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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."
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?
NO. You don't want this, trust me.
My little sister is autistic, and I think at least a third of her brain is wired for solving jigsaw puzzles. Try working that into a resume.
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.
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).
"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.
Not to mock your sister's, your's, or your family's pain, but have you considered seeing what she can do with a pile of cross-cut documents?
Maybe I've watched too much sci-fi, but I would reckon the goverment could find some use for her.
"Dying tickles!" -- Ralph Wiggum
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.
This is quite interesting, because it's apperently different to people with Asperger's syndrome. I read somewhere that it's their right hemisphere that's lacking, and the left hemisphere is compensating for this. Which is why they have good language abilities (left hemisphere) and logical thinking (left hemisphere), but may lack in comprehension or finding meaning in what's being said (right hemisphere), as in the case of hyperlexia.
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
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.
"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'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?
Maybe it's possible to have an email conversation with her. I don't even know.
Try it. It isn't all that uncommon for autistics to be articulate with the written word yet be unable to speak or handle face-to-face communication.
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.
"Ema" is even closer to "emä", which is often used as "mother" in the context of animals. "Emo" is especially in archaic texts (compare Kalevala) often a word for even a human mother.
I must admit I am not awfully impressed by this guy's invented language without seeing more of it. Interesting, though, that he is stated as knowing Lithuanian and not Finnish -- Lithuanian is after all very different from Finnish, and he cannot have got those words from there.. he must know Finnish at least subconsciously, or then they screwed up with the languages in the article.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
This is a very sad but honest post.
I feel your pain. I have a son who is autistic and though he isn't yet a teenager, he is at about the same level as your sister. He may never get any better. Treatment can cost $30,000 a year and may or may not work. If it does work, the end result will be that he is trained like a dog, to respond on command. Some people I know who have kids like mine are working two jobs each...both husband and wife...so that their child will be taken care of when they can't any longer.
Evidently, this is epidemic now with three in a hundred kids being autistic. Currently, insurance covers almost nothing, but something will have to be done at some point to manage the sheer numbers.
I have three other children that may or may not help out. It isn't fair to them to have to shoulder the responsiblity, but then again, we are family. If it were my brother, I would help out if he is resonable. Sometimes they can be violent which can prevent that.
I wish you luck.
My goodness, what is good enough for you? The fact that he can do this, despite the fact he can't tell right from left, is the story. He's not the latest new processor or kernel, he's a human being with a severe disability. For a lot of disabled people, standing upright is an amazing feat (and for many it's beyond them). As a person who suffers from a severe mental disability myself, I am darn impressed.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I'll throw my chips in with the above poster and agree that this is a great idea, many autistics light up when they have access to non-verbal communication, and for some strange reason computers have that glow about them that is attractive and addictive. I really think there needs to be some sort of standardized computer based learning system for autistics in this country, the (rather minor) set of programs instructors are able to collect together and get going now and then prove so beneficial, I can only imagine what further talents could lead to.
For possible career motivations, try product design, heck some form of engineering could be really good for her. Try to find a way to convince her that EE is basically just one big jigsaw puzzle! If she can apply a third of her brains to simplifying a circuit, Intel would want her in a second, they'd make any accommodations she needs!
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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).
He hasn't proven any new theorems or developed a new field; why is he being called a genius?
Because it's not generally called "mathematics" once you get past arithmatic, until you get to the sign on the college department's door.
Which means that a majority of us don't think "complex equations" when we think "mathematics." Which means that the word is getting itself re-defined, just like "hacker" or "gay."
His ability to multiply numbers quickly, or test for primes quickly (not sure if he does this), or factor large numbers quickly (never does an article about a math idiot-savant talk about this - a problem that is *hard* by all known algorithms - but that is another story) does not say anything interesting for mathematics. It is interesting purely from the viewpoint of understanding how the human brain works.
And if we are on the topic of raw computing ability - and we decide that computing ability _is_ interesting - could we *please* have them try computations in a more general number field? Could we *please* have them solve problems that we can't yet solve efficiently by any known algorithm? (And, could someone also study how fast this guy computes factorisations as a funtion of the input size? Fr instance, could we find out how fast his brain's process works - O(n) ? O(log(n))? This question could at least be answered experimentally.
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 did. I sent her an email just now. Maybe she'll write back.
I can also write much better than I can talk, which supports my mother's Aspberger's theory I guess. I can still speak well, but writing well is much, much easier and requires less mental effort. There are these four arrow keys I use to order thoughts when writing, but when speaking you have to order your thoughts before they come out, and mine are usually in the wrong order. And if I write something stupid, I can (and sometimes do) delete it before anyone sees it. Good thing we don't use typewriters anymore.
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.
I think the right word to describe this person's numerical abilities is "good calculator". Mathematics is something different.
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?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
22,514 decimal places. It should be obvious that we're not talking about people to whom minor concerns such as size and shape apply.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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
You should know then that Aspbergers is quite common in this industry. Maybe you just don't know how to recognize it, but all the stereotypes of geeks being socially inept have Aspbergers at their root. That's not to say that all geeks are high-functioning autistics. But, it is easier to mask in environments where their logical/reasoning/technical skills are valued over skills at socialization. Maybe you just need to look closer at the people around you.
From your description of her as, "busy being a teenage girl" it sounds like she is in the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, because the people in the middle to lower range are barely able to even BE a teenager in a way that society recognizes and avoiding the stigma of geekiness just isn't even a comprehenisble concept to them.
It is easy to say from the other side of the internet, but one of the best things anyone can do for her is to get her as much positive exposure to a wide range of "autistic-excelling" skills so that pattern-matching ability which makes her good at jigsaw puzzles will get the chance to focus on a more (financially) rewarding area. You never know what oddball skill might "click" with her, whatever it is, chances are it won't be what society considers a traditional job so you have to keep open to as broad a range as possible.
FWIW, I am speaking from experience here, one of my closest relatives has asperbergers. Early on he focused on computers and did the rounds as sysadmin/programmer and he was somewhat better than average at it. But what he found is that he is really good at talking about and explaining the processes and logic behind all that stuff - he's got really low communication skills otherwise, zero socialization ability, zero non-verbal communication ability, hardly any empathy, etc. But if you ask him about the way a complex system works he can explain it and he can explain it in a way that regular "non-savant" type people can follow.
He's been able to leverage that ability to "talk about work" into a very high paying career, serving as "resident guru" for companies doing software development. He doesn't do any real work, he just helps the regular developers understand how best to do their work. At first glance, it's not your typcial aspergbers-friendly kind of job because of all the people-interaction. But from his perspective it is a perfect match because it is all technical discourse about stuff he is really focused on with very little non-verbal/emotional content.
It's probably something like talking about jigsaw puzzles with your sister, she could probably talk about them all day and go into the most exruciating detail about them. Just nobody really wants to know about jigsaw puzzles, but knowing how complex hardware and software systems work is a very valuable skill in today's market.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
My father claimed during my last visit there to be setting up a trust fund of some sort, so that whoever takes care of her "will be getting a lot of money". I think he said something like $60K. I have no idea how long that would last in meeting her needs- but I don't think it would be long. Usually we're thinking "group home" with her but maybe she'll surprise us and live independently, who knows...
He's another story himself. He's a mentally ill mainframe programmer. He may be crazy, depressed, alcoholic, and miserable, but I have to admit he did pick an excellent career for himself back in the seventies, especially for someone who might otherwise find it difficult to hold down a job. He's practically unfireable- and very few programmers in India spend their time learning crap like RAMIS. On the flip side he has to deal with EBCDIC which would drive anybody to drink.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am Autistic. I don't see it as anything to be pitied, or even delighted in. It's just a word that describes how some aspect of the chemistry in my brain differs from the "norm". It is a description, not a definition.
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.
True, I could be better understood, if I spoke in a language closer to your own. But if I want to be understood by fellow autists, I go join the autistic channel on an IRC network specially set up for such folk. Here, I expect to be understood by geeks, who know how to dereference the pointers of obscure and arcane language.
Well, they must. When karma was still counted in points on Slashdot, my score was in the thousands. Someone out there must have understood me.
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 know anecdotal evidence is pretty much crap, but I think you're being a somewhat captious here.
I have an autistic cousin and uncle through marriage, and it should be noted that both have severe forms of autism. My uncle-in-law can make some affirmative and negative sounds but is completely nonverbal, and my cousin-in-law makes no communicative noises, except for the occasional shriek in anger or confusion. Both of them are completely dysfunctional and must live in skilled care group homes.
When strangers come in contact with my relatives, they always ask about the situation, and they hear autism as an explanation. When somebody meets you (or some other highly functional autistic person), they probably never even suspect that you have autism.
Extremes are always remembered more clearly. Most people, when they think of autism, remember meeting somebody like my uncle. This is merely the nature of a malady that exists on such a wide spectrum.
Life is too short to be obsessed with victimhood. Everybody who belongs to a larger group is sick of being spoken of in stereotypes.
The breakthrough is his capacity to communicate his abilities (how he visualises numbers) and creativity (his creation of a language). Neither of these are normally associated with savants which puts it far beyond high-school psychiatry.
Seriously, chess is a problem in combinatorial logic, over multiple-step sequences. It relies on the ability to analyze massive amounts of future data, based only on past experience and present status. A good chess-player would likely do well in meteorology or the stock market. I imagine it is also useful to tacticians. The advisors who set up the formulae for risk assessment in insurance are likely fans of chess, too.
Bridge, poker and other card games are statistical, rather than logical. Statisticians are employed by very similar organizations to those above, because they tend to be rather good at picking out patterns from apparent chaos, too. The chief difference is that chess is a "full information game" - that is, it is possible to determine at any given time if a play is going to be a winning play or not. It is hard, but it is possible. You can't do that, when there's a random element. All you can do is say the odds and maximize the probabilities. Card players will likely be good racing drivers, for that reason, as racing is all about maximizing the probability of winning, in a very random and fluctuating environment.
Scrabble, jigsaw puzzles, "memory" and jackstraws are all games about patterns, structure and sequence. They are all about identifying what goes with what and how things are connected. I imagine the celebrated scientist/TV host James Burke is good at one or all of these. The key is in recognizing what sequences are better than others. Anyone involved in scheduling, code-breaking, language translation and organizing of any kind is certain to be excellent at this class of puzzle.
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 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, you have to do it in your head. If you do it fast enough, the branch prediction logic hitting rollback points seem only as thoughtful pauses.
Of course, then your wife beats on you with "you're not listening to me!" and "don't you have anything to say?!?", and you already know that "no, because I've already exhausted the likely conversation paths in my head already, and none of them are worth pursuing. Should we explore those?" will not fly, because people don't like hearing about it when you've pretty much predicted what their conversation processes are... "you...arrogant...ASS! How can you think you know what I might be thinking?" are what comes out after you tell them that, and you realize that you can never tell her that, "well, you had about a 99.97% probability of responding just like that. See? You're attempts to poke that chef's knife between my ribs are proving it right now..."
If you're really handy, you use it to your advantage, and tee some of the guttoral swearing bits to your mouth from those conversation threads, so that people just think you have Tourette's Syndrome, and leave a lot of room next to you on the bus or train...
(Yes, the last is not original. But it's still funny.)
I think there probably is something about the subconscious processing that goes on in "normal" brains that just filters out so much information because the brain is so involved with figuring out the difference between "he likes me" and "he LIKES ME!", or, "why is he crossing his arms? he always does that when he's mad about something... " to "He's bluffing. I know that my 6-2 will beat whatever crap he's got in his hand! 'ALL IN!'".
He said as much, and just about everything seems to indicate that autistics lack, to differing extents, the processing in their brains to make all those conscious and subconsious social cues workable.
In some, their brains simply get swamped with all the stimulation. Just about everyone has an overstimulation point. If you cross it far enough, you can be reduced to a fetal-position, babbling idiot. An autistic can be turned into this simply by the phone ringing.
With autistics, they seem to lack only bits and pieces of the social processing, and the rest of their brain over-compensates.
My wife has PTSD. Her brain dedicates a LOT of processing on her stimuli that might lead to some of the traumatic things (she worked at the morgue on Guam for the KAL 747 crash there) that have happened to/around her.
It could always be worse, though. Yes, it's "in her head", but it's WAYYYYY beyond "just think 'happy' thoughts!". But at least I don't have to deal with waking up suddenly with a knife at my throat because she's reliving a combat incident.
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
People on the Autism spectrum tend to have an extremely large, florid vocabulary. Sometimes, the most difficult part of writing is dumbing it down by using simpler synonyms. If I want to make my writing understood to a general audience (i.e. not Slashdot), I usually have to spend 2 or 3 times longer "debugging" my writing than I actually spend writing it. (I'm deliberately not right now, because A. this is Slashdot, and B. I'm providing an example.)
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
In Finnish,
Mänty, äiti, aurinko, päivä
So he's actually making a mixture between two...
maybe more.
What you just wrote there seems a perfectly succinct way of saying what you said - in fact I don't think I could make it any shorter than you did without some effort. I myself have often been accused of being too wordy - for example, I almost always went over the page limits in school assignments.
On the other hand, I also seem especially skilled at turning logical statements about complex systems into very simply-stated rules that convey highly accurate information about the entirity of the complex system I'm describing. So when I'm arguing a point I've already thought out well, I have a tendancy to be a bit too short and to the point, and wind up having to elaborate a lot in order for people to completely grok what was meant by the short (though perfectly accurate and proper English) sentence I previously said. Or sometimes I end up assuming that the reader will need such elaboration, and thus give it all to them ahead of time before delivering my point. Neitehr seems to be a very pleasant form of communication to most people I talk to.
How exactly does one go about finding out if they have something like this? TFA and these comments have gotten me thinking a lot - I seem to share a lot in common with the person in TFA and some people who have spoken here, and I'm very interested to find out if I meet the definition of some of these terms. Not sure what use it would be to me to have such a diagnosis, or perhaps it could even be a bad thing (negative stereotypes and all)... but I'm still quite curious just to know.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Guardian article (and Savant) only says european record which appears accurate.
;).
Slashdot story should probably say holds "a record" not "the record", which in typical Slashdot context would either imply world record or USA record
Mind to keep us updated on the communication experiment in your Journal? I'd love to read about it as it's going on.
I can tell you right now.
I sent an email to my mother asking if my sister is checking her mail, since I hadn't gotten an answer.
According to my mother, she is delighted to get E-mail and checks it all the time. Only problem is: don't expect a reply.