_The r-word_ (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Jonathan Lighter]

Phil Donahue had a show about idiot-savants (as even a psychologist and the
super-diplomatic Donahue called them) close to twenty years ago.

One did the math stuff, one could recall the weather on each day of his
life,  another could play a complex neoclassical piano concerto after
hearing the composer play it once live on TV, and one could whittle
incredibly realistic animals from  block of woof while the others were
doing the above.

The theory is/was that the savants' condition enables/compels them to focus
almost all of their attention on one extremely narrow galaxy of
information, like math and musical relationships or the weather.  It wasn't
clear to me whether their memory for ordinary things is impaired.

JL

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 12:37 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: _The r-word_ (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 11:32 PM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
> <Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
> > You don't have to be a savant to do this particular parlor trick.
>
> True. But nobody taught or could teach that to the twins and they
> don't have the intellectual capacity to have figured it out for
> themselves. Like, these women can just about count to ten. What's
> interesting about such otherly-intelligenced people is not that no one
> else can do what they can do, but that they can do what they do
> without having any concept of how it's done, with no appreciation of
> what they're doing, having had no training or teaching of any kind,
> and often, they are able to do very little else. The twins, aside from
> their savantism, are, standardly, the intellectual equivalents of
> eight-year-olds.
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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