ZOMBIE FORUMS

I just thought I would do a quick note about idiot savant. This is a currently unexplainable phenomenon. In this people who are mentally retarded (usually severly) possess certain uncanny skills. Most often these take the form of incredible mathematical ability.

Now social interactions are thought to not have definite answers because there are too many variables and too often missing pieces of information about other people. Now even if all this information was present there is likely no normal human who is able to sort through and "calculate" the answer. We just resign to making guesses about it that we call "opinion." Now I personally believe that there are some mentally retarded individuals who have an uncanny ability for social interactions. The problem with this is that it is much more difficult to teach a person social things than it is math. Social things have to be learned, something that comes very very slowly to these individuals.

This is why I think that someday research should be done into these phenomenon and they should be put to use if the individual with the disorder is so willing. They could be invaluable assisstants in politics and courtrooms. It will probably sound like objectifying them, but then again we are discussing genetic cleansing. You never know what a completely different perspective of something could reveal, hence individuals should always be given a chance. Though don't get me started on abortion.

Actually, scientists do kind of know why idiot savants are the way they are. It seems that almost all idiot savants have damage to the left side of their brain, the side dealing with mathematics, language and such. This somehow causes the right side of their brain, which deals with spatio-temporal reasoning, to be augmented. Because their abilities must be right-brain-based, most idiot savants have talent in the arts and music, whereas there are very, very few who excel in linguistic or mathematical tasks. There are exceptions, but these are just that - exceptions. Besides, social problems are way to complicated to be analyzed in the way you're proposing.

Quite impressive that you knew this. It has been fun debating with you :) Just of of curiosity roundabouts how old are you?



The mathematical skills are relatively common, but not the extremely gifted ones. (Source) Read some of the examples they are quite interesting. They always have a prodigious memory.



That is the point. Regular humans can't figured them out because they are mathematical in origin, they are logical. However it is a far far more complicated form of it than most are used to dealing with it. Hence we simply it, or assume it has no definite answer (I am speaking opinion here).

However I must also state that in my reading I found that sometimes, when people atempt to employ or hone the savant's abilites they relapse so to speak, causing their retardation to worsen and possibly loose their savant abilities.

Oh, I forgot to mention this earlier, but most savants, if I remember correctly, seem to have something more akin to autism than just-plain-old-retardation.



I just happened to know about the savant thing because there was an article on savants in Scientific American a while back. As for my intelligence: don't make me blush. I just have a good memory for things like this and I'm pretty good at pretending I know more than I do. ;)



I'm 18 - I'm currently a college freshman.

17 myself. Sorta funny too, you described how you manage to look intelligent about the same way I would say I manage to under some situations. Good memory and the full of so much bullshit my nose runs brown.

I remeber an episode of The Outer Limits that handled this pretty well:

There is this retarted guy and his sister/caretaker living together. One day, these space slug things invade and take over the minds of everyone. He is the only one not affected, and manages to save human civilization through a series of plot devices that really arn't important here.

This is quite feasible, and when space slugs attack, I want that retarted guy to save us.

This is really a topic to write a full paper on, so I wont get into it now, but one thing people forget is to look at the really really big picture of things, not just on a genetic level. (social worlds and the like)