Stop Tapping, Damnit
Till the demons come calling for you"
When I was younger my mother used to call me 'Aut Boy,' referring to me being autistic. Jokingly, of course, as I'm not autistic, just inward, quiet, and I used to have a thing for making repetitive noises (tapping on the desk, etc).
I've alway been fascinated by it though, as with all workings of the mind, no doubt a product of my interest in all things computing. I've always been amazed at tales of the "idiot savants" that can calculate 23,000 digits of pi, calculate square roots faster than modern calculators, and count things like nobody's business.
Just recently my interest in autism was triggered again. An article I found interviewed an autistic savant about how it felt to use his gifts with numbers. If you're like me, you 'do math' much like how you count on your fingers, one-by-one, maybe even two-by-two, and then you memorize the result for later use. When we are asked 'What is 5 times 6?' we immediately respond 30 because that's what we've memorized it to be. But the first time we had to do that problem we had to count, by 5's, upward, 6 times. See what I mean?
When this guy is asked the same question, he sees it as a visualization in his head, two objects with their own special shapes, colors, and other properties. These two objects interact, and become a new object. Not as the result of counting. Not a result stored somewhere in long term memory. This is how he performs the square root of numbers essentially without thinking.
This, I find amazing.
But before I go any further I should clarify a bit. Savant behavior is not limited to people with autism, it is only that somewhere around half of people with savant-like abilities have autism. It is also very rare, having only 1% of people with autism exhibiting any sort of savant behavior. Well, here I am rattling off statistics. I don't pretend to know much about autism, especially having my studies limited to my brief flipping through Wikipedia entries.
One thing I can be sure of is that I don't like some of the opinions people have about autism, or even savants for that matter. Above when I mentioned "idiot savants" I put it in quotes for a reason. When I was reading through more articles and things people had to say on the subject, I kept coming across this term. I've always accepted it as just the term for the behavior, but I never really realized that it was pretty derisive. After reading the comments of a person offended by the term, I realized that the term implies that if you aren't a savant, then you're just an idiot.
I also came across multiple comments claiming that savants were the closest thing we have to aliens. Non-human.
This, I got kind of mad about.
Having those abilities, to me, would just be like having double-jointed thumbs. Yes, I could bend my thumbs backward, in addition to the usual forward motion. It is not a defect, just another natural human trait. Its different, yes, but it would make me no less human. We don't consider the mentally handicapped or those born with birth defects to be any less human. Just 'differently abled.'
It is only when we are faced with somebody whose abilities so greatly surpass our own that they are beyond our understanding that we have the need to fear them. To alienate them, to call them something else. Standard-issue human 'fear of the unknown.'
In my mind I think that everyone is a savant. Or at the very least has the ability to be one. Beneath our half-inch thick cranium casing lies the most powerful distributed computing mechanism the world has yet to encounter. It manages thousands of systems simultaneously, controlling not one but multiple levels of consciousness, all collaborating to support the reasoning, thinking animal we pride ourselves to be. Complex mathematical logic, infinitely relational, infinitely extensible information storage, and a learning algorithm that's gotten us through ice ages and world wars.
The hardware is there. We just haven't figured out how to access it. Yet.
I'm not a psychologist, or a neurosurgeon, or even in the medical field. I didn't even know we had a nursing college at my school until this year. As a result, I can't realistically begin to guess as to the 'how' of accessing these undiscovered abilities.
I can, however, venture the 'why' of our inability to discover them thus far. Our school careers are based on teaching us things we don't know. Mostly things that we cannot know, like history and geography, facts and trivia from our respective societies. But I have to wonder if a lot of the mathematical computations we are taught to perform aren't already programmed into us and need only an alternate method to access these functions. Instinctual computation. Human functional abstraction.
Well, just something to think about. Or something I think about. And wish that I could just 'visualize' the work I have to do this week.
- Previous: You Know That Road
- Next: Built to Specification