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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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
So what do you call (in Esperanto) a place for horses?
And can you keep horses and cows in the same building?
What about llamas?
-- Alastair
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).
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'd love to hear the answer to this from an Esperanto speaker.
This is exactly the sort of thing where I'd imagine that synthetic languages would trip up. Personally, I'd say that evolution, interaction with various dialects and corruption is invaluable to the usefulness of a language. How does Esperanto deal with this?
(n.b. not attempting to flame: I'm genuinely interested)
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
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.
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.
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.
the point of Christianity is that there IS NO SUCH THING as an unforgivable sin. You just have to ask forgiveness (the sacrement of confession, which is done to a priest individually for Catholics (me), and usually as part of the mass as a congregation for protestants). However, when one knows that they do is a sin and repeatedly do it, asking for forgiveness doesn't really have the same weight. It's like, multiple offender thing in the court system. For instance, it's a venial sin to masturbate. But if you keep doing it even if you know its wrong, it becomes a mortal sin. Mortal sins send you straight to hell (if you don't get last rights and that sort of thing) if you haven't confessed them. Venial sins are not so bad.
For instance, yes, theoretically, Hitler could have confessed his sins, been given absolution, and gone to heaven. But not bloody likely, of course any actual "documentation" of the last hours must be suspect in its truth. If a gay person keeps on keeping doing gayness and doesn't ever feel remorse or confess his sins, then yeah, that's hell-bound. If he does, it's not hellbound, likely.
What Christians need to realize is that the Old Testiment and the Jewish laws were pretty much done away with by Christ. There is a new set of laws. Do what he said, and that's fine. He never mentioned gays in the new testement. I don't know what the rules are. Old Testement God was a hard-core bad-ass who killed people. New Testement God is not. Yes, Jesus talks about hell. Yes, I believe there is hell (that Stalin and St Francis would meet the same fate is not something I wish to believe. It makes no sense).
Now, does the fact that Christ did away with it mean that sin isn't there anymore? No, there is sin. But a lot of the shit in the old testiment is just bullshit. Like Kosher. No one is going to go to hell for eating pork. Kosher makes sense in the days before refridgeration and stuff, but now it does not. Et cetera.
Do I think gayness is wrong? Yes, absolutly. But my best friend is gay. Do I believe God created the universe and everything in it? Yes. But Genisis is more of a poem on creation. I believe it may have been divinly inspired (I am a poet and English major and I do believe in muses and things because whether it's a literal thing or not, the principle is sound), but it is not literal truth. Even the notes in the new bible I bought last year (my old family bibles are like, 200 years old and I don't like to handle them) say not to take Genisis seriously (Catholic bible).
The point is that God loves us, Christ died for us, and because of that all sins are forgiven. But as it also is said, "God helps those who help themselves" -- ie, one must ask to be forgiven. It's like how showing remorse effects sentencing phases in trials. In fact, it's exactly the same. Last time I went to confession was a month ago in St Peter's in Rome. In the part of the Priest's schpele were he tells you your penence, part of it is "for your own peace of mind" -- people have a need to confess otherwise guilt builds up. This is a kind of hell. So, whether one believes in an afterlife or not, yes, telling the priest what you've done does help your own peace of mind and makes you feel better. Guilt weighs heavily.
It's lent. I ate meat on Friday. I'm Catholic. I should be going to hell like a fag according to ultra-radical militant puritan fucks in this country who take shit way too seriously. Boo Fucking Hoo. I can go to confession and get away with it. But it's not like the methodist-affiliated college I go to is going to serve fish on friday for 6 weeks to make me feel better.
I suppose the etymology would be the same as with any other word. In the case of "barn", it comes from "barley house" - a contraction of two different words in old English. Yet we no longer keep barley in barns. Meanings change. That's the very essense of a living language. So is the interaction and corruption of different dialiects and other languages.
New International Version
Well there's your problem. You need to get the KJV and a good set of translation notes. The NIV and other "modern" bibles are the word of Bob the fallablle translator, not the word of God. I'll never understand why you people waste your time on those things. It's like trying to understand Shakespeare by reading only the Cliff's Notes.
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
That's both more accurate to Paul's original text and more beautiful to read. If Paul had intended to say "homosexual", he would have used the well-known word "paiderasste." Instead, he uses, "malakoi" and "arsenokoitai," neither of which have ever had clear homosexual connotation. Do a Google search on the Greek words if you want to learn more. It's fascinating.
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.
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)