I contributed a thread a while back about genius, the usual sort of genius. What another type of genius does is really extraordinary and hopefully you will find this as interesting as I do.
You have probably heard of autistic savants. You might recall that these are people who have really extraordinary abilities, but who are usually cursed with some degree of autism and cannot relate socially to other people in a normal manner. I was lucky to see a National Geographic documentary a few nights ago about some of these people in a series called “My Brilliant Brain” (see http://www.nationalgeographic.co.in/.../episodes.aspx for more info). I am sure some members of this site would have seen it also.
There is, still alive today, a blind man - yes, a blind man - Leslie Lemke, who was severely autistic from early childhood but at the age of 16, was found by his stepmother playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 during the middle of the night. He had recently heard the piece on television. This is not your blind Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, God bless them, who can play what they know how to play. Leslie Lemke can play anything after hearing it only once and he never had any lessons. That is definitely a mark of genius. (see wikipedia for more information on him). How does he do it? We have no idea.
Research has been done on another savant - a man, with the phenomenal ability to tell you what the day was for any date you care to give him. Because he is only partially autistic, he could be tested with MRI scans while doing his special thing, and he has a brain which seems to be “hardwired” quite differently from most peoples’. While doing his amazing calculations, he uses the part of the brain that we use for anything related to movement and muscles. He also does incredibly detailed sketch drawings.
This raises, for me, the possibility that maybe the brains of “normal” genuises are also quite different. That is what we would have suspected as obvious, of course, but having proof that some brains just work differently from the normal is interesting.
Genuine savants are incredibly rare: perhaps only 100 of them out of all of us 6 billion. Maybe “ordinary” genuises come somewhere in between the rest of us and the rare savants. Perhaps this is where the Glenn Goulds and Barenboims are. Maybe Mozarts and Beethovens were a little ( or a lot) closer to the autistic savants and their extraordinary abilities.
Another savant, a young boy, 7 years old, named Marc Yu, plays classical music, including works by Beethoven, at an extremely high level. (google youtube and mark yu if you want; there is a lot of him online). An Australian scientist, a Dr Snyder, believes that we may be able to train our normal brains to think like savants. So when we wanted to, we could achieve tremendous feats of intellectual power. Maybe we coud all play the sonatas!
That is food for thought, no? Imagine…
You have probably heard of autistic savants. You might recall that these are people who have really extraordinary abilities, but who are usually cursed with some degree of autism and cannot relate socially to other people in a normal manner. I was lucky to see a National Geographic documentary a few nights ago about some of these people in a series called “My Brilliant Brain” (see http://www.nationalgeographic.co.in/.../episodes.aspx for more info). I am sure some members of this site would have seen it also.
There is, still alive today, a blind man - yes, a blind man - Leslie Lemke, who was severely autistic from early childhood but at the age of 16, was found by his stepmother playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 during the middle of the night. He had recently heard the piece on television. This is not your blind Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, God bless them, who can play what they know how to play. Leslie Lemke can play anything after hearing it only once and he never had any lessons. That is definitely a mark of genius. (see wikipedia for more information on him). How does he do it? We have no idea.
Research has been done on another savant - a man, with the phenomenal ability to tell you what the day was for any date you care to give him. Because he is only partially autistic, he could be tested with MRI scans while doing his special thing, and he has a brain which seems to be “hardwired” quite differently from most peoples’. While doing his amazing calculations, he uses the part of the brain that we use for anything related to movement and muscles. He also does incredibly detailed sketch drawings.
This raises, for me, the possibility that maybe the brains of “normal” genuises are also quite different. That is what we would have suspected as obvious, of course, but having proof that some brains just work differently from the normal is interesting.
Genuine savants are incredibly rare: perhaps only 100 of them out of all of us 6 billion. Maybe “ordinary” genuises come somewhere in between the rest of us and the rare savants. Perhaps this is where the Glenn Goulds and Barenboims are. Maybe Mozarts and Beethovens were a little ( or a lot) closer to the autistic savants and their extraordinary abilities.
Another savant, a young boy, 7 years old, named Marc Yu, plays classical music, including works by Beethoven, at an extremely high level. (google youtube and mark yu if you want; there is a lot of him online). An Australian scientist, a Dr Snyder, believes that we may be able to train our normal brains to think like savants. So when we wanted to, we could achieve tremendous feats of intellectual power. Maybe we coud all play the sonatas!
That is food for thought, no? Imagine…
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