Sadly,
Kim Peek, the inspiration for Rain Man, has died. He was an absolutely fascinating character. His gift (and his accompanying debilitation) came from an abnormality within the brain's hemispheres connection.
It has been theorized that this disruption of normal communication between the brain’s left and right halves resulted in a kind of jury-rigged rewiring. “Perhaps the resulting structures allow the two hemispheres to function, in certain respects, as one giant hemisphere, putting normally separate functions under the same roof, as it were,” Drs. Treffert and Christensen wrote. “If so, then Peek may owe some of his talents to this particular abnormality.”
It's amazing to think that similar abnormal cognitive structures, perhaps differing in some very tiny manner, have given rise to history's greatest geniuses (almost all of whom were plagued by general awkwardness). Peek's ability to gather information was quite remarkable.
He knows all the area codes and ZIP codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide MapQuest-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music.
Peek and other savants provide neurological researchers with important information regarding how our brains function, i.e. intelligence.
6 comments:
"almost all of whom were plagued by general awkwardness"
Locke Franklin and Voltaire had people skills sufficient to be diplomats/courtiers. Lavoisier mingled with high society.
Math geniuses seem to be the most likely to be weird, but even then I think they're in the minority.
True. I was thinking more of science and math genuises. Probably should read "some of whom", not "almost all of whom".
Most of our scientific and mathematical geniuses didn't have the remarkable computational power the "Rain Man" had. Their strength was in abstraction and conceptualization. "Rain Man" had no such ability—in fact idiot savants are hardly able to analyze conceptual matter.
That's why I've never been impresses with human memory calculator types. Hardly any of them would be able to understand Real Analysis or Set Theory.
(almost all of whom were plagued by general awkwardness).
Did the greatest scientists and mathematicians usually have emotional problems?
Isaac Newton had mental health issues but others didn't. (Alan Turing was homosexual but I don't know if he had mental health problems).
Euler, Gauss, Neumann, Heisenberg, Leibniz were not reputed to have emotional problems.
There's been a lot of recent research on great geniuses with Asberger's. I imagine it's overblown, but such immense brainpower is generally the result of some abnormality (the spatial reasoning part of Einstein's brain was twice as large as normal). It's not unreasonable to think such a deviation from the norm that gives huge brainpower would have other implications as well, not necessarily social though. For example, Newton had extreme OCD, which seems to be more common amongst high intelligence types.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_figures_sometimes_considered_autistic
Then there's Feynman....
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