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This 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
by torlok 3y ago
This 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.
- potamic 3y agoI saw a demonstration of this in this very old documentary once. Not sure what the latest research says but it doesn't seem this kind of situation is entirely impossible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYAfmyMZe5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYAfmyMZe5g
- yetanother12345 3y ago> they flew him over a city and he drew all buildings with there windows etc on a large sheet of paper Steephen Wiltshire, Autistic Savant and Artist [0,1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire [1] https://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/gallery/originals https://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/gallery/originals
- paulpauper 3y agoAgree. The whole thing reeks of being a pseudoscience or irreproducible. The 'replication crisis' is a thing for a reason.
- sandspar 3y agoI'm not saying this guy is one of them, but there's a special place in hell for adults who target gifted children. Many of the victims of Catholic priests were intelligent, sensitive children, children who became involved in church because they were interested in learning about life's meaning.
- hilux 3y agoI remember Scientific American running a similar story 10-15 years ago. Can't comment on these individuals, but the phenomenon is real.