This caught my eye on my home page today and raised a question for me. Maybe some of you have an idea about it.
Shakuntala Devi was born the daughter of a trapeze artist/lion tamer in Bangalore, India. According to her obituary her amazing gift was discovered at an early age. Circumstances of her birth raise a suspicion of the possibility of showmanship involved but I also know that people exist who do have this ability.
It is said that in 1977 at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, Shakuntala extracted the twenty-third root of a two-hundred and one digit number in fifty seconds. The Univac computer with which she was competing took sixty-two seconds.
So I’m thinking. This cannot be a thought process. That would take too long, wouldn’t it? It must be something more like instinct. And I’m wondering if she would be able to explain the steps she went through to obtain her answer.
Savants. No, they can’t usually explain what they are doing. Many them might not even have the ability to explain what their own name is or what a toilet is used for, let alone explain their though processes. Maybe not her, but the vast majority are profoundly impaired in some way.
Some of it is truly extraordinary. Some, like calendar memorization, might be taught to someone normal once they know the “tricks.” E.g. the same day of the week in the previous year is Tuesday if today is Wednesday. Stretching out farther and accounting for leap years, one can do decently well. Also, IIRC many calendar counting savants perform poorly if you ask them to predict future years.
I’m hoping others will speculate here. I suppose our resident neurologists are busy writing books or something. It sounds like this woman was of average or above average intelligence. It doesn’t say anything about her coping skills, though.
Has anyone here encountered someone like this? I personally know of three.
I had just run into one of them serendipitously shortly before I read the article. Hadn’t seen him for several decades but nothing about him had changed except he had gotten older and heavier.
When I went back to college I was cooking in a half-way house for mostly elderly mentally-ill/chemically dependent men. He was one of our clientele. Never said much but was able to carry on a conversation if encouraged.
His hobby was playing chess with people by mail. Postcards would arrive with just a short note saying where his opponent had moved a piece and he’d send one back. He received quite a few each week. I don’t know how many games he had going at once. Many.
I asked where his chess boards were set up and was told, “In his head.”
I know one, and like your example, he’s a chess savant, along with other neat talents. He’s worked for about twenty years at the large retail store where I work (myself nearly twenty years), and has always been in the same department: paint/hardware. He’s capable of good customer service and such, is a good and dependable associate, and impeccable with with color matching, paint mixing, and measuring/cutting. Worth his weight in gold just for his color/paint skills, so he’s got a secure job for the rest of his life. He comes across very oddly in social interaction, speaks atonally, and he lives in an assisted living facility; he spooks new customers and new hires, but is beloved by people who’ve got a history of working with him.
He does scribbling motions in the air all the time, and it transpired that he was playing chess on an imaginary board, trying various strategies, and often playing his opponents’ future strategies as well. He’s usually playing dozens of variations of a single game at a time. He’s visualizing and playing multiple games in the air while he’s waiting for a paint can to finish being agitated. His big outlet outside of work turns out to be long-distance chess with several dozen-to-hundred people simultaneously, all kept in his head, and worked out in his spare time. It’s kind of interesting how he seems to get a feel for how others play and can play himself as they would, and he can get really frustrated when he’s getting beaten by “them,” even when “their” plays are those coming from his own mind. Watching him play is interesting. He’ll sit at lunch with a chess board playing both sides, and he’ll make moves for his opponent then say something like “oh, I never saw that” or “not what I’d have done.” I don’t know if he’s capable of integrating the strategies he learns from channeling others into his own play, but he’s definitely capable of recognizing them as superior/inferior to his own. The long-term associates are pretty defensive of him; when new hires mock his air scribbling, everyone jumps in… “he’s playing chess. He’ll destroy you in a game.” It’s his life, and his primary method of interacting with people.
He also has been prolifically published as a writer of recipes and wins cook-off contests with alarming regularity. It’s kind of an odd contrast to see him at a stove whipping up a meal for a contest, but pretty cool. Dude can cook, bake, can, and do pretty much anything else involving heat and edible things better than anyone I’ve ever met.
I’ve been checking out some various sites including your Wiki reference. It says the condition is called a syndrome but is not considered a mental disorder. Other sites refer to it as such. Looks like there is going to have to be more discussion on the issue?
If a person is a genius in one area and barely able to care for himself in another what other condition could it be than a mental one given he is of sound body?
It sounds like a combination of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with an almost supernatural tapping into obscure information. Where does it come from? How do they know? It doesn’t seem to be the result of intensive study for some.
Interesting story, Student Driver.
When my daughter cooked for a local hotel she made friends with the dishwasher who was also an interesting person. He could remember minute details of his life on any given day - the weather, what happened, and so forth. The kitchen staff used to quiz him on various happenings and found that he was accurate. He came into work one morning and said, “You know, I don’t understand why my mother can’t remember the day we got the washer and dryer. I don’t see how that can be.” Then he went on in some detail about that day. No checking on whether he was making it up as he went though everyone who worked with him was impressed.
He also seemed to have a low frustration tolerance and had a unique method for dealing with stress. Seems he had worked selling tickets at a tourist site in MN where they put on a pageant for three weeks in the summer that told the story of Hiawatha.
She said when his workload built up and he needed to concentrate he would begin to recite all the roles of the pageant by heart and that could last for over an hour.
I think he was accepted as a part of the crew and participated as much in being so as he was able. But one day the prep cooks were talking about the film Rain Man and decided to test him with the counting toothpicks test. They tossed a box on the floor and asked him how many he thought there were.
She said he was justifiably disgusted with them. “How the heck should I know; you scattered them all over the place.”
As awesome as chess is and as cool as it would be to hang out with that guy…
I think here was a word we used to use for people who behave like that - universally accepted before the PC brigade - and that word was “crazy.”
No one ever said crazy was necessarily bad though…