_The r-word_ (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

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> -
>
> 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
> -----

Oh, I'm not disagreeing that some people have some truly wondrous mental
abilities, and that they do it at an intuitive level.  And while many of
these abilities can be reduced to something that you or I could do if we
applied ourselves, sometimes it just appears miraculous.  The brain is a
marvel.

One of my interests is lightning calculators.  (see Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_calculator )
Arthur Benjamin, a math professor at Harvey Mudd College, has trained
himself to do some of these feats, and does them for entertainment (for
select nerd audiences, to be sure).  Here he is at the TED conference:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html


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