This thread on idiot-savants reminded me of a question I’ve long had: Do people of normal and superior intelligence also exhibit savant-like capabilities, such as memorizing massive amounts of detailed data, or instantly performing arithmetic involving huge numbers in their heads? Do we hear more of idiot-savants just because their savant capabilities are in such stark contrast to their otherwise low mental function? Or is it not unheard of to find university mathematics professors who can instantly tell you what day of the week Christmas fell on in 1782?
According to Cecil, William Sidis “had a knack for such stunts as mentally computing the day of the week for any date in history”. And he was certainly no idiot.
Well, he may have been no idiot, but he certainly fell far short of functioning as his early promise might have led one to expect. Not that you couldn’t say that of many others. But his case sounds extreme.
Hmmm…who remembers the guy who finally decyphered Egyptian Hieroglyphics?
I seem to recall that his aptitude for languages fell into this catagory.
I think it was Flinders Petrie.
No–Petrie was a digger, not a linguistics boy.
Maybe Jean Francois-Champollion?
Erm…make that “Jean-Francois Champollion.”
Supposedly, savant-like abilities are due to damages to certain parts of your brain so it can’t perform certain normal functions. If this is true, we won’t have genius savants.
Just an anecdote here - I knew a guy in High School that was very smart, honor student, etc. etc. He would occasionally do things that were totally off the scale, even for the whiz-kid crowd. Once, we were trying to do this computer program in Pascal and it turned out it was a trick question (trick project, whatever), there was no way to do it. The instructor tells us that this problem can only (at that time, mid-eighties) be programmed in Assembly language. So this guy checks out a book on Assembler and learns it overnight. I don’t mean just enough to write the program, the whole language. The teacher verified it the next day.
Coincidentally, this guy was a real egghead, literally. He had an unusually protruding forehead. I always wondered if that had anything to do with it. His sister was a cheerleader, her head was not only normal, but downright attractive.
As amazing as that stuff might be, there are savants that can perform stunts so far beyond the pale as to make Good Will Hunting blush. The most likely explanation is, as Urban Ranger said, damage to the left hemisphere of the brain causing the right hemisphere to ridiculously overcompensate.
One savant I heard about, considered sort of a savant among savants, spends all day in the library memorizing books. Each book takes around 7-10 minutes. He reads both the left and right pages simultaneously, one with each eye. I’d be seriously surprised if even the brightest of the bright could pull that one off.