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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
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!"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)
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
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).