From: Stirling Westrup (sti@cam.org)
Date: Sun Mar 05 2000 - 19:36:32 MST
Bryan Moss wrote:
> What I'm wondering is this: Might we have a large number of
> abnormal mental architectures on this list because such
> anomalies force us to learn cognitive 'tricks' thus creating
> an interest in our own abilities, their limits, and their
> potential for improvement?
I'm sure there is a certain truth to this. I have a friend, the smartest
person I've ever met by a very wide margin, who seems (at least to me) to
have developed his intelligence in response to some very strange
neurological wiring. He just doesn't seem to have much of the low-level
mental processing that so many of us rely upon to get through the day. The
result, as far as I can figure out, is that he was forced to develop his
brain because he spends more mental energy just walking down the street
than I do working on a math problem. (As I discovered the last time I
tried to follow him over badly broken ground. Since he's having to do foot-
placement calculations anyway, the fact that the terrain is terrible
doesn't slow him down.) One of the by-products of this is that he doesn't
get caught up in many common fallacies that come from using an intuition
(or hard-wired calculation) in a context in which it isn't valid. Since he
always does things the 'hard way', and has had to construct his own
internal algorithms, he searches hard to find general problem solving
techniques in his daily life, to reduce his mental burden. This has made
him a really great generalist, and a crack problem solver.
Of course, there are also a number of disadvantages to being wired the way
he is, but I've often wondered just what it must be like to live in that
skull of his.
--
Stirling Westrup | Use of the Internet by this poster
sti@cam.org | is not to be construed as a tacit
| endorsement of Western Technological
| Civilization or its appurtenances.
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