This is lovely. I can't wait to hear the rest of the story.
It gave me lots of bittersweet nostalgia to my early childhood when everyone was excited beyond words about what a genius I allegedly was, and had about three complete timelines of my life scripted out for me, from primary school to grave, only I pissed it all away to become a foul- mouthed loser with a trucker husband and a hog farm.
My husband set down a hard pass on goats. He grew up with them and learned to absolutely detest them and their smell.
Chickens are good to learn on. We have about 2 dozen Rhode Island/Leghorn hybrids but I'm experimenting with Jersey Giants this spring since we have lots of space for free ranging and they look really impressive.
Cattle and hogs I can handle. We all know what each other is about. And they're delicious.
"I pissed it all away to become a foul- mouthed loser with a trucker husband and a hog farm" I feel that. <3 Oh well. But you already well know that keeping up with the Joneses isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The existential angst of the "high potential individual" comes not from necessarily keeping up with the Joneses in a materialistic way but from the internal voice of an angry god that is going to punish you for having wasted your exemplary gifts by not becoming a cardiologist or nuclear engineer.
Contrary to what our parents told us (because they were told to tell us), you cannot be anything and everything you put your mind to. There are a ridiculously large number of humans now, and the overwhelming majority of us possess neither the ability, opportunity, or luck to accomplish anything significant (and you need all three). All but a miniscule minority are going to live very ordinary, small lives.
I feel like an anorexic. No matter how much I study I feel undereducated, like the intellectual equivalent of a fat person. Because I could not get into a good college for a long time for reasons that had nothing to do with my grades or even my level of poverty, I have been forcing myself to study and I feel incredibly guilty whenever I read a fiction book or watch a movie or write a fan fiction or do anything for fun. If I can't get a degree I want to at least know more than people that do have a degree. Yet I can't concentrate so I end up doing a lot of that crap anyway. And in 2020 I got panic attacks, probably due partly to mercury poisoning and partly to being medicated all the time because I'm ADHD and my brain doesn't work for shit unless I'm high.
I’ve also got ADHD and am obsessed with learning information. Not to compare myself to others though - just that I find some topics too engaging to leave alone. The Scamdemic has been a particularly unhealthy topic of obsession.
What Guttermouth says is right - we should be learning more skills and less info. I’m trying to expand my skills in the kitchen of late, in order to be more useful.
Cooking and growing food is one of the best things any of us can learn, practically and psychologically. It will concretely change our relationship to our immediate environment.
The other two biggest skills I advocate cultivating are fixing bodies (first aid, emergency care, and basic pharma) and fixing things (maintaining the vehicles, appliances, and structures you own), in the order that interests you most. These, also, have a profound impact on your active and passive thinking about your relationship to the environment- people and technology cease to be black boxes.
Lastly, learn to shoot, and fight armed or unarmed. It will change your relationship to your own body and its capabilities and teach you about active and passive power.
Thank you. I know a fair bit about the body, though I could probably do a first aid refresher course. I know nothing about machines, lol. Have a few men around me who know them well and I must admit I’ve taken advantage of their generous help in that regard. I did pay attention today when someone changed my tires for me though!
I’m Australian so don’t get a great deal of shooting practice! My bf does have a gun though which I’ve tried out on his rural property. I would like to learn how to use someone’s power against them in some kind of martial art, that is a good point. Thank you.
Worry about accomplishing something. Stop chasing elitists. I hear a ton of very detailed explanations as to why you can't do this and that. People seem to like telling long stories explaining their limitations.
I'm more interested in what you CAN do, and what you intend to do about it.
Didn't the man say, genius is 99% exasperation and 1% desperation? Something like that. And look at what happened to him... even the penniless rival savant who mocked his pig-headedness is now a mere logo for some bullshit corporation.
You're a bright thread in this big tapestry, and we appreciate you for it. I don't give a damn whether that's good enough for you, but there it is.
Feb 2, 2022·edited Feb 2, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
Very interesting and it may interest you to know one of the ACT tests had a question on the quadratic expansion process of multiplication. As for memory i have known 2 people in my life with true total recall. In high school at the Donoho Academy (Anniston Academy at the time) we had a fellow student who I got to know pretty well. The first day of school he brought no books to school. We had 7 classes and he and I were in all but one together. I asked where his books were and he said he looked at them the night before and did not need them any more. I said - What??? and he said he remembered them. In disbelief I opened book after book and could flip to any page and as long as I gave him the page number he could recite every word on the page. I tested him will all the books. Throughout the year he never brought the books - even when we took turns reading Hamlet in class - he read his parts verbatim with only a clean sheet of paper in front of him. He was quite remarkable.
The next one was really interesting. I was working in a truck shop changing tires and servicing transfer trucks. I had to get the mileage off of every truck on the yard every day. It could range from 20-100 trucks. The mileage was always 6 digits. I noticed this other guy who worked fueling the trucks every day and he had to get the trucks and pull them over and fuel them and record the mileage and how much fuel he would put in them which would range from 50-150 gallons and oil which could range from none to 3 quarts. The truck numbers were 4 digits. He would fuel 30-50 trucks and never write anything down and then go sit in the break room and write it all down. Since I also had the mileage I tested him to see if he really remembered them. I could go back a year or so and if I gave him the date he knew the numbers - all of them. However he said he had to look at a calendar every day to know when something occurred. That gave him a refernce point. He remembered everything he saw.
For number crunching i had one friend who computed cube roots in his head with great efficiency. I tested him with a calculator and he never missed and could compute decimals as far as I could check him.
Congrats on all your number computation techniques. I have developed several myself that are similar but as you said - if you do not practice it regularly it slips away. I still find it more interesting to spot patterns if possible. I am already looking forward to the next episode:) Thanks again for the enormous amount of work you have done and thanks for sharing it.
One skill I developed in high school was reading upside down and that was quite easy and then about 15 years ago I taught myself to write upside down so that I could sit across the table and work math problems for the students I work with. I worked on cursive but it took a little more effort and once I got to where I could do a little I quit trying to expand it. I can work math problems almost as fast upside down as normal and I can read at the same speed either way.:)
I suspect that a lot of memory feats are about association and context. I bet you remember a lot of numbers better that are associated with all the magnets you engineer. A lot of the memory feats are not much different, except in scale. There is something called the "Palace technique" (may go by other names) where the memorizer recreates the same palace/house over and over, knowing the rooms well. They memorize objects or words or whatever by placing them in the various rooms in the palace. This probably creates reinforced RAM by exciting more neurons to a threshold.
Interestingly these 2 people had total photographic memory. They did not read the words they memorized the images. You could see the first guy looking like he was looking at something he was reading while he was reading but there wasn't anything there:) My daughter Stephanie has I guess you would say an audiographic memory. She knows all the words to every song she has heard. She can start in the middle or the end - all she needs is a word and she knows the rest of it.
As you mentioned a lot of it is mental tricks and my brother developed his own way to remember all the zip codes in the US and all the areas covered by them. When he worked in the rate department at a trucking company it was very helpful but after that - not much use:).
An interesting point on that. I take Lyrica (an anti-epileptic) for fibromyalgia. My doc gave me free reign to find whatever dose suited me best, so I naturally went to the dose where I felt no pain at all. Unfortunately I realised I wasn’t driving straight and was way too agreeable in that state (and put on too much weight!). At that high dosage I also found word-finding when speaking really difficult (I naturally have a bit of a problem with this but it was very exaggerated), but I found I knew lyrics to songs I never thought I knew. I could sing them super fluently and easily (when often I might muck up a few lines per song), and knew words I didn’t know I had memorised.
That went away as I lowered the dose. I figured perhaps my right temporal lobe is over-active. I’ve always been able to go the auditory version of visualise very easily - it’s as though the song is playing in the environment, just very quietly. But it was interesting how the medication changed it. Particularly interesting that the medicine is called Lyrica - I wonder if there is a connection!
This reminded me a lot of my own high school years, where I memorized entire plays, took all of my notes in mirror handwriting, and derived geometric formulas in the margins of my papers. I was never focused enough on the math part to learn the tricks that you describe, but that's definitely something that would have been within my capacity as an above-average non-genius.
It is sad and frustrating to see how the downstream effects of corruption can be so huge. So much time, money and brainpower wasted on research that is built on a flawed foundation, or on fixing problems that already had a solution, but the solution was quashed due to someone's ego or pocketbook.
I'm always intrigued by memory. I've played a ton of golf, and if I pick up a scorecard, look at the date, and really think about the day, I can remember all the shots from that round. But, I can't remember what I had for dinner 10 days ago.
P.S. Your childhood trauma experience has provided you unique insight. (Mine has as well in this whole medical dealio, in a slightly different way. Covid-19 is maybe my fourth ride on the rodeo...) This is important. A headline recently came out that childhood trauma is associated with "vaccine hesitancy." Damned straight, and that's not a bad thing.
Oh that doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. This is all way too much like being in an abusive relationship with a narcissist. I worked too hard on self sovereignty to just roll over and have it taken by the government!
Fascinating article, Mathew, especially since I used to be a big fan of Daniel Tammet. I *loved* his book, “Born on a Blue Day,” and frequently recommended and gave copies of it as gifts. And then I read “Moonwalking with Einstein,” which exposes the very trickery you describe in this article. Tammet evaded certain tests of his skills by saying he had promised his dead mother he would never be a performing monkey, but then of course he’s perfectly comfortable doing so with tasks he’s prepared for. I was severely disappointed to discover the possibility that he is a fraud, but I still love “Born on a Blue Day” if I think of it as fiction.
I’m so old that I took a “business math” class where we were taught to do calculations in our head. I got my first hand-held calculator—a Sperry, which I still have somewhere in the basement—as a junior. My physics teacher had to take a look. The math skills I learned lasted for years. Likely destroyed when I got a watch with a calculator. Now it’s difficult to add simple digits in my head.
My husband's cousin is one of those language people. She works for the Foreign Service. She speaks English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Swedish.
I don’t have this, but there is a pretty short fiction book about a girl finding out she has it – both spacial and numbers and colors. It is called A Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass.
The Association for Research and Enlightenment. There is a lawsuit going on right now that may bring the organization down, so I'm going to stop talking about it right there.
I have an audio-visual disorder that makes me effectively dyslexic, so I'm aware that people do sometimes have unusual "wiring". Everything that is unusual and difficult to understand has the potential to be gamed in an overly standardized world.
There's no need to be. I'm enjoying life, the people in it, and finding constant fascination with so many things that I cannot imagine feeling sorry for it. I feel very lucky.
Without doing any research on that group it immediately conjured up memory of the old TV show The Pretenders and other examples of adults taking advantage of children.
Yes genius is enjoying something so much you come to fundamentally understand its very nature. Once you have this knowledge you can manipulate it to make it look like magic.
I myself have had problems during lfe, since child, by never meating anybody, in schools, university, including teachers, and other places, that among knews as much as I concerning, mathematick (400 books), history, engines, Universe, and much more, but now i Stive Kirch there I meet persons who also knows much about Covid-19, virusses (maybe 600 or 700 books).
But concerning mathematick, while reading the artickel I remembered Ramanujan, from India, only interesting in Mathematic, and who came to Hardy and Littlewood in London before the 1 War, after they had read his letter (no anser from 2 letter to other professors). By self study, Ramanujan had needed to invent mathematical signs, and Hardy and Littlewood had to speculate. Hardy later said that he himself only had the number 60 in mathematic while Ramanujan was 100. He died only 33 years old, way back in India. But in parallel to concerning numbers only divisible by themselfe and 1, then when Hardy one day visited Ramanujan in a hospital and told that he came in a taxy with the number 1729. Then Ramujan answered back "A special number as this is the lowes number which 2 times has the sum of 2 third exponent numbers the 1^3 + 12^3 and 9^3 + 10^3. And it took half a year before it was prowed.
Fabulous article. Your skills are fascinating. Brings back memories of returning home from high school only to do math homework immediately afterwards. More, please.
I was interested in math as a young person, and I wish I had had a teacher like you, because I think I might have enjoyed learning to do the kinds of computations you described above. To be sure, as an adult, I have thought very little about math and forgot a lot of what I learned as a child. But I do have a tiny parlor trick that impressed my husband when we were first dating. I grew up in Mexico, where we used the decimal system. When my husband and I would go out to eat, he would struggle to calculate the 15% tip. Because I was familiar with the decimal system, I could calculate it in seconds, by moving over the decimal point so I had 10%, dividing that by 2 then adding half for 15%. It’s easy to calculate any percentages this way. It seemed impressive to him, but it’s really just a trick. And now my decidedly non-math inclined husband can do it too with very little thought. This is a way less complicated example of the principle you illustrate in your essay, but it helped me to extrapolate the principle to the calculations you were explaining, given the ease that I have with percentages, when I’m really not very good with numbers or math at this point in my life. And it’s only because of my understanding of the relationship between the decimal system and percentages. Great essay and fun read! Thank you.
The film Rain Man was an interesting one and with the right acters. But concerning memori some children are born with ability only one time to hear or see something fore storing in memori, now a days we connected to the autism have seen som cases, but often only concerning one topic. We have seen a person who after just one time oround in Londen, then at home draw a detailed 3 dimenional drawing of af big center part of London, as drawn while sitting in an airplaine. And parallel to Mozart, as we se in films, after just one time hearing another persons complete music number, then himself played it, and corrected it. And parallel to a family, I think it was in London, with their son to a concert, and after this asked for a copy of the notebook, but denied, Then at home, the son jost wroute it down! And concerning mathematical and numbers - or the famous words "Don't disturb me in my Circles", and then was killed, 82 years old - we for excample had Poul Erdoes, about whom I 16 years ago wroute the book Paul Hoffman: "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers". But when it comes to brain and remembering something which not should know by the actual person, then we had the strange case with Edgar Cayce. He, never educated, in trance could tell recept for curing sick persons. In some cases, of his brain came out old discoveries by doctors, but which had been firgotten. Is this telepathy? One person wroute that a cousin knew 6 languages, and parallel to this we had a Polish mathematic person, who talked 32 anguage. Before a left side skull fracture, I talked 4 languages, but after 12 days again waking up from being in another World, with normal communication to my friens, I have been told, then monday the 27th of May years ago, I had lost all languages, and only bad relearned 2, but can't relearn the beatifull French language.
The language alone makes me expect so much more, but these tricks only entertain those that lack education or interest in math. This is why virology is claimed to have saved lives, even though it just made up reasons for existing disease, but never really cured them.
I'm a certified dumbass, and I have never been able to memorize my wife's phone number (which is 6 digits, not 7 because we don't live in the USA) even though I see it on my screen every day. Therefore, I cannot speak to memorizing numbers or calculating tricks.
What I can talk about is the kid learning languages (I saw the documentary years ago). Icelandic isn't particularly complex, but it is rather grammatically dense in that it uses noun cases as WELL AS all the other things many European languages have such as grammatical genders (often more than just two) and stricter rules on verb tenses.
For a native English speaker, these are some pretty tough concepts to get your head around. A sentence like "a man rides a horse" and "the horse is ridden by a man" use two different forms of the word "man" and "horse," for instance.
Did this kid Daniel know any other languages beforehand? Did he memorize a grammar book or read a text outlining basic Icelandic sentence structure? We don't know. All we see is him chatting by a geyser with the audio muted and glancing at a book in the library.
But I will say this - if you know ONE language with noun cases (and grammatical genders, et al), it's a whole lot easier to learn a second one.
However, what clearly set this kid apart is that he is doing an EXCELLENT job of pronouncing Icelandic, regardless of how good his grammar, sentence structure, fluency, et al, is. It's fucking phenomenal, actually. And there's no book in the world that'll teach you how to "hear" a language well enough to mimic it, even if it doesn't have any new sounds.
I mention this because - again, I am definitely not a genius. I am learning my fifth language (Russian) at the moment. Just the other day, a lovely woman at the pharmacy told me I speak it "excellently," which I certainly do not.
What I AM good at, however, is a combination of a) pronouncing it well and b) using memorized stock phrases and grammatically simple sentences. And the reason I'm even halfway good at is that I've been learning foreign languages since I was a kid, including one with noun cases (Russian has 7 of them).
In other words, if you dolled me up and said I was a genius, I could go on a Russian TV show and "dazzle" them with my Russian, even though I can't even read a children's book without help. On the other hand, just the other day, I saw a report from an American who lives in Donbass, and his Russian was far superior, except that he spoke it with an atrocious "foreign accent" that would be described as "thick" if it were in English.
People can do all kinds of things that seem whizbang cool. Doesn't mean they're geniuses. Pretty sure Einstein was the one who said it's 99% perspiration, not "inborn talent gifted by God."
This is lovely. I can't wait to hear the rest of the story.
It gave me lots of bittersweet nostalgia to my early childhood when everyone was excited beyond words about what a genius I allegedly was, and had about three complete timelines of my life scripted out for me, from primary school to grave, only I pissed it all away to become a foul- mouthed loser with a trucker husband and a hog farm.
For the moment, I prefer goats and chickens. We'll see how that reality shifts according to the chosen land.
My husband set down a hard pass on goats. He grew up with them and learned to absolutely detest them and their smell.
Chickens are good to learn on. We have about 2 dozen Rhode Island/Leghorn hybrids but I'm experimenting with Jersey Giants this spring since we have lots of space for free ranging and they look really impressive.
Cattle and hogs I can handle. We all know what each other is about. And they're delicious.
"I pissed it all away to become a foul- mouthed loser with a trucker husband and a hog farm" I feel that. <3 Oh well. But you already well know that keeping up with the Joneses isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The existential angst of the "high potential individual" comes not from necessarily keeping up with the Joneses in a materialistic way but from the internal voice of an angry god that is going to punish you for having wasted your exemplary gifts by not becoming a cardiologist or nuclear engineer.
Contrary to what our parents told us (because they were told to tell us), you cannot be anything and everything you put your mind to. There are a ridiculously large number of humans now, and the overwhelming majority of us possess neither the ability, opportunity, or luck to accomplish anything significant (and you need all three). All but a miniscule minority are going to live very ordinary, small lives.
I feel like an anorexic. No matter how much I study I feel undereducated, like the intellectual equivalent of a fat person. Because I could not get into a good college for a long time for reasons that had nothing to do with my grades or even my level of poverty, I have been forcing myself to study and I feel incredibly guilty whenever I read a fiction book or watch a movie or write a fan fiction or do anything for fun. If I can't get a degree I want to at least know more than people that do have a degree. Yet I can't concentrate so I end up doing a lot of that crap anyway. And in 2020 I got panic attacks, probably due partly to mercury poisoning and partly to being medicated all the time because I'm ADHD and my brain doesn't work for shit unless I'm high.
I’ve also got ADHD and am obsessed with learning information. Not to compare myself to others though - just that I find some topics too engaging to leave alone. The Scamdemic has been a particularly unhealthy topic of obsession.
What Guttermouth says is right - we should be learning more skills and less info. I’m trying to expand my skills in the kitchen of late, in order to be more useful.
Cooking and growing food is one of the best things any of us can learn, practically and psychologically. It will concretely change our relationship to our immediate environment.
The other two biggest skills I advocate cultivating are fixing bodies (first aid, emergency care, and basic pharma) and fixing things (maintaining the vehicles, appliances, and structures you own), in the order that interests you most. These, also, have a profound impact on your active and passive thinking about your relationship to the environment- people and technology cease to be black boxes.
Lastly, learn to shoot, and fight armed or unarmed. It will change your relationship to your own body and its capabilities and teach you about active and passive power.
Thank you. I know a fair bit about the body, though I could probably do a first aid refresher course. I know nothing about machines, lol. Have a few men around me who know them well and I must admit I’ve taken advantage of their generous help in that regard. I did pay attention today when someone changed my tires for me though!
I’m Australian so don’t get a great deal of shooting practice! My bf does have a gun though which I’ve tried out on his rural property. I would like to learn how to use someone’s power against them in some kind of martial art, that is a good point. Thank you.
Worry about accomplishing something. Stop chasing elitists. I hear a ton of very detailed explanations as to why you can't do this and that. People seem to like telling long stories explaining their limitations.
I'm more interested in what you CAN do, and what you intend to do about it.
Guttermouth - lol! I was actually just thinking about how life has not gone the way I thought it would.
I started to feel sorry for myself but I don't want to go down that path.
I am 99% regret and 1% coffee.
Didn't the man say, genius is 99% exasperation and 1% desperation? Something like that. And look at what happened to him... even the penniless rival savant who mocked his pig-headedness is now a mere logo for some bullshit corporation.
You're a bright thread in this big tapestry, and we appreciate you for it. I don't give a damn whether that's good enough for you, but there it is.
Very interesting and it may interest you to know one of the ACT tests had a question on the quadratic expansion process of multiplication. As for memory i have known 2 people in my life with true total recall. In high school at the Donoho Academy (Anniston Academy at the time) we had a fellow student who I got to know pretty well. The first day of school he brought no books to school. We had 7 classes and he and I were in all but one together. I asked where his books were and he said he looked at them the night before and did not need them any more. I said - What??? and he said he remembered them. In disbelief I opened book after book and could flip to any page and as long as I gave him the page number he could recite every word on the page. I tested him will all the books. Throughout the year he never brought the books - even when we took turns reading Hamlet in class - he read his parts verbatim with only a clean sheet of paper in front of him. He was quite remarkable.
The next one was really interesting. I was working in a truck shop changing tires and servicing transfer trucks. I had to get the mileage off of every truck on the yard every day. It could range from 20-100 trucks. The mileage was always 6 digits. I noticed this other guy who worked fueling the trucks every day and he had to get the trucks and pull them over and fuel them and record the mileage and how much fuel he would put in them which would range from 50-150 gallons and oil which could range from none to 3 quarts. The truck numbers were 4 digits. He would fuel 30-50 trucks and never write anything down and then go sit in the break room and write it all down. Since I also had the mileage I tested him to see if he really remembered them. I could go back a year or so and if I gave him the date he knew the numbers - all of them. However he said he had to look at a calendar every day to know when something occurred. That gave him a refernce point. He remembered everything he saw.
For number crunching i had one friend who computed cube roots in his head with great efficiency. I tested him with a calculator and he never missed and could compute decimals as far as I could check him.
Congrats on all your number computation techniques. I have developed several myself that are similar but as you said - if you do not practice it regularly it slips away. I still find it more interesting to spot patterns if possible. I am already looking forward to the next episode:) Thanks again for the enormous amount of work you have done and thanks for sharing it.
One skill I developed in high school was reading upside down and that was quite easy and then about 15 years ago I taught myself to write upside down so that I could sit across the table and work math problems for the students I work with. I worked on cursive but it took a little more effort and once I got to where I could do a little I quit trying to expand it. I can work math problems almost as fast upside down as normal and I can read at the same speed either way.:)
Hi George.
I suspect that a lot of memory feats are about association and context. I bet you remember a lot of numbers better that are associated with all the magnets you engineer. A lot of the memory feats are not much different, except in scale. There is something called the "Palace technique" (may go by other names) where the memorizer recreates the same palace/house over and over, knowing the rooms well. They memorize objects or words or whatever by placing them in the various rooms in the palace. This probably creates reinforced RAM by exciting more neurons to a threshold.
Interestingly these 2 people had total photographic memory. They did not read the words they memorized the images. You could see the first guy looking like he was looking at something he was reading while he was reading but there wasn't anything there:) My daughter Stephanie has I guess you would say an audiographic memory. She knows all the words to every song she has heard. She can start in the middle or the end - all she needs is a word and she knows the rest of it.
As you mentioned a lot of it is mental tricks and my brother developed his own way to remember all the zip codes in the US and all the areas covered by them. When he worked in the rate department at a trucking company it was very helpful but after that - not much use:).
An interesting point on that. I take Lyrica (an anti-epileptic) for fibromyalgia. My doc gave me free reign to find whatever dose suited me best, so I naturally went to the dose where I felt no pain at all. Unfortunately I realised I wasn’t driving straight and was way too agreeable in that state (and put on too much weight!). At that high dosage I also found word-finding when speaking really difficult (I naturally have a bit of a problem with this but it was very exaggerated), but I found I knew lyrics to songs I never thought I knew. I could sing them super fluently and easily (when often I might muck up a few lines per song), and knew words I didn’t know I had memorised.
That went away as I lowered the dose. I figured perhaps my right temporal lobe is over-active. I’ve always been able to go the auditory version of visualise very easily - it’s as though the song is playing in the environment, just very quietly. But it was interesting how the medication changed it. Particularly interesting that the medicine is called Lyrica - I wonder if there is a connection!
Wow that is fascinating. I haven't ever heard of anything like that.
This reminded me a lot of my own high school years, where I memorized entire plays, took all of my notes in mirror handwriting, and derived geometric formulas in the margins of my papers. I was never focused enough on the math part to learn the tricks that you describe, but that's definitely something that would have been within my capacity as an above-average non-genius.
It is sad and frustrating to see how the downstream effects of corruption can be so huge. So much time, money and brainpower wasted on research that is built on a flawed foundation, or on fixing problems that already had a solution, but the solution was quashed due to someone's ego or pocketbook.
I'm always intrigued by memory. I've played a ton of golf, and if I pick up a scorecard, look at the date, and really think about the day, I can remember all the shots from that round. But, I can't remember what I had for dinner 10 days ago.
Interesting read.
Context = neuronal excitement = memory
Enjoy your 18 holes.
Great piece. <3 It actually reminds me of something my late husband wrote years ago. It's an enjoyable read and I think you will be able to identify with this. :) https://robbservations.blogspot.com/2010/10/re-wiring-brain.html
P.S. Your childhood trauma experience has provided you unique insight. (Mine has as well in this whole medical dealio, in a slightly different way. Covid-19 is maybe my fourth ride on the rodeo...) This is important. A headline recently came out that childhood trauma is associated with "vaccine hesitancy." Damned straight, and that's not a bad thing.
Oh that doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. This is all way too much like being in an abusive relationship with a narcissist. I worked too hard on self sovereignty to just roll over and have it taken by the government!
Fascinating article, Mathew, especially since I used to be a big fan of Daniel Tammet. I *loved* his book, “Born on a Blue Day,” and frequently recommended and gave copies of it as gifts. And then I read “Moonwalking with Einstein,” which exposes the very trickery you describe in this article. Tammet evaded certain tests of his skills by saying he had promised his dead mother he would never be a performing monkey, but then of course he’s perfectly comfortable doing so with tasks he’s prepared for. I was severely disappointed to discover the possibility that he is a fraud, but I still love “Born on a Blue Day” if I think of it as fiction.
In part 2, I think I get to give a unique review of Moonwalking with Einstein. Great participatory journalism.
Intriguing!
I’m so old that I took a “business math” class where we were taught to do calculations in our head. I got my first hand-held calculator—a Sperry, which I still have somewhere in the basement—as a junior. My physics teacher had to take a look. The math skills I learned lasted for years. Likely destroyed when I got a watch with a calculator. Now it’s difficult to add simple digits in my head.
I find it harder to use a calculator than to do stuff in my head. I’m too lazy to push the buttons.
Response from a language arts lady:
What cult? Tell me more. And sorry. A cult?
My husband's cousin is one of those language people. She works for the Foreign Service. She speaks English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Swedish.
What a fascinating read. Thank you.
http://www.synesthesiatest.org/
I follow this blogger. The comments are interesting.
https://www.thefrugalgirl.com/spatial-sequence-synesthesia/
ex:
Rachel
October 28, 2014 at 11:53 AM
I don’t have this, but there is a pretty short fiction book about a girl finding out she has it – both spacial and numbers and colors. It is called A Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass.
"What cult?"
The Association for Research and Enlightenment. There is a lawsuit going on right now that may bring the organization down, so I'm going to stop talking about it right there.
I have an audio-visual disorder that makes me effectively dyslexic, so I'm aware that people do sometimes have unusual "wiring". Everything that is unusual and difficult to understand has the potential to be gamed in an overly standardized world.
OH. Oh, I'm very sorry.
There's no need to be. I'm enjoying life, the people in it, and finding constant fascination with so many things that I cannot imagine feeling sorry for it. I feel very lucky.
Without doing any research on that group it immediately conjured up memory of the old TV show The Pretenders and other examples of adults taking advantage of children.
Yes genius is enjoying something so much you come to fundamentally understand its very nature. Once you have this knowledge you can manipulate it to make it look like magic.
I myself have had problems during lfe, since child, by never meating anybody, in schools, university, including teachers, and other places, that among knews as much as I concerning, mathematick (400 books), history, engines, Universe, and much more, but now i Stive Kirch there I meet persons who also knows much about Covid-19, virusses (maybe 600 or 700 books).
But concerning mathematick, while reading the artickel I remembered Ramanujan, from India, only interesting in Mathematic, and who came to Hardy and Littlewood in London before the 1 War, after they had read his letter (no anser from 2 letter to other professors). By self study, Ramanujan had needed to invent mathematical signs, and Hardy and Littlewood had to speculate. Hardy later said that he himself only had the number 60 in mathematic while Ramanujan was 100. He died only 33 years old, way back in India. But in parallel to concerning numbers only divisible by themselfe and 1, then when Hardy one day visited Ramanujan in a hospital and told that he came in a taxy with the number 1729. Then Ramujan answered back "A special number as this is the lowes number which 2 times has the sum of 2 third exponent numbers the 1^3 + 12^3 and 9^3 + 10^3. And it took half a year before it was prowed.
Fabulous article. Your skills are fascinating. Brings back memories of returning home from high school only to do math homework immediately afterwards. More, please.
I was interested in math as a young person, and I wish I had had a teacher like you, because I think I might have enjoyed learning to do the kinds of computations you described above. To be sure, as an adult, I have thought very little about math and forgot a lot of what I learned as a child. But I do have a tiny parlor trick that impressed my husband when we were first dating. I grew up in Mexico, where we used the decimal system. When my husband and I would go out to eat, he would struggle to calculate the 15% tip. Because I was familiar with the decimal system, I could calculate it in seconds, by moving over the decimal point so I had 10%, dividing that by 2 then adding half for 15%. It’s easy to calculate any percentages this way. It seemed impressive to him, but it’s really just a trick. And now my decidedly non-math inclined husband can do it too with very little thought. This is a way less complicated example of the principle you illustrate in your essay, but it helped me to extrapolate the principle to the calculations you were explaining, given the ease that I have with percentages, when I’m really not very good with numbers or math at this point in my life. And it’s only because of my understanding of the relationship between the decimal system and percentages. Great essay and fun read! Thank you.
The film Rain Man was an interesting one and with the right acters. But concerning memori some children are born with ability only one time to hear or see something fore storing in memori, now a days we connected to the autism have seen som cases, but often only concerning one topic. We have seen a person who after just one time oround in Londen, then at home draw a detailed 3 dimenional drawing of af big center part of London, as drawn while sitting in an airplaine. And parallel to Mozart, as we se in films, after just one time hearing another persons complete music number, then himself played it, and corrected it. And parallel to a family, I think it was in London, with their son to a concert, and after this asked for a copy of the notebook, but denied, Then at home, the son jost wroute it down! And concerning mathematical and numbers - or the famous words "Don't disturb me in my Circles", and then was killed, 82 years old - we for excample had Poul Erdoes, about whom I 16 years ago wroute the book Paul Hoffman: "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers". But when it comes to brain and remembering something which not should know by the actual person, then we had the strange case with Edgar Cayce. He, never educated, in trance could tell recept for curing sick persons. In some cases, of his brain came out old discoveries by doctors, but which had been firgotten. Is this telepathy? One person wroute that a cousin knew 6 languages, and parallel to this we had a Polish mathematic person, who talked 32 anguage. Before a left side skull fracture, I talked 4 languages, but after 12 days again waking up from being in another World, with normal communication to my friens, I have been told, then monday the 27th of May years ago, I had lost all languages, and only bad relearned 2, but can't relearn the beatifull French language.
I find these "superhuman" grifts boring.
The language alone makes me expect so much more, but these tricks only entertain those that lack education or interest in math. This is why virology is claimed to have saved lives, even though it just made up reasons for existing disease, but never really cured them.
Also quantum theory is https://youtube.com/channel/UCcSIkt24P3WzN1n07l2C97Q
The grifts are worse than boring. They're destructive of both science and education. The warping of all our institutions has to stop.
I'm a certified dumbass, and I have never been able to memorize my wife's phone number (which is 6 digits, not 7 because we don't live in the USA) even though I see it on my screen every day. Therefore, I cannot speak to memorizing numbers or calculating tricks.
What I can talk about is the kid learning languages (I saw the documentary years ago). Icelandic isn't particularly complex, but it is rather grammatically dense in that it uses noun cases as WELL AS all the other things many European languages have such as grammatical genders (often more than just two) and stricter rules on verb tenses.
For a native English speaker, these are some pretty tough concepts to get your head around. A sentence like "a man rides a horse" and "the horse is ridden by a man" use two different forms of the word "man" and "horse," for instance.
Did this kid Daniel know any other languages beforehand? Did he memorize a grammar book or read a text outlining basic Icelandic sentence structure? We don't know. All we see is him chatting by a geyser with the audio muted and glancing at a book in the library.
But I will say this - if you know ONE language with noun cases (and grammatical genders, et al), it's a whole lot easier to learn a second one.
However, what clearly set this kid apart is that he is doing an EXCELLENT job of pronouncing Icelandic, regardless of how good his grammar, sentence structure, fluency, et al, is. It's fucking phenomenal, actually. And there's no book in the world that'll teach you how to "hear" a language well enough to mimic it, even if it doesn't have any new sounds.
I mention this because - again, I am definitely not a genius. I am learning my fifth language (Russian) at the moment. Just the other day, a lovely woman at the pharmacy told me I speak it "excellently," which I certainly do not.
What I AM good at, however, is a combination of a) pronouncing it well and b) using memorized stock phrases and grammatically simple sentences. And the reason I'm even halfway good at is that I've been learning foreign languages since I was a kid, including one with noun cases (Russian has 7 of them).
In other words, if you dolled me up and said I was a genius, I could go on a Russian TV show and "dazzle" them with my Russian, even though I can't even read a children's book without help. On the other hand, just the other day, I saw a report from an American who lives in Donbass, and his Russian was far superior, except that he spoke it with an atrocious "foreign accent" that would be described as "thick" if it were in English.
People can do all kinds of things that seem whizbang cool. Doesn't mean they're geniuses. Pretty sure Einstein was the one who said it's 99% perspiration, not "inborn talent gifted by God."
Fascinating, I cannot keep up with the math, but I am captured by the post and the comments !