7 ms·
The Mystery of Sudden Genius
- DanielGeisler 3y agoI've been wondering if there was anyplace that could diagnosis autism savant syndrome. It may be a useful label to communicate who I am to people. I have my early mathematical biography at https://tetration.org/index.php/Biography https://tetration.org/index.php/Biography.
- coldtea 3y ago>if there was anyplace that could diagnosis autism savant syndrome Wouldn't most qualified psychiatrists working with autism (or adult autism) do? All it takes is diagnosis autism (what they do anyway) and being able to identify savant abilities (which is even easier).
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoI had a look at your writings, and was wondering if you saw any worthwhile ideas on here: https://www.timecube.space/ https://www.timecube.space/
- ted_bunny 3y agoWhich writings? Calling someone schizophrenic is pretty rude. I don't see anything confused about their site, but I'm not a mathematician.
- DanielGeisler 3y agoNo worthwhile ideas. Why, what worthwhile ideas do you see that reminds you of my writings?
- sandspar 3y agoIf you have a moment, how do you deal with boredom when you are really really really smart? How do you deal with stress? How do you stay motivated?
- wrycoder 3y ago[flagged]
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis is almost exactly what happened to me in 2022 and led to the authoring of my paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39569747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39569747 I had been having months of focal (non-tonic clonic yet) seizures that I thought were panic attacks for about 5 months I had a massive psychiatric event in Dec 2022 and started writing that paper I was in the bath tub the same night and saw a hallucinated blue orb for lack of better term that “felt” like it was trying to communicate that the paper was good So very interesting! The brain is crazy and I have spent a lot of time studying it and it never ceases to amaze. Oh and I forgot, my art style got really honed in and I was more prolific in 6 months than I had been in years, leading to my first art show in 15ish years: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzC8HoZOApQ/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng== https://www.instagram.com/p/CzC8HoZOApQ/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng...
- user_7832 3y agoHave you written about your experience or contacted any researchers? I'd assume some scientist somewhere would love to know more.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoI haven’t cause I don’t really think there’s anything there other than artifacts of brain activity.
- sandspar 3y agoThe machine elves desperately trying to contact humanity: "That's it, no more revealing ourselves to rational people. We need to go back to concentrating on the hippies."
- zikzak 3y agoContact with mysterious phenomenon that seems to communicate with the witness is not unheard of and many people seem to undergo an intelligence boost afterwards, even if short lived. This is often considered a religious experience while more secular minded people might attribute it to something like a ufo experience.
- mkl 3y agoSome of Diana de Avila's art: https://dianadeavila.art/ https://dianadeavila.art/, https://www.dianadeavila.com/defineexclusives https://www.dianadeavila.com/defineexclusives
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoIt's a shame there isn't a timeline. This appears to be the first image "boomerangs and blobs"? https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/3/boomerangs-and-blobs-diana-de-avila.jpg https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediu...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoNo way that was done by someone with no training. I call bullshit.
- steve1977 3y agoNo training in what? Also note that she mentioned „no formal training“. And she is a digital artist and knew how to code.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoI missed all of that, thank you. So that painting I my mind just went from "impossibly good for someone who's painting for the first time" to "mediocre".
- steve1977 3y agoYeah it kinda puts the article in a different light. It is also is worded in a way that sounds like she was actually painting on canvas, which doesn’t seem to be the case as I understand. „She immediately began painting. She had no training in art. But her hands just knew what to do. “It was fulfilling to connect line and form. I let things be guided by intuition,” she says. Two hours later, the canvas was covered in splotches of teal, brown, and orange. She titled her first piece “Blobs and Boomerangs.”
- delichon 3y agoIt mentions Rain Man and X-Men but misses the closer fit, Phenomenon (1996). But the word keeps cropping up, including in the subtitle.
- torlok 3y agoThis just smells foul; can't help but be sceptical. Diana de Avila sounds like an arist who crafted a story to sell her work, and George Logothetis sounds like a genius who was approched by Treffert and convinced that actually he's smart because he had an infection at the age of 2. > In Treffert’s response to de Avila’s outreach, he called her story “compelling, and your artwork amazing.” > “He was like a father figure to us weird circus people. He was the ringleader of this beautiful circle of giftedness,” Treffert sounds like grade A manipulator, though not sure who's using who here.
- torlok 3y agoFrom the article, about Derek Amato: > He loved music and had played drums as a kid, but nothing more. And from a Guardian article from 2012 about him: > I'd played guitar in a couple of little rock bands when I was young but I'd never progressed beyond that on any instrument. Yet here I was, producing a fluid melody I'd never heard before.
- smusamashah 3y agoIt's not all lies. You can watch videos of Kim Peek who can memorise whole books and can answer questions from them but doesn't talk or act like normal people, Daniel Tammet who visualizes numbers, another guy who can sculpt and in a video he made a great looking horse with his bare hands in few minutes while the interviewer was talking but he is also not normal. There was another guy, don't remember if he was a savant but in a video they flew him over a city and he drew all buildings with there windows etc on a large sheet of paper. Just saying that not all of these people are fake.
- paulpauper 3y agoKim Peek is an outlier. Most of these 'savants' seem like disabled people who have a lot of free time to work on something obsessively, not that they possess special mental abilities.
- gwern 3y agoBut we're not discussing ordinary savants like Peek. Such savants often hone their skills over decades, sometimes inventing their own algorithms or tricks and memorizing vast reams of data. Those are amazing, but not sudden. To analogize: Arnold Schwarzenegger was an amazing bodybuilder, but you can understand how he was possible; but it would be even more amazing if a couple people out there woke up one day and literally overnight they had turned into Arnold, and you would very much like to know how that was possible.
- shannifin 3y agoNot sure I would call it "genius" or the emergence of latent "talent", terms which suggest a positive judgment of the work produced... Rather it seems like obsession. It is a very curious phenomenon, and I wonder if it can tell us anything useful about the psychology of motivation and interest. Calling it "sudden genius" feels clickbaity.
- sandspar 3y ago> Sudden genius Readers: "You're saying there's still a chance I'm a genius???"
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y agoMeh. How come all of these "savants" are in disciplines where there either is no right or wrong (painting) or there is but it's just a matter of practice in applying an algorithm until you're perfect (calendars)? Where are all the savants that actually produce breakthrus in science? Oh that's right that actually requires knowledge and understanding. It's almost as if these people are inventing something to feel special about.
- paulpauper 3y agoIt's articles like this that gives psychology a bad name and turns it into a pseudoscience. All they did was assemble some -anecdotes of people who developed hobbies following some sort of traumatic event but this is not enough to establish either the diagnosis of an actual syndrome or prove the acquisition of new skills. These anecdotes have as much credibility as alien abductions, remote viewing, out of body experiences or other self-reported paranormal experiences. So-called savant syndrome could instead be explained by people who have autism or other disabilities having enough free time to hone in on a certain hobby obsessively, such that to outsiders it seems like they are a savant, not that they possess special mental abilities (except for Kim Peek). From a young age, Logothetis took an interest in his father’s work, devouring the weekly shipping newsletter and analyzing the market. He soon took the helm, becoming CEO by age 19. He remembers every number, every quantity, every measurement, every price that passed through his ledger. “The East Cape, a ship we delivered in 1993, was 482,000 cubic feet, built in 1975, and leased for $416,000 a month,” Logothetis says. “It doesn’t require effort to retrieve this. It’s just there.” This could instead be explained by having a IQ , not savant syndrome. People
- 7thaccount 3y ago>"This could instead be explained by having a IQ , not savant syndrome. People" Can he remember what is essentially thousands of numerical data points? I would think that kind of photographic memory would be pretty similar to savantism? Also what do you mean by "explained by having a IQ"? An IQ is just some test's measurement of our intelligence, so I don't know how that is relevant. I am just as skeptical as you though.
- pazimzadeh 3y agoYeah I do think manic episodes can explain a lot of this.
- yetanother12345 3y ago> This could instead be explained by having a IQ I respectfully disagree. Reasoning and memory is not the same. If you happen to actually become aquaintaned to more than one of this type of people during your lifetime you will (maybe) note that their abilities in memory do not need to be correlated to their abilities in reasoning. I have personally met more than a handful with extraordinary memory skills, and while some would probably be able to achieve a "high IQ" score others would certainly not. The latest I've met did not even pass public school reading tests [0]. As an aside, obtaining a high IQ score is done using a standardized procedure and as such it is only a measure of one very specific class of reasoning skills, not "general intelligence" per se [0] First hand, he told me ---- Edit to add this: Here I specifically relate to the memory-equilibrists due to the parent comment emhasizing one such specimen. Others in the savant spectrum (it is a spectrum) do have abilities that would correlate better with the measure known as "IQ".
- akdor1154 3y agoUrist has come under a strange mood and claimed a jeweler's workshop.
- sandspar 3y agoLovely reference. As an aside, it seems like jazz is a real example of this kind of thing. The organizational structure of a live jazz band specifically rewards inspiration, strange moods, and claiming the workshop.
- richrichie 3y agoHow is it possible to write this without references to Oliver Sacks?
- ted_bunny 3y agoAsacksgnosia
- sandspar 3y agoThe line between occultism and psychology is very thin in places.