I saw these “Idiot Savants” (apparently super smart, but essentially stupid …) on TV, these guys can memorize hundreds of numbers, many pages of books and so forth in little time and recover said memory. But especially they can calculate multiplications and divisions of large numbers having many decimal points and so on in little time, large results that only a machine could do.
How do they do it ? One hypothesis is that they maybe memorize a simple microprocessor architecture in their minds, assign registers and write a program in their minds and execute it exactly like a real microprocessor and therefore they can obtain incredible results. After all memorizing a CPU architecture and some instructions and practicing it in your mind a lot and you can become a real walking microprocessor: a brain self programming itself to simulate a microprocessor and executing the same behavior.
It seems possible, after all, there are really smart math students who can do incredible things, really smart chess players and so forth, so creating a microprocessor in your mind and writing your own programs and excuting them doesn’t seem so far fetched for those who are very smart and have good memory. Playing chess very well seems way harder…
How do you do it then ? do you guess ? Of course they must be using some technique, something to keep partial results or whatever, hence if you are going to do that, you might as well memorize a CPU, hardwire it into the neural circuits of you brain and execute a program for anything you need to calculate. I think this would be the easiest way. What are they writing it down in pencil and paper in their mind and multiplying it out (or dividing it out ) ?
Of course a more reasonable hypothesis is that they are fooling everyone: they have a small walky talky, a small cell phone and communicate to another guy who is producing the results on a computer and telling him the results: he just repeats it. Or maybe these shows are all just a make believe joke and none of it is true.
People talk about how they do it. One guy who memorized a lot of digits of pi (thousands) said that he sees numbers as shapes in his mind. Some super-memorizers use this technique that involves imagining a corridor with paintings on the wall. Each painting is something you’re trying to remember. There might be someone who does some sort of microprocessor technique, but I’ve never heard of that. Sounds interesting, but also sounds unlikely.
So instead of using 8 bits to process data, they use many more bits so to say, like 128 bits of information in parallel, but even more so they multiply pictures and shapes and images or combine them in such a way as to produce a calculation: a kind of analog computer using images and pictures and operands upon these to process numbers. Possibly…an interesting possible new CPU architecture using images that multiply other images and can be translated into results or something like that, or picture - shape processing CPUs using not bits or numbers but large ensembles of information…
But that seems so much harder and contorted than simply memorizing a simple 8 bit CPU and writing the program in your mind and executing all the steps, there is a lot less to keep track of and memorize and the technique is well known and you can improve on it by doing it more and more: of course only someone kind of bizarre could want to be a walking CPU, but anyways…
But maybe it really is all a joke, none of it is true.
Some of it’s probably fake, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say none of it is true.
Anyway, the thing about doing it like a CPU is that the conscious mind wouldn’t be able to execute it as fast as the CPU – if at all. I’m not suggesting that the mind is not a computer – but that the conscious mind works too slow to work like that.
The CPU gets an instruction location from the Program Counter, goes there, reads an instruction value, reads an input value, and does the instruction on the input. It does this around 3Billion times a second for a 3GHz CPU (I think that’s the right number).
But now, just think about you consciously doing that. How much time would it take you, consciously, to get an input value, interpret that into an instruction, perform that instruction on the input, etc? And even then, large amount of memorization would be required – you’d have to memorize all the initial variable values, memorize the program itself, memorize the instructions and what they do. You’d have a lot to think about.
Consciously trying to work like a CPU is, if you think about the brain as a computer, more like simulating a computer within a computer. But if your mind is already a computer, it would only slow it down to do your calculations on a simulated computer within that computer. Simulated computers by necessity have to be slower than the computer they’re simulated on. So why not let your mind computer how it computes, instead of simulating another computer inside of it?
I don’t disagree with any of that article, but I don’t think that it applies much to the “idiot savant” type of person (not much different from myself).
What is happening with the idiot savant is that a large portion of the brain has become dysfunctional, usually due to acquired contaminants that prevent either blood flow or normal neurological functioning (neuron corruption or disintegration). Then because so much of the brain is rendered slow (literally “retarded”), other parts of the brain get extra use in resolving problems that the normal would have resolved in easier ways.
But then because those few parts become so experienced, their talent becomes the first unconscious thinking effort and overrides any more normal processes that might come back to life. It is like the educated elite knowing “the proper way” to resolve an issue, but someone not so elite can’t see it that way, so they face the issue in another way. Then because they get good at it (Science versus Religion), they insist upon using what they know works, just as the elite before them had done.
So when someone, for example, can add numbers extremely quickly compared to the normal (the film Pi comes to mind), what is happening is that a subconscious process has forgone the normal routine of saying, “I don’t know, leave it up to the conscious” and instead uses the algorithm that was always available to anyone, because that algorithm was the only one functional at some earlier time.
The more important concern is how to get the normal to stop doing the less efficient process and adopt the more efficient. That is like asking the religious to accept Science or the egotist to accept the offensive. There is a strong impedance mismatch and such things seldom work (thus Buddhism attempts to eliminate the ego structure entirely).
I have done some work directly in that arena in teaching photographic memory to people who were already diagnosed as “retarded”. My favorite example is the 3rd grader girl who was being told that she wasn’t going to pass to the 4th grade because she couldn’t spell her words. I gave that little girl 2 weeks of my attention and she could then pass every spelling test with 100% every time and without pneumonia techniques. She could out perform me and all of her teachers without trying and she had no idea why or how, but was tickled to death that she could so easily answer every question regarding her spelling. And she could do that because I altered literally the engrams in her brain such as to be able to bring forth an exact visual copy of the entire spelling list such that she could consciously examine it and tell you anything you asked concerning it, such as “what is the 14th letter from the bottom of the page?” I could never come up with any such question that she couldn’t answer after her merely seeing the spelling list for more than a 2 minutes.
The trick is “reprogramming” the brain to STOP doing the wrong things (the slow error prone things). After that, the right things are trivial and natural. But it seems that society isn’t actually interested in anyone doing better if they are not part of the government in one way or another, thus schools do not use such techniques that would improve literally anyone’s memory skills. Society wants to control who is intelligent and who isn’t. How else can they guarantee their control over everyone else?
The unsighted learns to hear better than the sighted.
The idiot savant has learned to do some particular trick better than those who were not infected, blinded, and crippled when young.
It’s not necessary that the government deliberately does this to decrease power - it’s that most people have much more trouble imagining the powers of the brain than the weaknesses. And the government consists of people, often very narrow minded and cowardly people who are scared to death to abandon the lowest expectations for the higher.
So exactly why does the US government (the FDA) restrict actually effective nootropics to government use only?
Why don’t the teachers to whom I demonstrated what DOES work to create far greater actual intelligence use such techniques for their students for whom they are supposed to be “responsible”?
And perhaps more importantly, why did they ever say, “The first responsibility of a leader is to maintain his leadership authority”, when that isn’t actually true?
Saint, it appears your at a early stage of trying to cross a vascular theory of the mind effecting cognition with hard wired neurologically networked theory of personality. The attempt on your part on one hand is good, considering it appears to be mostly intuitive grasping and reasoning as to how the mind works, on the other it’s sour fetish shit reminiscent of the theory of the four humors.
Despite its obvious faults, and non-relevancy to idiot savants or cognitive programming, I do encourage more feral, independent thought by you on how the mind works, your assumptions, though medieval, did develop into some of the best of modern brain science. On a instinctive-imaginative level, your not bad for guessing this, and will pay more attention to your posts in the future for this reason, you may in time develop into a independent and brilliant psychologically oriented philosopher. I usually don’t complement people this way, so consider it a good thing.
That’s strange, a minute after I call you one you reopen the long closed thread on them.
I would listen carefully to what CN says on this subject. Not only has he likely read all about it but it’s one of the few subjects he can speak on from experience.
Though I admit I feel like everyone here is playing a joke on me. No one esle seems to respond negatively to CN’s condesending attitude, maybe it’s because they really are impressed, but to give the benefit of the doubt they probably just don’t like stating the obvious. Well I’ve been called stupid too many times to take it so well. CN can’t engage in a debate with anyone, he simply can’t interact in that way. His talents can’t be denied, and there’s no use in berating someone for there weaknesses, but if the condesention of his doesn’t stop then why shouldn’t we let him know his weaknesses. He readsmuch and he must have some criteria for what he reads that he will paraphrase and what he’ll be skeptical of, it could be as simple as that the majority opinion rules. So if the majority were to speak there mind on this we would be getting somewhere. I mean, d63, Mo etc. wouldn’t give Volchok a break because of his condesending disposition, why must CN get one. His condesension grates at me whether I like to admit it or not.
They have highly stimulated brain area, and doesn’t have the same restrictions as normal humans, unfortunaly other areas of their brain suffers greatly and can be defined as retarded.
There are many kinds of idiot savants, some are good with numbers, names, preception as can by visual impression draw very complex things by just 1 look, etc.