Savants in Slashdot

Slashdot has an post on a interview with Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant who explains his genius abilities. I was not really impressed with some of the claims, especially since these abilities can probably be mastered by other people with a lot of time in their hands, which autistic people tend to have.

Whenever I read about impressive feats, I always asked myself if there was any way I would be able to accomplish that. In many cases, people aren’t born with the ability to, say, calculate the day of the week an arbitrary date falls into. Some people see this as a divine gift. My view is that a seven-day week, 12 month calendar of an earth-year is a random human invention, that none of us should have evolved a skill to calculate, especially correcting for leap years on every 4th, 100th and 400th year. These are skills, that have to be learned. I actually figured out the date trick in college and impressed quite a number of people with it. I wrote up the trick in an earlier post about idiot savants, but killed the post because some people were apparently offended by my unspoken suggestion that idiot savants were indeed idiots.

• Daniel speaks seven languages. While that’s not a very common skill, I have known a few people who know that many languages. My college roommate, David Carlton, knew eight languages. That skill is also more common in Europe.
• He can calculate cube roots faster than a calculator. Given that there are only 100 cubes under a million, that’s not an especially difficult skill to acquire.
• He knows over 20,000 digits of pi. I have memorized 100 digits of pi in just two minutes back in my college days just by grouping the digits in five and singing it repeatedly. I supposed, with over 200 times the effort and time, I might be able to match his feat, but it would not be a valuable use of my time. Apparently, Daniel sings it too backwards and forwards.
• He multiplies multidigit numbers very quickly. After thinking about this, I wondered about the impact of learning one’s multiplication tables up to 100. It’s, of course, 10,000 associations to learn, but a lot of it is redundant.

On the other hand, I will allow for the fact that he may have an exceptional memory, which can make these feats a lot easier for him than the ordinary person. This could be the result of a rewiring of the brain during fetal development that has lead to his autism; or it could be the strengthening of one portion of brain to compensate for the weaknesses in the other, the way a blind person develops an acute sense of touch and hearing, or a foreign-born student excels in math and science, but can’t read functionally in a non-native language.

These tricks have redeeming value, a sense of worth, for people, who are otherwise disabled, and their families. In this particular case, Daniel can’t drive a car or tell right from left. He gets to appear on Letterman and have Discovery channel special based on him. He garners more respect from friends and family. Considering that one-third of Americans presently have some disability and all of us will be partially disabled if we live long enough, something like this reaffirms our dignity even if we may not be very productive and are dependent on others. With my memory, learning ability, and energy levels much less than ten years ago, I personally feel my options becoming more limited as I age.

Lastly, while I am skeptical that Daniel’s abilities can’t be taught to others with time and effort, I do applaud them as they are still rare and astonishing.

Comments

try the trachtenberg system of maths, seems to give you lots of nice tricks :)

[nil4]

Think about the 120 seconds contained in "just under two minutes", and the ratio of 100 digits of pi / 120 seconds, and realize you barely had time to read those digits carefully, let alone memorize them.

Do the math before you start bragging.

[Wesner Moise]

A friend of mine gave me five minutes to learn PI on a friendly bet, when I told him that I wasn't impressed that he knew pi to a hundred digits. I didn't use half the time.

You can memorize a lot of digits fast by breaking it out in to groups of five and singing it repeatedly. Then it becomes part of your intuition. Then you can try to find interesting patterns in it to help you remember it.

I haven't practiced in several years and I still remember something like this:
3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288

[Jeffrey Sax]

You are right that, rare and remarkable as such abilities are, they are less out-of-this-world than people like to believe.

Speaking many languages is not that unusual. In Belgium, kids are taught 4 languages through high school. Add Spanish and Italian (similar to French), and Esperanto (mixture of everything) and you're up to 7.

I'll be really impressed with someone who speaks languages from 7 different families, like English, French, Swahili, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese.

Cube roots of numbers less than 1,000,000 are easy... If you know the cubes of 1 to 10, you know the first number right away by the relative size of the first 3 digits. The second digit is almost as easy, as there is a simple mapping: 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 0 map to themselves. 3 and 7, and 8 and 2 are interchanged in pairs.

So... 39,304... 27 39 64 and 4 maps to itself. Result: 34. No thinking involved.

The key to mental arithmetic is memory, sure, but more than anything it's training.

[Bob]

Numbers are simply relationships, all numbers are made of the number 1 (or fractions of 1).

Savantism is interesting, you can't say it isn't because it opens up whole new worlds of perception and human advancement, especially in education.

True geniuses in my opinion are deeply concerned and loving people, and who want to tap teh genius of everyone to work towards solving the most pressing problems that face todays generation and all future generations.

I'd say the true geniuses are silently hammering away among the masses of workers on the most difficult problems to ease all of our burdens and suffering because it is implicit in their nature to do so.

Lack of concern in a smart person shows how close to the feral animal kingdom instead of the gods he really is (to speak in the language of metaphor).

Too many in this world are ineffably feral, and this goes for the brute logic intellectuals. It took me a long time to appreciate the logic behind peoples emotions (i.e. adaptive nervous system responses, etc) and insight to realize that many people aren't as mature nor have the time or inclination to understand how they work and so "coast" on autonomic functions.