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."

Comments

Re:It makes one wonder....

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Resume Puzzle

[jd]

She could apply to the NSA as a code-breaker. Many of the better code-breakers in history were experts or idiot-savants who "specialized" in the structure of information. Indeed, in the war, Bletchley Park (the UK's code-breaking center) used puzzles to identify people they wanted to interview for such jobs.

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.

Re:Resume Puzzle

[typhoonius]

"Idiot" was once a legitimate medical term:

A person of profound mental retardation having a mental age below three years and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers. The term belongs to a classification system no longer in use and is now considered offensive.

Likewise, "idiot savant" was the original term for what is now "autistic savant" (although, as someone on the Wikipedia talk page points out, "less than half of all savants are autistic").

In any case, I doubt the grandparent intended to offend. The worst you can say is that he hasn't kept up on his political correctness.

Re:homosexuality

[$raim_n_reezn!]

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.