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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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_savant
FTA:
"Scans of the brains of autistic savants suggest that the right hemisphere might be compensating for damage in the left hemisphere. While many savants struggle with language and comprehension (skills associated primarily with the left hemisphere), they often have amazing skills in mathematics and memory (primarily right hemisphere skills)."
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!"Mathmatics and programming?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
It's sad that we've created a society for ourselves in which the overriding concern is work and making money. In a world where farmers are going bankrupt because it's so cheap to make food, do we really need to worry what a person looks like in the context of a resume??
Yes, this is a little unspoken crisis in my family. One of us three older non-autistic siblings is going to have to take care of her in a few decades when our parents are no longer around, and although nobody's said anything, it's obvious that nobody wants to be that sibling. This sounds heartless, but if you spent an hour with her you'd understand- she's pleasant enough, but incoherent and unresponsive, so you never really feel like you know her even after you've met her. No one has any idea how employable she'll be when she's an adult (she's in her teens now), or how much of an independent life she'll be able to lead. Right now she's a handful and requires close adult supervision at all times unless a jigsaw puzzle or a DVD player is around- she can't get involved in typical conversations that take place and will try to regain attention by turning off all the lights in the room and laughing at everyone in the darkness. Maybe she'll grow out of it. Right now it's pretty funny at family gatherings- I can tell my brother in law would like to strangle her from the way he groans when the lights go out, but he can't say anything.
She just got a yahoo email account. I should send her an email- she'll be thrilled. Maybe it's possible to have an email conversation with her. I don't even know.
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)
Bram Cohen is one...he seems to have integrated the "disease" into his life pretty well!
Aliens? There are people who do this. LSD causes a similar effect.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
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
I have no idea if you're already familiar with such research or if it'll be helpful at all, but I saw an interesting talk a week or so ago where the researcher mentioned therapeutic successes with autistic children playing with robots. I think the idea is that attempting to comprehend complex human emotional interactions is way too overwhelming, but trying to interact with more simple "emotions" from robots is easier and acts as a stepping stone to more complex understanding. Here are some interesting links:
http://www.neurodiversity.com/robotics.html
http://www.aurora-project.com/
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
yes, it counts. i understand him. it's based on estonian or finnish. in finnish:
mänty=pine tree
emo=mother (of animals, but can be a human too)
elo=living (noun)
päivä=day
and so on...
And I suppose you would know that because you are....autistic? That would explain your post.
To clarify myself, a shreder shreds papers into a piece narrow than 1/2-inch width, and since the blades are positioned regularly (as produced at the factory) the cuts have identical (to the limit of precision of a human eye, or even a ruler) width. That's what I mean by regular---even if they weren't the same width, since it would still be a straight-cut, no information can be gathered (not even if you were savant; not even if you are a supercomputer connected to the world's most high-res scanner) from the shape of the piece of paper.
Then, perhaps a savant, presumably a being of much superior ability than our own, could garner some information from what is actually written on the pieces and use those to match them? Not likely---as I said, the shape and size of the pieces is the barrier, not the amount of information to be procesed. I have no doubt of a talented savant's ability to remember exactly what (be it a picture, shape, fragments of a writing) is on each of one million pieces of paper---I only doubht his ability to collect them all by hand, in enough time to be of any use.
And, as I said, if it's only his extraordinary memory that will be useful, for all practical purposes, computers are better.
yes. What I'm saying is Ramanujan had savant abilities without the handicap. He produced amazing theorums though he didn't give proofs to many of them. Also he was apable of this such as determining extroadinarily complex properties of the number of a cab. Einstein didn't have such abilities. But Ramanujan, who claimed a godess made him smart, also had amazing computational abilities that one would have classified him as a savant.
not on a brain function level, reading, writing, speaking and listening all involve different brain areas. It's often quite frustrating to stroke patients who may lose the ability in one area and not others, imagine the frustration of knowing a word, being able to read it, to write it, able to spell it out loud, and to be able to make the sound in your mind, but not to be able to say it while knowing you can't.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'm not a christian anymore....but I used to be a pastor and taught a lot of bible studies in my time, so I think I might be able to help you here. When modern day christians talk about certain things they take most of their cue from the new testament, which (recursively) according to the same new testament is the substance of which the old testament was a shadow Heb 8. Paul is a focal point because he usually interpreted the old testament in his writings and tried to show what they foreshadowed. In Roman 1, he specifically counted homosexuality as one of the grieviances that the christian God had with certain generations. Hence the preoccupation of new testament christians with homosexuality as a perversion of 'Gods' original plan for relationships between man and woman. So while the practitioners of Judaism hold to a lot of the stuff in the old testament, christians are not bound by the literal text of the old testament. The 'spirit of the law' 1st of 2nd Corinthians chapter 3 talks about the danger of literally interpreting the law and instead advocates imbibing the spirit of the law instead. I hope I've been able to throw some light on these things. I might not be as coherent as I'd like to be but you have to blame that on my just having just woken up.
All straight things must come to a bend
Daniel Tammet's web site is here and looks quite nicely done.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
and we can't see when we misspell things.
I guess what I am trying to say is that there could be worse things: you could be dyslexic too. your sister could be severally downs syndrome and have congestive ht failure at 25.
she is no doubt something special in some wonderful light and i wish you luck in communicating with her. My experience has been puzzling and rather awe inspiring in reference to autistics. Oddly enough, does she have a pet? When I worked with this children's clinic the autistics that had pets that were their own (usually a dog or cat) they seemed better acclimated and better communicators. some also learned sign rather well. Just things to look into (sorry if this is redundant to your situation).
A google scholar search turns up a couple of items. This is the only one which seems to be a research publication by him:
Savant-like skills exposed in normal people by suppressing the left fronto-temporal lobe (Journal of Integrative Neuroscience, 2003)
Alas, I have no idea how reputable a journal the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience is.
I do agree that there may very well be some fishiness. Hopefully some more noted neuroscience will try replicating the experiments. Unfortunately, experiments of some sort are illegal (or at least difficult to get permission for) in the US; at least that's what I was informed when I looked into the possibility of trying to replicate the results.
The language that is described in the article ("Mänti"), is _extremely_ close to Estonian (or Finnish).
"Mänti" ("Mänd" in Estonian) is a pine. "Ema" means mother. The other words match too, only "päive" should be "päev", but that might be because of influences from Finnish "päiva".
Why create a new language, if it's nouns are directly from Estonian?
And "tamm" is oak in Estonia, not "Tammet". Tammet is a not-very-common surname.
What you may or may not realise, is that you are quoting a well known (fallacy?) from Boswell's book, Christianity, Social Tolerance & Homosexuality (1980)
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There are quite a few flaws in his argument, and therefore, flaws in your argument.
The fact is, if he was refering only to male prositutes, Paul would have used the word pornos (which was the word used at the time for male prostitutes), since that is related to the purchasing of sex.
Even if you know greek and hebrew, you will be unable to understand completely the words in the context of the times they were written.
If you do a Google Search for "Boswell Critique" you will find a lot of information regarding this.
Here is some text from http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/greek/boswell
Often the evidence about a word's meaning in a certain context is not conclusive but merely indicative. When the best and strongest evidence consistently points to the same conclusion, however, we can become more confident. In this case, the immediate context of the word arsenokoithV (arsenokoitês), all throughout the New Testament, its Septuagint parallels, and its usage among the Apostolic Fathers, like Polycarp, all point to a meaning of a homosexual and not a male prostitute. Boswell's general argument, apart from a facile consideration of the context, relies too much on the argument from silence and an egregious etymological analysis.
It is very important to note the context from the other parts of '1 Cor 6'.
Paul's message is not one of fear or hate, but rather joy and thankfullness for forgiveness; he goes on to say:
"But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." NIV.
The vocabulary sounded eerily like Finnish (or Estonian, which are closely related). In his language, "Ema" means "mother". In Finnish "mother" is "äiti", but if you are talking about animals, then it's "emä". In his language, "päive" is "day". In Finnish it's "päivä". Related to this: the name of his language is "Mänti". In Finnish, "Mäntti" means "moron"
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.