https://aeon.co/essays/historys-shaming-fascination-for-the-so-called-idiot-savant
The puzzle of the ‘idiot savant’
- The convergence of singular talent and profound disability confounded scientists eager to place humans into neat categories
- The chess prodigy Samuel Reshevsky in a simultaneous chess exhibition match, 6 April 1922. The 10-year-old won 1,491 of the 1,500 games he played against experts during his US tour.
by Alamy Violeta Ruiz
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On 25 November 1915, the American newspaper The Review published the extraordinary case of an 11-year-old boy with prodigious mathematical abilities. Perched on a hill close to a set of railroad tracks, he could memorise all the numbers of the train carriages that sped by at 30 mph, add them up, and provide the correct total sum. What was remarkable about the case was not just his ability to calculate large numbers (and read them on a moving vehicle), but the fact that he could barely eat unassisted or recognise the faces of people he met. The juxtaposition between his supposed arrested development and his numerical facility made his mathematical feats even more impressive. ‘How can you account for it?’ asked the article’s author. The answer took the form of a medical label: the boy was what 19th-century medicine termed an ‘idiot savant’. He possessed an exceptional talent, despite a profound impairment of the mental faculties that affected both his motor and social skills.
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This essay tees up another outstanding problem in human understanding. Is it a genetic heritage or something else? I have no idea. Other than to marvel what Nature’s God has created. Humanity, for all its dikw (i.e., data, information, knowledge, wisdom) still has no understanding or explanation for simple concepts. An “idiot savant” has talent but we can not understand it. It has the concept of “gravity” but we can’t do more than quantify it. For all our efforts to “shrink” Unknown area in Pane 4 (what is known neither to self nor others) of the JoHari window, we just seem to enlarge it further and further.
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Reinke Faces Life 