4 ms·

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,

by 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-...
- c3534l 10y ago
  > Let's look at Kim Peek- people say he did pretty amazing things because he could calculate your birth day from your birth date and he memorised facts. What? I'm not sure you actually know who he is and his abilities. It's not that he knew some facts. It's that he knew the zip code for nearly every street in the country, even inconsistent ones. It's that you could have an auditorium full of people asking him the most obscure questions they could come up with ("When was the birthday of Lincoln's younger Aunt?").
  - c3534l 10y ago
    > 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. Also, yes they do. They absolutely did that with Kim Peek. People investigated him with lists of such facts at hand. > Right off the bat, the very fact that the two things he's remembered for -calculating birth days and recalling news items- You have no idea what you're talking about. He was known for neither of those things.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
      That's what's on wikipedia. Why am I absolutely required to know who Kim Peek was? Because they based a film on him, and it sold well? Also, for the love of god, listen to yourself. People "tested" him with lists of facts? And you don't think it's even remotely possible that those people were planted in the audience? There is even a word for that thing: the people who do that are called "shills" [1]. In popular shows they're paid for it, from the persons who run the show, to make sure that nobody asks questions the mentalist (or the medium etc) can't answer. You can't base anything on something that happened in a show! Give me a break. _______ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill
      - Pica_soO 10y ago
        Question all the things. Question the Reason of Questioning. Honestly, if nothing on earth convinces you, and everything is just one huge collaborate conspiracy to invent a mentally retarded guy, who worked like a info vending machine. I have one final question. If such a savant exists, would you travel to his location and question him in person? For this unreasonable burden of proof you demand, would you carry that stone yourself, even if it is so heavy that god can not lift it?

by c3534l 10y ago

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-...

c3534l 10y ago
> Let's look at Kim Peek- people say he did pretty amazing things because he could calculate your birth day from your birth date and he memorised facts. What? I'm not sure you actually know who he is and his abilities. It's not that he knew some facts. It's that he knew the zip code for nearly every street in the country, even inconsistent ones. It's that you could have an auditorium full of people asking him the most obscure questions they could come up with ("When was the birthday of Lincoln's younger Aunt?").
- c3534l 10y ago
  > 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. Also, yes they do. They absolutely did that with Kim Peek. People investigated him with lists of such facts at hand. > Right off the bat, the very fact that the two things he's remembered for -calculating birth days and recalling news items- You have no idea what you're talking about. He was known for neither of those things.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    That's what's on wikipedia. Why am I absolutely required to know who Kim Peek was? Because they based a film on him, and it sold well? Also, for the love of god, listen to yourself. People "tested" him with lists of facts? And you don't think it's even remotely possible that those people were planted in the audience? There is even a word for that thing: the people who do that are called "shills" [1]. In popular shows they're paid for it, from the persons who run the show, to make sure that nobody asks questions the mentalist (or the medium etc) can't answer. You can't base anything on something that happened in a show! Give me a break. _______ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill
    - Pica_soO 10y ago
      Question all the things. Question the Reason of Questioning. Honestly, if nothing on earth convinces you, and everything is just one huge collaborate conspiracy to invent a mentally retarded guy, who worked like a info vending machine. I have one final question. If such a savant exists, would you travel to his location and question him in person? For this unreasonable burden of proof you demand, would you carry that stone yourself, even if it is so heavy that god can not lift it?