God and we are loved.
Don't tell this to the Gov't though, or they will call you a Commune and the ATF will destroy you. Remember Waco? Take mushrooms, folks and squeegee your Third F***ing Eye.
Peace out.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
From the wikipedia definition:
"An autistic savant (formerly called idiot savant) is a person who expresses extraordinary mental abilities, often in the fields of numerical calculation (not to be confused with mathematics)"
From the Guardian article:
" Ever since the age of three, when he suffered an epileptic fit, Tammet has been obsessed with counting. Now he is 26, and a mathematical genius who can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places"
Sigh....
Sometimes I wonder what people think when I tell them I study mathematics.Do they assume I sit in an office multiplying large numbers together all day?
It's a shame there's so much ignorance about what mathematicians really do. There could be so much more interest in the field otherwise.
don't waste any effort attacking the lack of capitalization in this post. it's not an error; it's a deliberate choice.
Is it not possible that the author of the grandparent post is making a deliberate choice to flaunt certain grammar/spelling rules, just as you have?
Only in the UK would they tax having a fucking PLUG pre-wired on electrical appliances. Is it a third world country?
It's a bit late to answer this, but what the hell. You have greatly misunderstood the nature of spectrum disorders. Autism, like many neurological or psychological conditions, is a spectrum disorder -- it ranges (possibly continuously) from severe to normal, and there are probably multiple factors (perhaps most genetic, perhaps not) involved. With any spectrum disorder, people who are near the normal end of the spectrum are just a little different from the norm, and those differences present as personality quirks (the same being true for mood disorders, schizoaffective disorder, and possibly many of DSM-IV Axis II disorders). Kids show different personalities from a very early age; where do you think those come from anyway, if not differences in how we're wired up? I also think you overestimate psychologists. Until we have some sort of physiological test -- a genetic test, brain scan, whatever -- that can objectively determine who has a particular condition and who does not, it's all subjective anyhow. While a psychologist or neurologist is certainly better educated and has more experience, and thus in a better position to say who might have Asperger's syndrome than a layperson, they're still making a judgement call, one which other psychologists may disagree with when the patient is close to the normal end of the spectrum. Are geeks towards on the Autism/Apserger's spectrum? I certainly don't know. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be the case -- for example, discomfort with, and avoidance of, socialization is sometimes a response to innately poor ability. But my personal feeling, having known several people with Aspserger's syndrome when I was a mathematics major, is that most geeks probably aren't; the most obvious difference I noted was humor (much geek humor delights in playing with ambiguity, blurred levels of abstraction, and metaphor, and the people I knew with Asperger's syndrome were poor at those). However, I do think it's possible that if, say, genetic (or developmental, or whatever) conditions C1, C2, ..., Cn are necessary for Autism spectrum disorders, some subset of these conditions, perhaps with other conditions, may contribute to geekiness.
Oh, and frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of all the "victim victimhood", myself, and I hear a lot more bleating from people whining about how we've become such a victim society than I do from any of the supposed "victims". There's nothing wrong with wanting to understand one's nature, one's strengths and weaknesses. Doing so is NOT the same thing as expecting special treatment. I'd be delighted, for example, if I could see a "road map" of my own neuropsychological development, and know where and how the elements of my personality arose, because it would make it easier for me to work on changing (or compensating for) those elements if I saw fit to do so.
For example, I'm mildly bipolar -- diagnosed as such by several gen-yoo-wine psychologists. I've never gone completely off the deep end, and I've never understood that annoying, narcissistic addiction to hypomania some bipolars have that makes them regularly go off mood stabilizers and act like fools, but it's still had profound impact on my life. I don't generally tell people about it in real life unless they ask or it's topical, and I certainly don't expect any special treatment (or a get-out-of-jail free card when I fuck up) either. From my perspective, it's just an element of my personality, and I deal with it like any other element. Does it occasionally make life difficult? Sure, but we all have burdens to bear and I know plenty of people in much worse shape than I. But knowing a major contributing factor to my behaviour and personality has been enormously useful to me, so I'd appreciate it if people would stop crying "poor me, I'm surrounded by victims" every time someone speculates about contributing factors to personality.
The post was ontopic. You obviously haven't seen Rainman. Don't mod a post down just because you don't understand it.
Some people can tell what makes a hit single and what doesn't (not necessarily that they can make one).
HOWEVER, there is no guarantee that their "hit single" sense will be as good as it is, or be consistent. Who knows how reliable your math intuition is?
As such corporates are always looking for ways to quantify such stuff.
The danger is that they will miss entirely new and cool stuff - since if they are mapping human tastes, it is unlikely to be that accurate - accurate enough to make a profit, but subpar enough to possibly set back discovery of new stuff for a long time.
BUT calculator and computer stuff like what these savants are doing are often quite easily defined and narrow in scope, so rather than depend on the vagaries of perishable neurons, for these tasks I'd prefer to depend on the likes of Casio, AMD et all.
Thus if you want savant skills, rather than risking brain damage, you'd be better off waiting for wearable/implantable computers AND extra auxiliary senses/inputs and outputs. You'd have video+audio memory, telepathy and possibly a form of telekinesis (if a room/area is suitably enabled). ( Gun muzzle recognition might be very useful for soldiers, so would be instant triangulation of shots).
But the more human stuff is likely to still remain a core competency.
Regarding the cavant from Kent, I'd love it if he would write a book called "genius math for the non-autistic" or "Math: a study in art." If this guy could capture what he is talking about with the colors, sounds, and patterns, enough to teach, think of the amazing gift that would be. We could rid ourselves of these evil computers and think for ourselves. Until then, I continue to feed at the trough of Slashdot.
My "Savant" ability relates to 3 dimensional puzzles. I can disassemble, reassemble and reverse engineer any mechanical or electrical system. For me this is natural. I just "See" how things go together.
But people are a whole 'nother story. Basic human interaction is this ultra complex unsolvable puzzle. It's like the box and half the pieces are missing, the image has faded, and the cardboard is falling apart.
It just doesn't make any sense.
The only way I can deal with this is to build these immense mental lists of human interaction protocol.
Things like: Smile; look people in the eye 1/3 of the time during conversation; do not over obsess with people or objects; intonate voice, do not scream in public, etc.
"Is it not possible that the author of the grandparent post is making a deliberate choice to flaunt certain grammar/spelling rules, just as you have?"
firstly, my post didn't "flaunt" any grammar or spelling rules; the issue in question is capitalization, which falls under the aegis of neither grammar nor spelling. secondly, it is certainly *possible* that the errors i pointed out were deliberate, but i think it's very unlikely; there was no indication to that effect. it's also *possible* that a cat knocked over a jar of marbles onto the poster's keyboard, resulting in the post; i think you'll agree, though, that the likelihood of that approaches zero. furthermore, even if we stipulate that his errors *were* deliberate, what end would be served? what would be achieved?
i believe that my interpretation of the post to which i replied is by far the most likely one, and therefore stand by it.
When people use the word "redneck", they are talking about someone with problems.
I completely agree... it was wonderfully written, and nothing was made of it in the article, very, very nice.
What I am saddened to see is that the first few screens worth of comments on this article became discussion about homosexuality and autism and then religion and homosexuality...
so sad.
I wish you well in your hunt for a partner... and hey, as a question, did you leave the church because of its stance on homosexuality, or completely unrelated issues. (I guess I just find it odd how gays can go to church considering how much hatred and anger the church has dolled out to them...)
A strong part of being a savant - or being autistic for that matter - seems to be about being obsessive with details. Quote from the article:
"Tammet has never been able to work 9 to 5. It would be too difficult to fit around his daily routine. For instance, he has to drink his cups of tea at exactly the same time every day. Things have to happen in the same order: he always brushes his teeth before he has his shower. "I have tried to be more flexible, but I always end up feeling more uncomfortable. Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work.""
I'm wondering what, for him, constitutes a habit. How's a habit formed? What kind of granularity is involved? If he can't follow a habit for whatever reason, what effect does it have on him and the special abilities he has, on top of the probable (and indeed confirmed) uncomfortable feeling?
The best thing christian church can do for the society is to immediately expel all the sinners. Surely someone who drops his seed to the ground should never be allowed to have a holy communion. And deadly sins of gluttony and sloth should lead to expulsion after several attempts to get one to repent and mend his ways. Jesus himself only hung around with virtuous people and told sinners to get lost and never be saved.
In the meantime, we can take the newly liberated minds into our fold and really work on getting more "blue" votes next time.
Because I hate Gays. So what? Have you seen Levitivus 18:22? I mean, I'm not a Christian but I am willin to belive that all those *gay* bishops are!
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
They are illogical
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
Same question. Answer me!!
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
What othe rdog? You know I suspect that you're just completely nuts. (Not that thats a bad thing) (Not that I'm complementing you.)
. . . Eyosgii thinks thus.
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
Yep, I hear it's much more clear in the original Klingon.
A gay Christian genius... Something doesn't add up.
"Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity."
This would seem to open a giant chasm in the belief that symbolic language (conventionally conceived as words and numbers) is a precursor to human-level intelligence.
This could re-write what we think we know about language, intelligence, and possibly our "uniqueness" at the "top" of the brain pyramid.
Those words that are said to be of his own invented language resemble very much words in Estonian and Finnish languages (whiach are very related). His word Estonian Finnish English Mänti Mänd Mänty Pine tree Ema Ema Äiti Mother Ela Elu Elämä Life Päike Päike Aurinko Sun Päive Päev Päivä Day I guess he has invented the language, but read an Estonian vocabulary once. Estonian and Lithuanian do not much resemble each other.
What I would like to know is if he can use this 'ability' only with decimals- or for instance binary too?
The question seems interesting because the answers seem to be simply emerging from his head...
Sweet!
I love the bible. Now if only it had said something about the woman not being able to speak without being spoken to. Only then would a country under Biblical Law be perfect.
Well there you have it husbands, the only way to get away from your nagging wife is to attend Church. Maybe this is why that passage was included in the first place, kind of like a PR move to get more tithing husbands in the pews!
"Are you sick of your wife? Sure, we all are. But for pennies a day you can get some respite from that braying bitch: Just come on down to the Holy Church of Christ!"
And for the record, the punishments recorded in the bible for "shaving your beard" and "blending fabrics" is not death at all.
I'll just add that from the Jewish tradition, the prohibitions on these activities are much more detailed and complex than the simple translations here imply. Many ways of shaving one's beard are acceptable, and blending most any combination of fabrics is perfectly permissible; it is only the specific cases (detailed elsewhere) that are circumscribed.
And for the astute Slashdot crowd, no, there is no prohibition on women shaving their faces. ;-)
"Software is either testable or detestable."
Lets see what he can do on acid. Or maybe mushrooms to start with and we could work up to higher doses.