#savants

PICK A CONTROVERSIAL TAKE FOR ME TO PUBLISH AN ARTICLE ON!!!!!

All of these are titles from my drafts. Which one do you want me to prioritise, Tumblr???

YES, YOU HAVE TO PICK ONE. YOU DO NOT GET TO SCROLL PAST. PICK ONE!!!

Laplace and Lagrange: *expecting harrowing and heroic tales from the war*

Jules-César Savigny (1777-1851)

Savigny worked closely with the artists to supervise preparation of the plates (for Description de l’Egypte). But Savigny was unable to write annotations for the plates. A neurological disorder struck him in the 1820s and made it impossible for him to work, or even be spoken to about work. Although he did not go blind and could read for short periods, he could not tolerate light and had to wear a veil of black netting. A young naturalist, Victor Audouin, who had not been a member of the Egyptian scientific contingent and was not allowed to speak to Savigny, was asked to identify and describe Savigny’s illustrations based on secondary sources and the evidence of the drawings themselves. Savigny was not supposed to be told of this arrangement, but somehow he learned of it. His own copy of the Description de l’Égypte, which has been preserved, is annotated with his many objections and corrections to Audouin’s frequent mistakes. Link

Kim began memorizing books at eighteen months of age as they were read to him. To date he knows nine thousand books by heart and has available recall on all of them. He reads a page in eight to ten seconds, recording the page in his mental hard drive as he goes. He has a wide variety of interests and an encyclopedic knowledge of each, including history, sports, movies, geography, space programs, the Bible, church history, literature, Shakespeare, and classical music. 

He can identify hundreds of classical music compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and his or her biographical details, and discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Further, he can identify the composer of a piece not heard before by assessing the musical style involved and deducing who the composer might be.

In his fifties Peek picked up piano playing, an adjunct to his remarkable memory of music in general. In one meeting he presented the opening of Frederick Smetana’s tone poem “The Moldau” by reducing the flute and clarinet parts to an arpeggio figure in his left hand and introducing the oboe and bassoon parts of the primary theme, playing them in thirds with his right hand while his left continued the arpeggio figures as in the score—and all of this was done by memory. He also has tremendous associative capacities ordinarily missing in savants. 

Kim walks with a peculiar sidelong gait, can’t button his clothes, and can’t attend to simple tasks.

-- Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit

Kim - now 54 - was born with a malformed cerebellum, at the base of his brain, and lacks a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of nerves that normally connects the brain's two hemispheres. As a child he was assumed to be suffering from severe mental retardation. Only later was his condition found to be more complex. He had superb abilities at arithmetic but could not deal with the abstractions of mathematics. In 1988 he was given an IQ rating of 87, well below average. Yet some of his subscores were in the genius bracket, while others plunged into the mentally retarded range.

-- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/11/science.research

When a 44-year-old man from France started experiencing weakness in his leg, he went to the hospital. That's when doctors told him he was missing most of his brain. The man's skull was full of liquid, with just a thin layer of brain tissue left. The condition is known as hydrocephalus.

"He was living a normal life. He has a family. He works. His IQ was tested at the time of his complaint. This came out to be 84, which is slightly below the normal range … So, this person is not bright — but perfectly, socially apt," explains Axel Cleeremans.

Cleeremans is a cognitive psychologist at the Université Libre in Brussels. When he learned about the case, which was first described in The Lancet in 2007, he saw a medical miracle — but also a major challenge to theories about consciousness.

-- https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.3679117/scientists-research-man-missing-90-of-his-brain-who-leads-a-normal-life-1.3679125

Now let me ask you a "no-brainer". Is your brain really necessary? If the answer is a blindingly obvious yes, then you are not familiar with the work of the late Dr John Lorber (1915-1996) professor of paediatrics at Sheffield University. More than 20 years ago the campus doctor at Sheffield University was treating a student of mathematics for a minor ailment. The student was bright, having an IQ of 126. The doctor noticed that the student's head seemed a little larger than normal and he referred him to Dr Lorber for further examination.

Dr Lorber examined the boy's head by Cat-scan to discover that the student had virtually no brain. The normal brain consists of two hemispheres that fill the cranial cavity, some 4.5cm deep. This student had a layer of cerebral tissue less than 1mm deep covering the top of his spinal column. The student had a condition called hydrocephalus in which the cerebrospinal fluid (clear colourless fluid in the spaces in and around the spinal cord and the brain) becomes dammed up in the brain instead of circulating around the brain and spinal cord.