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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."
...if the savants' abilities are compensation for "ordinary" cognitive abilities.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
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!!
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.
I think that the visualizing of the numbers has little to do with it. His brain multiplies the numbers thanks to ihis brain being optimized for this type of operation, and gives him the answer. All the while, he is visualizing each number in the process. However, any shape or pattern or color can be assigned to each number and it would'nt change anything...
Theories...
I'm your huckleberry
I think of things like this all the time. So does everyone in my family. Maybe she'll have a career at NASA. I'd love to train her to be a little autistic DBA if she were to show an aptitude with computers. But right now she's still busy being a teenage girl (as in, not geeky), and I have a feeling that everyone with an autistic kid thinks this way. Look around- how many autistic people do you see working in computers? I see none where I work. Unless you count me- my mother insists I have Aspbergers and was just like her when I was growing up and that my sister will turn out just like me. (She does seem to have avoided the temporal lobe epilepsy that I picked up by her age, which is supposed to be an Aspberger's symptom.) But no one else shares my mother's optimism, and I don't recognize myself in my sister at all.
/. post I've ever written.
I think this is the saddest
Leviticus also states that eating meat on Fridays, shaving your beard and wearing blending fabrics are crimes punishable by death. Will you be casting the first stone?
A gay, churchgoing autistic savant in fact. That's a tough call for someone trying not to stand out.
As a gay, formerly-churchgoing, neurotic genius (i.e. a bit like like him but not as "out there"), I'm jealous that he has a boyfriend.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I think you are the one who doesn't read much. The parent's point was not the stoning, but rather the selective nature of the quote from Leviticus. If homosexuality and wearing blended fabrics are both sins with the same punishment (nevermind what it is), how do most Christians justify the picking and choosing of the ones that are most convenient or tolerable?
This was exactly my point. Leviticus is the "moral code" for the perfect Christian. No Christian I have *ever* met follows even a fraction of this code. So how can they justify taking one quote out of context and hold homosexuals to it absolutely? I say that if Christians want to make homosexuality an unforgiveable sin, they need to make every "abomination" in Leviticus an unforgiveable sin. It's only fair.
Many of the better code-breakers in history were experts or idiot-savants who "specialized" in the structure of information.
You know, I can put up with almost almost all the insults in this thread. That's what I would expect when a bunch of NTs get together and start talking about autism while totally ignorant on the subject. (The ones with autistic relatives may be slightly more clueful.)
But I'm not going to sit by while you toss around the term "idiot-savant".
Who died and made you Grand Lord Definer of Intelligence? To call an autistic person with savant abilities an "idiot-savant" is to call every autistic person without savant abilities just an "idiot".
Just to make it explicit:
1. Not every autistic person has savant abilities.
2. Not every autistic person is nonverbal.
3. Even the ones who *are* nonverbal are not the sort of basket-case you seem to think they are.
4. There are a lot of autistic adults out here who are quite capable of making ourselves understood, and we are sick of being spoken of in this slighting fashion.
That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program of ignorance, flamewars, and cheat-beating contests (otherwise known as "Slashdot.org").
(Oh, and one brief note to those posters with young autistic relatives: I'm sorry it's been tough for you. Believe me, it's no picnic for them, either. Try getting them a computer; keyboards are wonderful things. Don't despair; a significant portion of us *do* learn to communicate your way as we become adults. And don't go for the "dog-training" programs; trust me, they're bad juju...you'd be better off with acceptance, patience, and a degree of flexability.)
NOTICE: This notice will appear at the bottom of all my slashdot posts.
Actually, Leviticus is the moral code for the perfct Jew...there nothing Christian about the old testament...it is the historical/cultural text of the Jewish people...Christianity did not exist until thousands of years after Leviticus...I bet 99% percent of "Christians" don't even realize that they only reason the old testament ended up in the "bible" anyway was because a small group of people voted on it 300 years or so after Christ....oh, but i forgot, its god's word...well 51% of the guys in the meeting felt it was god's word
But there is some hope to be gained from others' examples. I have a friend with cerebral palsy whose pediatrician said he'd never be able to care for himself but is now a successful business owner and head of household, another friend with learning disabilities who's doing well handling repetitive tech-support calls, and a great aunt who was born cyanotic with multiple disabilities but has lived a rather full and rich life. My boyfriend, whose brain hemorrhage several years ago left him unable to care for himself (let alone hold down a job) has ended up as "a burden on the family", but they - and I - still value him for (to put it crudely) what's left of him. A step mother I expected nothing from turned out to be his greatest caregiver. (And I sure as hell didn't turn out like my family expected.)
My point I suppose is that things don't always turn out as badly as you fear they will, and you have to let every situation sort itself out as best as you can. There's no guarantee that everything will all work out, but then there's no guarantee that it won't. Work with that.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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Now go look that up in a few other translations. It is quite a bit different.
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.
1) Homosexuality only disrupts the nuclear family when said family or society deems it necessary to harm homosexuals. Many children are thorwn out of their homes for being gay without a second glance. In several states it is illegal for homosexuals to even try and have a family via adoption or fostering.
2) Homosexuality is not a vector for disease spread. The vector is massive ammounts of sexual activity without proper precautions (such as condoms, limiting partners [to a perferred one], and plain ignorance). I will not say that there are not a large number of sexually over active individuals and I will not condone actions which are well known to be stupid and dangerous, but just because a large portion of a population engages in a dangerous activity is no reason to attack this population en masse. There are no laws preventing smokers from adopting children or raising children they alreayd have, but there are similar rules against gays. While it is known that being around smoke and smoking is dangerous to your health and to the child's health, being around gays is not dangerous to the child or to the homosexual.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Oh I see. Because the NIV uses "you" instead of "ye", it's completely mistaken. What makes you think the KJV is any better? It too is just one translation, fallable as the others.
Just because it's OLD doesn't make it RIGHT.
Ahh modern religious interpretation. Mmmm, its like Burger King. Do it Your Way. Believe what you agree with, rationalize away what you don't. Contradict yourself at every turn because Your Way, made up by You, is somehow the Right Way. What a sickness to rather twist and distort, rewrite and reinterpret all just to uphold some fairytale. You'd do yourself a favor using logic and reason and just letting go of this man-made framework of control and self-pity.
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.
Interestingly, many Jews find this a confusing aspect of Christianity. "What do you mean there's 197 different versions? Which one is, you know, the *real* one?"
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.
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?
In all fairness, don't you think the same could be said for many (perhaps even the majority) of mental illnesses?
I'd say it's natural to be depressed every so often, but we still have such a thing as "clinical depression". I'd wager that lots of people falsely decide they need treatment/medication for their depression too, when they don't really have a mental problem.
Even defining an "alcoholic" seems to be rather difficult. I remember reading the list of "signs" back in school, and the running joke was that "Hey, we're almost ALL alcoholics and we didn't even know it!"
It seems to me, Aspergers is just a definition of extremely mild autism -- and the diagnostic criteria have to be broad, because it's nearly impossible to draw an absolute "line" as when this transcends "slightly geeky" and crosses over into the territory of an actual disease/illness.
Truth is, these things only become "problems" for an individual when they interfere with their daily lives to the point where they're unable to overcome them on their own.
So yeah - if you're simply not making an effort to overcome some problem you're having, then you're correct. It's time to stop with the excuses and time to take a little responsibility to change.
But I can certainly see value in parents being made aware that something like Asperger's exists. I'm pretty sure I have a touch of it myself, actually, but nobody ever brought it up as I was growing up. I struggled quite a bit with social skills and to some extent, with physical clumsiness. To this day, I have a habit of rocking back and forth in my chair while thinking, reading, or trying to work on a project, and I have a tendency to twiddle pens or pencils and so forth. I also tend to "hyper-focus" on specific problems or items of interest. I put up with a lot of teasing in school, until I got much of the way through high-school, and started making a real conscious effort to "fit in" and to succeed in being more "social" with other people.
To this day, I naturally want to avoid eye-contact with people when I talk to them, and I have to pretty much force myself not to do that (reminding myself each time about it).
I suspect that what I've really done over the years is teach myself how to cope with and work-around my own problems. That's fine, but I might have gotten to this point a lot more quickly if someone helped me along a little bit when I was a kid. About the only "advice" I got was that I was "shy".
The problem with technical definitions is that it requires someone who is technically competent to apply them. The US has only recognized Aspergers at all only very recently. (It was identified in the 1940s, I believe, but not diagnosed outside of "Old Europe" as a certain politician kindly refers to that part of the world until the 1980s.)
The most practical method of diagnosis is to hang out with autistic people. If you find you think in ways that they can relate to (and vice versa) then you have a working diagnosis. In other words, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you must consider the possibility that it really is a duck.
Best place to find autistic people is over on Starlink. The Asperger channel is only for people who have been diagnosed, not just self-diagnosed, but there are plenty of other resources there.
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)
What Christians need to realize is that the Old Testiment and the Jewish laws were pretty much done away with by Christ.
(Contemporary English Version)
Nm 15:15 This law will never change. I am the LORD, and I consider all people the same, whether they are Israelites or foreigners living among you.
Dt 4:2 and now he is your God. I am telling you everything he has commanded, so don't add anything or take anything away.
Seems to me that he didn't have the jurisdiction to do away with anything, at least according to the very book that gives him authority in the first place -- the one written by his father. I suppose you can totally disregard the Old Testament, but then where the heck did Jesus come from and who is he speaking for?
Ah well, Christian Logic is not something I'll ever wrap my head around. The LORD works in mysterious ways indeed.
Cheers.
So you only value your gifts when nobody else has them?
Two Moms and two Dads and are their children growing up just fine.
Either they are really young or you are referencing a great exception.
My daughter is missing some fingers on one hand. She is now in teens and is having major issues with depression and having a very hard time accepting who she is. I could go on for hours about the details of how she feels and why. Kids make fun of kids for things and some kids would rather not be living and not have to face that on a daily basis. Try telling a teen age girl the kids are only making fun of her because most of society has a different view of homosexuality then her parents. If you think she will say, Oh, I see now and go along happily, you are sadly mistaken. If you dont think the kids are going to make fun of her, you are sadly mistaken. We as adults can see people for who they really are, teenagers do not.
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
Homosexuality is a religion now?
"The NIV and other "modern" bibles are the word of Bob the fallablle translator, not the word of God."
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New in Greek. Neither of them are English, of any time period.
This is what I would call a load of crap.
I mean, I realize it feels good to be able to explain away social ineptitude with some magical neurological hand-waving (oh, I'm sorry I'm a dick, it's just that I have Aspergers -- most geeks have it to some degree), but when it comes straight down to it, it just ain't so.
I have worked with autistic kids before; my first girlfriend and my college roommate both specialized in autism and working with such people was/is their profession. It seems to me that some of the self-described autistic people on Slashdot are so high-functioning that describing their state as autism essentially takes the meaning from the word.
The truth is, people have different skills and talents. My brother is exceptionally good at video games, for example, while I lack the attention span and motor skills to effectively play them. I'm better with people than he is. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, because we are not all alike. Serial insensitivity to other people's emotional state and a predilection for consistancy are symptoms of autism, but possession of symptoms is not sufficient for diagnosis.
While I have met at least one person that is actually a bona-fide sufferer of Asperger's -- ie, he was diagnosed as such by someone other than himself or a well-meaning school counselor or "psychologist" who said something like, "Well, you might have a mild-form of Asperger's..." when trying to explain to a confused kid with no social skills and an unsual love of math why he doesn't fit in -- the truth is, the impression I have of most "Asperger's" sufferers is that they're mostly just normal geeks that would rather believe that there is something chemical that prevents them from engaging socially rather than just plain not being good at it.
I mean, when someone isn't good at Math, we don't start saying, "Well, maybe you have a mild form of mental retardation." After all, retards aren't usually good at math! Heck, maybe it's true! Why don't we say this? Because we understand that some people just aren't as good at math as others. This is true of all skills.
I hate to say this, but all this "I have a mild form of Asperger's" or "geek behaviour is a manifestation of Asperger's syndrome" is what I would call, plainly, a load of crap. Pop-psychology at its worst.
So why do we accept it? Why do people keep up this charade? Because we want to believe that there's some more exotic reason for our shortcomings than them being just that -- shortcomings.
Believe it or not, for 99% of us, social ability is something that is well within our reach. All we need to do is work hard at being better at it, practice, and want to get better. It annoys us that frat-boy John that we've always resented and that we privately think beneath us can so easily master a skill that seems beyond us; fearing failure, we find a thousand reasons we shouldn't even try to play his game. But were we to actual set our minds to it, we could overcome these barriers, because despite our fantasies of neurophysiological differences that neatly explain our lack of social skills, we are able to learn these things. We just never bother trying.
It would simply be too embarassing to fail at something that people we discount as morons do everyday with ease. It's painful.
Painful, but possible.
That's the difference, you see. People who are actually suffering from Asperger's are blind, in a way. They can honestly not perceive things like sarcasm, emotional stress, etc. There is a part of the world they cannot perceive. This is not the same as the geek who is frustrated by his dating difficulties. This is a real, bona-fide disability, which is relatively rare and quite difficult to overcome.
I don't have a lot of respect for all the people out there who write off their "inability to be socially adept" as a mild form of Aspergers. I've worked in IT most of my life; most of my friends have been geeks. And while 99% of them are hopeless socially, autistic they most definitely are not.
Just like people who suck at math aren't retarded.
One thing that has to be remembered is perspective. Most non-autistic people I know seem, no matter how bad they are at doing anything else, to be savants in such obscure skills as recognizing people entirely by their faces. They also often have splinter skills in areas such as multitasking, keeping track of large amounts of social information, relating to whole objects in their environment, and many more. At least some of these things seem to hold true even if they can't do simple things like finding their way around a new location without getting lost, even if they're otherwise considered intellectually disabled.
When I was diagnosed with autism, the doctor apparently speculated about whether or not I was a savant. I don't believe myself to be one, but I think he must have been noticing what appeared to him to be a strange combination of extreme abilities and extreme difficulties. Having to live with myself every day, I can't consider myself that exotic.
I write a lot. I sing with perfect pitch. And I don't get lost, having detailed maps in my head of pretty much anywhere I've been since I was three. I have a strong suspicion that if all of my other abilities were average, nobody would be making a big fuss over this kind of thing.
I also can't speak, not with communication in mind. I have to work to understand sensory input as more than a chaotic and undifferentiated mess of colors, shapes, tones, pitches, textures, scents, and tastes, that also tend to blend into each other. I have enough trouble coordinating perception, thought, and action that, despite a good deal of teaching, I can't do a lot of things that other people consider basic -- food, water, hygiene, and so forth. I need someone either doing those for me or walking me through every step, or else I either get everything out of order or don't do it at all. Someone is paid to do exactly that.
I have trouble deliberately moving around my house unless it's in a specific path, and have to use a number of outside cues to move where I want to move at any given time or else I just get stuck. While I can find any object based on my memorization of its location, if someone moves it a few inches I might as well be blind as far as my ability to recognize it. I can't cross a street safely. I can't pay attention to more than one thing at once, and that can go as basic as color or pattern or shape, not all three at once. No matter how many rules and ideas I learn when I'm not doing things, I won't be able to remember most of them while I'm trying to keep up with moving and perceiving so in practice act like I don't know them. I have a lot of difficulty with things other people consider everyday life. You get the general picture.
I've become aware of how weird this seems to people who aren't autistic. They seem to think that you can either do lots of things or not do any things. But it still seems weird to me that most of them can do such a useless thing as recognize faces despite the fact that they get lost so easily compared to me. The fact that I can do the things I do and can't do the things I can't do doesn't confuse me at all. The fact that people with much less intensely focused minds than mine can do such specific tasks as recognizing faces, does confuse me.
While savants have talents even more extreme than mine, I often wonder what the reason is for the specific category. To me, what looks to others like a very uneven mix of skills is totally normal and even given that I understand the way my mind works and grew up in it. I can do direction and layout without thinking. Other people can multiply large numbers without thinking (which I can't do). The fact that they can do large numbers is only marginally odder to me than the fact that most people can do small numbers.
I've speculated that the idea of the autistic savant or idiot savant came about when someone looking in from the outside decided that it was really weird that his assumptions didn't fit. Here was som
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".
"the truth is, the impression I have of most "Asperger's" sufferers is that they're mostly just normal geeks that would rather believe that there is something chemical that prevents them from engaging socially rather than just plain not being good at it. "
You're trying to draw a dichotomy where nothing exists. It's all chemical (unless you're a dualist).
Whether you're a moron, a pedophile, an asperger, a socially inept geek, or a low functioning autistic, there's a neurological explanation somewhere, whether genetic, environmental or a combination of both.
You seem fixated by these black and white labels; this person has that disease, but that person is ok, they're just inept.
???
The truth is that there's a broad landscape of ability and disability. For purposes of mental health treatment, it helps to draw circles around certain peaks and call them disorders, but in reality it's all shades of gray on a huge multidimensional surface.
It's extremely likely that some subset of the genes that cause autism/aspergers are active in the socially inept. Why do you take such offense at this? Does it make you feel better to tell these people "no, you're just inept, you don't get to claim that it's because of the way your brain is wired."
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.
I think that some heterosexual people have fucked up their kids enough that even super-gay people would have a pretty tough time competing. If we can't have a law that prevents warped heterosexuals from reproducing I don't see why we should have a law banning a gay couple from adopting on the same premise.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Your post really struck a chord with me. I'm mildly autistic, but since "autism" is usually the doctor's way of saying "I don't know", it's not a very descriptive label, and I've never met anyone with a similar condition. Many conditions that are very different if examined in detail are lumped together as autism based on similarity in social interaction. However, as I read your post I realized that this is *exactly* the condition I have, magnified ten times. I know *just* what you mean - every detail resonates with me, though I have these differences from the average to a lesser extent.
Fortunately, my difficulty with "ordinary day-to-day things" is manageable, and my social interaction skills have been slowly growing since I was young. Sometime after college I reached the point where people stopped noticing anything unusual, though it still takes me 10 times as long as an average person to be able to put a name with a face.
The thing is, growing up I never felt unusual. Instead, I always wondered why I everyone I met was unusual.
While I don't have a savant's friendship with numbers, that ability has never seemed like a mystery to me. I suspect my mind works with numbers in the same way, but I'm just not very good at it - I can juggle numbers quickly, but I work faster using a calculator for large numbers. My "direction and layout" skills impress some people, but are clearly not as good as yours. I think there's probably a tradeoff between processing power devoted to unconsciously turning sense data into managed orderly input, and processing power left over for (other) mental abilities that seem amazing to those who don't have them.
Do you enjoy music? As a child I could only listen to very quiet and orderly music, but now I enjoy just about everything. I guess expanding my musical taste was, for me, the safe way to challenge myself with ever more chaotic sensory input while in a safe physical environment. I'm curious whether anyone else has had that same experience.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This 'store' is run by a friend of mine with severe CFS and a cocktail of other problems. You might be interested in some of the shirts or their slogans.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
What do you expect from me? I'm autistic myself. (Well, the "formal" diagnosis is Aspergers, but I consider that to be on the Autistic Spectrum.)
I agree. The only difference between Asperger and Kanner autism is language-onset delay. Not very telling, in my view.
It's not unusual for people with Aspergers to have trouble recognizing the "correctness" of behaviour, facial expressions, etc. Sure, it's not universal, either, but it's definitely not a rarity.
Do I care? No. But, then, I'm not built to care about things like that. This isn't an "I can't help it", because that implies it's wrong to be anything other than a highly socially-aware, socially-structured individual.
Idiot Savant is the same thing. It is just a description, no different from "hot", "yellow" or "crispy". Someone might get angry with the words, finding them offensive. That's not my problem. How you choose to understand words is entirely up to you.
You miss my point. I was talking to someone I thought was an NT, in a forum primarily composed of NTs.
NTs think in language. But an effect of this is that the words they customarily use effect the way they think. In other words, if we let NTs continue the use words like "idiot savant", then this will contribute to them continuing to think of autistic people (with savant abilities or otherwise) as basket cases. Riders of the Short Bus. Members of the Helmet Brigade. Twitchy, non-lucid people who must be 'taken care of' rather than understood. You get the idea.
I'm not *personally* offended. Being who and what I am, I attach importance to principles, not individual interactions.
But principle is what I'm talking about here. Twisting a few arms to get people to use "politically correct" language is sometimes appropriate, not because of the meaning (or lack thereof) of words, but because it forces them to acknowledge the existance and humanity of those for whom they must change their behaviour.
Does that make a little more sense to you?
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Consider this analogy: if someone who ordinarily uses a wheelchair is able to drag himself up a flight of stairs using only his arms, no one would say, "Well, he can get up the stairs on his own, so he's not really disabled and doesn't need a ramp or elevator."