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Kim Peek was an extremely well documented individual. That he retained seemingly inhuman amounts of information is not under dispute, even though such charlatan

by c3534l 10y ago

Kim Peek was an extremely well documented individual. That he retained seemingly inhuman amounts of information is not under dispute, even though such charlatans do exist.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
The problem is that I'm well aware that charlatans do exist [1] but I've no idea why you say that his skils are not under dispute. Does this mean you know of some sort of test, some demonstration in controlled conditions etc? I'd like to see it, too, please. Edit: How was he well-documented? Where is that documentation? ___________________ [1] See (or rather, avoid seeing) here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3305206/Five-year-old-savant-LA-displays-signs-telepathic-learning-seven-languages-studied-scientists-mother-filmed-reciting-numbers-written-secret.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3305206/Five-year-ol... Five-year-old savant from LA who displays signs of being telepathic - and is already learning seven languages - is being studied by scientists after his mother filmed him 'reciting numbers written in secret' + Ramses Sanguino, aged five, was filmed seemingly displaying telepathy + He correctly recounted numbers that were written down 'out of eyesight' + Videos were posted online and attracted the attention of a neuroscientist + Ramses is now part of a cutting-edge telepathy study by Dr Diane Powell + His mother insists the footage of her autistic son's 'talents' is not trickery Not just a savant, but a telepath to boot. And there's a neuroscientist involved. Look, it's not my fault that a lot of that stuff about savants is a bunch of hooey. If that guy, the original Rain Man, was legit, and we know for a fact he was legit, I want to know why it is that we know it.
- c3534l 10y ago
  Because you can put him in a room alone and ask him questions. Many, many people have interviewed and investigated him. He was also severely disabled mentally, he's not a normal guy who is really smart. He was a mentally retarded person who could not care for himself. There was a documentary in which he spoke to neurologist VS Ramachandran and they showed how he was unable to grasp the concept of a metaphor, taking idioms of speech literally. I don't think he was capable of magic tricks. This is also well beyond small areas of knowledge. The guy was a walking wikipedia. His FMRI also showed an extreme malformation of the brain. He was completely missing the corpus callosum and several other very important structures. https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/blogs/110175/2012/12/113137-110958.gif https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/blogs/11... It's pretty damned hard to fake an FMRI like that. Essentially Kim Peek was not filtering any information that got into his head. It was all equally important and it's questionable how much he really understood the things he memorized (which he did hours and hours and hours of each day).
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    Yeah, I don't know about his fmri and its interpretation. I'm always very skeptical of this sort of "evidence". In the past people have used fmri data to support any old hackneyed, half-baked theory they wanted, like for instance, that bit about women not being able to park cars as well as men because they have a worse spatial sense [1]. As to his mental disability, I agree that if it's true that some people are mentally disabled (to any extent) in one area, but not in another, that's something surprising and possibly useful to research further. But- is it true? That people really have an extreme level of development in one faculty, but not others? How do we know that it's true? What are the experiments done that confirm it, if you want to be scientific about it? What is the standard of proof? Let's look at Kim Peek- people say he did pretty amazing things beause he could calculate your birth day from your birth date and he memorised facts. OK, well, calculating your birth day is through and through a parlour trick. Here's a guide that says how to do it: [2]. If he had been guessing the card you picked out of a deck, nobody would think he was a savant, but people probably wonder "how the hell did he figure out the date"? It's an algorithm. The same goes for his powers of recall (it's a parlour trick and something you can train at) except it's also possible to fake it, in the way I suggest above, because nobody really keeps that sort of fact handy and they'll probably not be given the time to check. So the question really is: was the guy really as mentally disabled as to be unable to learn how to perform those quite traditional parlour tricks? Right off the bat, the very fact that the two things he's remembered for -calculating birth days and recalling news items- are standard entertainment numbers suggests to me that he trained. Otherwise it's a bit of a coincidence that his unique superpower just happened to be exactly the same one exhibited by trained professionals. Which also suggests to me his mental disability was not as severe as people think it was, and that instead media reporting has severely distorted our image of his (real) disability. And for all of the above, I want to know why people insist that he had ("documented") superpowers. Where is the bloody documentation? __________________ [1] For a thorough, and thoroughly enjoyable, debunking see Cordelia Fine at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jnpyyY8l_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jnpyyY8l_Y [2] http://blog.artofmemory.com/how-to-calculate-the-day-of-the-week-4203.html http://blog.artofmemory.com/how-to-calculate-the-day-of-the-...
    - 10y ago

by c3534l 10y ago

Kim Peek was an extremely well documented individual. That he retained seemingly inhuman amounts of information is not under dispute, even though such charlatans do exist.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

The problem is that I'm well aware that charlatans do exist [1] but I've no idea why you say that his skils are not under dispute. Does this mean you know of some sort of test, some demonstration in controlled conditions etc? I'd like to see it, too, please. Edit: How was he well-documented? Where is that documentation? ___________________ [1] See (or rather, avoid seeing) here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3305206/Five-year-old-savant-LA-displays-signs-telepathic-learning-seven-languages-studied-scientists-mother-filmed-reciting-numbers-written-secret.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3305206/Five-year-ol... Five-year-old savant from LA who displays signs of being telepathic - and is already learning seven languages - is being studied by scientists after his mother filmed him 'reciting numbers written in secret' + Ramses Sanguino, aged five, was filmed seemingly displaying telepathy + He correctly recounted numbers that were written down 'out of eyesight' + Videos were posted online and attracted the attention of a neuroscientist + Ramses is now part of a cutting-edge telepathy study by Dr Diane Powell + His mother insists the footage of her autistic son's 'talents' is not trickery Not just a savant, but a telepath to boot. And there's a neuroscientist involved. Look, it's not my fault that a lot of that stuff about savants is a bunch of hooey. If that guy, the original Rain Man, was legit, and we know for a fact he was legit, I want to know why it is that we know it.

c3534l 10y ago
Because you can put him in a room alone and ask him questions. Many, many people have interviewed and investigated him. He was also severely disabled mentally, he's not a normal guy who is really smart. He was a mentally retarded person who could not care for himself. There was a documentary in which he spoke to neurologist VS Ramachandran and they showed how he was unable to grasp the concept of a metaphor, taking idioms of speech literally. I don't think he was capable of magic tricks. This is also well beyond small areas of knowledge. The guy was a walking wikipedia. His FMRI also showed an extreme malformation of the brain. He was completely missing the corpus callosum and several other very important structures. https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/blogs/110175/2012/12/113137-110958.gif https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/blogs/11... It's pretty damned hard to fake an FMRI like that. Essentially Kim Peek was not filtering any information that got into his head. It was all equally important and it's questionable how much he really understood the things he memorized (which he did hours and hours and hours of each day).
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  Yeah, I don't know about his fmri and its interpretation. I'm always very skeptical of this sort of "evidence". In the past people have used fmri data to support any old hackneyed, half-baked theory they wanted, like for instance, that bit about women not being able to park cars as well as men because they have a worse spatial sense [1]. As to his mental disability, I agree that if it's true that some people are mentally disabled (to any extent) in one area, but not in another, that's something surprising and possibly useful to research further. But- is it true? That people really have an extreme level of development in one faculty, but not others? How do we know that it's true? What are the experiments done that confirm it, if you want to be scientific about it? What is the standard of proof? Let's look at Kim Peek- people say he did pretty amazing things beause he could calculate your birth day from your birth date and he memorised facts. OK, well, calculating your birth day is through and through a parlour trick. Here's a guide that says how to do it: [2]. If he had been guessing the card you picked out of a deck, nobody would think he was a savant, but people probably wonder "how the hell did he figure out the date"? It's an algorithm. The same goes for his powers of recall (it's a parlour trick and something you can train at) except it's also possible to fake it, in the way I suggest above, because nobody really keeps that sort of fact handy and they'll probably not be given the time to check. So the question really is: was the guy really as mentally disabled as to be unable to learn how to perform those quite traditional parlour tricks? Right off the bat, the very fact that the two things he's remembered for -calculating birth days and recalling news items- are standard entertainment numbers suggests to me that he trained. Otherwise it's a bit of a coincidence that his unique superpower just happened to be exactly the same one exhibited by trained professionals. Which also suggests to me his mental disability was not as severe as people think it was, and that instead media reporting has severely distorted our image of his (real) disability. And for all of the above, I want to know why people insist that he had ("documented") superpowers. Where is the bloody documentation? __________________ [1] For a thorough, and thoroughly enjoyable, debunking see Cordelia Fine at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jnpyyY8l_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jnpyyY8l_Y [2] http://blog.artofmemory.com/how-to-calculate-the-day-of-the-week-4203.html http://blog.artofmemory.com/how-to-calculate-the-day-of-the-...
  - 10y ago