Are superhuman savants real?
13Seth Herd
10Steven Byrnes
1Bunthut
1Lorec
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I looked into this a little a long time ago while in cog psych grad school, and concluded that each savant whose story I looked at actually practiced their special skill a ridiculous amount, and was bad at lots of other things because they hadn't spent time on those. I haven't looked at every story but I strongly suspect that different weird obsessions and time-on-task means they're specialized but not superhuman.
Let’s distinguish “motivation theory” (savants spend a lot of time practicing X because they find it motivating, and get really good at X) from “learning algorithm hyperparameter theory” (savants have systematically different … ML learning rates? neural architectures (e.g. fiber densities, dendrite branching properties, etc.)? loss functions? etc.). (Needless to say, these are not mutually exclusive.)
I interpret your comment as endorsing motivation theory for explaining savants. Whereas it seems to me that at least for memory savants like Kim Peek (who memorized ≈10,000 books (almost?)-verbatim, including phone books) & Solomon Shereshevsky, it’s gotta be at least partly and maybe entirely learning algorithm hyperparameter theory.
I mean, we know there were unusual things about Kim Peek’s learning algorithm hyperparameters—he would memorize two opposite pages of the same book simultaneously (IIRC), and he was severely disabled in everyday life things like dressing himself (IIRC).
Also, I am highly skeptical that I could memorize an entire book in one sitting just from years of practice. For example, neurotypical “memory athletes” don’t just try to memorize, try to memorize, ...
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To clarify the question: I agree that there is variation in talent and that some very talented people can do things most could never. My question is, if you look at the distribution of talent among normal people, and then check how many standard deviations out our savant candidate is, then what's the chance at least one person with that talent would exist? Basically, is this just the normal right tail that's expected from additive genetic reshuffling, or an "X-man".
You know the phenomenon where men tend to score higher on mathematics tests and women tend to score higher on tests of verbal ability?
That's because men have more real estate allocated to the space-processing cortical areas, while women have relatively more space allocated to the verbal-associative cortical areas. The two cortical areas aren't morphologically-functionally adaptable or interchangeable. They genuinely do different things, and they trade off with each other for space in your skull. It's said that Einstein had massive parietal lobes on autopsy...
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