The Mystery of Sudden Genius

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202403/the-mystery-of-sudden-genius

by mpweiher • 2 years ago

76 67 2 years ago

I've been wondering if there was anyplace that could diagnosis autism savant syndrome. It may be a useful label to communicate who I am to people. I have my early mathematical biography at https://tetration.org/index.php/Biography.

coldtea• 2 years ago

if there was anyplace that could diagnosis autism savant syndrome

Wouldn't most qualified psychiatrists working with autism (or adult autism) do? All it takes is diagnosis autism (what they do anyway) and being able to identify savant abilities (which is even easier).

bdjsiqoocwk5• 2 years ago

I had a look at your writings, and was wondering if you saw any worthwhile ideas on here: https://www.timecube.space/

ted_bunny3• 2 years ago

Which writings? Calling someone schizophrenic is pretty rude. I don't see anything confused about their site, but I'm not a mathematician.

DanielGeisler2• 2 years ago

No worthwhile ideas. Why, what worthwhile ideas do you see that reminds you of my writings?

sandspar9• 2 years ago

If you have a moment, how do you deal with boredom when you are really really really smart? How do you deal with stress? How do you stay motivated?

AndrewKemendo6• 2 years ago

This is almost exactly what happened to me in 2022 and led to the authoring of my paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39569747

I had been having months of focal (non-tonic clonic yet) seizures that I thought were panic attacks for about 5 months

I had a massive psychiatric event in Dec 2022 and started writing that paper

I was in the bath tub the same night and saw a hallucinated blue orb for lack of better term that “felt” like it was trying to communicate that the paper was good

So very interesting! The brain is crazy and I have spent a lot of time studying it and it never ceases to amaze.

Oh and I forgot, my art style got really honed in and I was more prolific in 6 months than I had been in years, leading to my first art show in 15ish years:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzC8HoZOApQ/?igsh=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng...

user_7832• 2 years ago

Have you written about your experience or contacted any researchers? I'd assume some scientist somewhere would love to know more.

AndrewKemendo6• 2 years ago

I haven’t cause I don’t really think there’s anything there other than artifacts of brain activity.

zikzak2• 2 years ago

Contact with mysterious phenomenon that seems to communicate with the witness is not unheard of and many people seem to undergo an intelligence boost afterwards, even if short lived. This is often considered a religious experience while more secular minded people might attribute it to something like a ufo experience.

AndrewKemendo6• 2 years ago

I recognize that. However my perspective is that it was 100% in my head and I’m not unique or special or chosen or whatever nonsense fallacies that typically come with these experiences

Not some exogenous event or mystical miracle or whatever it was just pure chemistry and electricity.

slibhb• 2 years ago

Sounds like a manic episode. Symptoms include extreme grandiosity and hallucinations. Often a manic person will believe he is God, is in contact with God, or has a special part to play in history.

bane2• 2 years ago

This scenario is mostly the plot of the movie Phenomenon. It doesn't end well for the main character (played by John Travolta) so you might want to get checked out.

Maybe more boring, when trying to create I find I spend lots of time in a miserable morass where I feel like my "normal" brain is trying to solve creativity like it's a hard procedural problem, and progress is slow and the result is always uninspired. If I keep at it I eventually "punch through" and it's like an avalanche of sudden ideas and mental connections flow through and out of me and I get into a zone of unreal hyper productivity for a while.

Later on when reviewing what I did during those moments while in a normal brain state, I find I can't replicate, edit, or really do much to alter what I created until I can punch through again -- I have basically no ability to replicate what I just made. The level of detail, the inspiration, the raw creativity is just not my normal mode. It's just not on tap.

It also leaves me really hungry after a couple hours of doing it. I suspect there's some kind of interesting energy recruitment my body is doing in my brain, sensing it's working hard, and trying to support the emergency with sugars, or oxygen or something.

shrimp_emoji3• 2 years ago

Huh. The closest (extremely weak version) of this with me is I'll try to remember something and fail to. Then, hours or even days later, the answer will pop into my head out of nowhere, as if my brain ran a background search daemon which finally returned the answer.

AndrewKemendo6• 2 years ago

I actually did get checked out by a series of doctors at Mount Sinai (After months of nightmare with the VA) who did a battery of tests including an ambulatory EEG, CT scan, MRI, etc. and came back with: “Basically your brain looks perfect so this is confusing.”

This was after two severe tonic colic seizures, which put me in the hospital with a half bitten tongue and dislocated shoulders.

The initial thinking was epilepsy, but after the ambulatory EEG, and absolutely no history of epilepsy or anything of approaching epilepsy, she’s basically said “everything looks healthy, I have no clue what’s going on, so call me if you feel like you’re dying again.”

russellbeattie• 2 years ago

Phenomenon was meant to be a propaganda film for Scientology, which claims that it's adherents can unlock latent mental capacity. That the main character dies in the end is supposed to represent persecution of their "religion" by the establishment.

shrimp_emoji3• 2 years ago

It said the paper you hadn't written yet would be good? Or it said it in a sense of encouragement to go through with or publish it?

My interpretation is it was a Culture drone trying to influence you to influence humanity into joining the fold by returning to traditional human social structures of community, cooperation & sharing.

AndrewKemendo6• 2 years ago

Basically what I felt was that draft 1 was on the right track - which had the core of my argument

What I have linked is draft 3

I expect that I’ll have a proper falsifiable theory on paper by the end of the year (Is my hope)

My best guess based on what I know of the brain is that there was likely some amplified activation of memories linked to a heavy period of intentional visualizing (I’m a very visual thinker) cascading around my visual cortex as I was in a resting state

SilasX• 2 years ago

So you consider it a flash of genius because it led you to produce a paper that trivializes the relevance of scarcity (to greatly simplify)?

Without commenting on the merit of the thesis, people get flashes of insight all the time that seem totally genius to them. Regardless of what you wrote, I would wait until it's actually validated by further scientific consensus before calling that any kind of vindication of the phenomenon of sudden genius.

And your other example is that ... you produced art? As in, the famously capricious, easily duped community? That may not be the slam dunk you think it is.

With that said, you definitely were productive in some sense, and I don't mean to trivialize that in anyway -- it's certainly more than I accomplished over the same time! It's just ... "genius" is a stretch. By the same token, I could claim I unconvered something major with my "fish would be bad swimming instructors" idea:

http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2023/05/chatgpt4-refines-m...

mkl• 2 years ago

Some of Diana de Avila's art: https://dianadeavila.art/, https://www.dianadeavila.com/defineexclusives

pbhjpbhj• 2 years ago

It's a shame there isn't a timeline. This appears to be the first image "boomerangs and blobs"? https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediu...

bdjsiqoocwk5• 2 years ago

No way that was done by someone with no training. I call bullshit.

ecoquant• 2 years ago

I don't know, pretty "meh".

delichon• 2 years ago

It mentions Rain Man and X-Men but misses the closer fit, Phenomenon (1996). But the word keeps cropping up, including in the subtitle.

torlok2• 2 years 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.

torlok2• 2 years ago

From 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• 2 years ago

It'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.

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

Kim 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• 2 years ago

But 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.

yetanother123453• 2 years 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

[1] https://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/gallery/originals

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

Agree. The whole thing reeks of being a pseudoscience or irreproducible. The 'replication crisis' is a thing for a reason.

sandspar9• 2 years ago

I'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• 2 years ago

I remember Scientific American running a similar story 10-15 years ago.

Can't comment on these individuals, but the phenomenon is real.

shannifin• 2 years ago

Not sure I would call it "genius" or the emergence of latent "talent", terms which suggest a positive judgment of the work produced... Rather it seems like obsession. It is a very curious phenomenon, and I wonder if it can tell us anything useful about the psychology of motivation and interest. Calling it "sudden genius" feels clickbaity.

sandspar9• 2 years ago

Sudden genius

Readers: "You're saying there's still a chance I'm a genius???"

bdjsiqoocwk5• 2 years ago

Meh. How come all of these "savants" are in disciplines where there either is no right or wrong (painting) or there is but it's just a matter of practice in applying an algorithm until you're perfect (calendars)? Where are all the savants that actually produce breakthrus in science? Oh that's right that actually requires knowledge and understanding. It's almost as if these people are inventing something to feel special about.

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

It's articles like this that gives psychology a bad name and turns it into a pseudoscience. All they did was assemble some -anecdotes of people who developed hobbies following some sort of traumatic event but this is not enough to establish either the diagnosis of an actual syndrome or prove the acquisition of new skills. These anecdotes have as much credibility as alien abductions, remote viewing, out of body experiences or other self-reported paranormal experiences. So-called savant syndrome could instead be explained by people who have autism or other disabilities having enough free time to hone in on a certain hobby obsessively, such that to outsiders it seems like they are a savant, not that they possess special mental abilities (except for Kim Peek).

From a young age, Logothetis took an interest in his father’s work, devouring the weekly shipping newsletter and analyzing the market. He soon took the helm, becoming CEO by age 19. He remembers every number, every quantity, every measurement, every price that passed through his ledger. “The East Cape, a ship we delivered in 1993, was 482,000 cubic feet, built in 1975, and leased for $416,000 a month,” Logothetis says. “It doesn’t require effort to retrieve this. It’s just there.”

This could instead be explained by having a IQ , not savant syndrome. People

7thaccount• 2 years ago

"This could instead be explained by having a IQ , not savant syndrome. People"

Can he remember what is essentially thousands of numerical data points? I would think that kind of photographic memory would be pretty similar to savantism? Also what do you mean by "explained by having a IQ"? An IQ is just some test's measurement of our intelligence, so I don't know how that is relevant.

I am just as skeptical as you though.

pazimzadeh• 2 years ago

Yeah I do think manic episodes can explain a lot of this.

yetanother123453• 2 years ago

This could instead be explained by having a IQ

I respectfully disagree. Reasoning and memory is not the same.

If you happen to actually become aquaintaned to more than one of this type of people during your lifetime you will (maybe) note that their abilities in memory do not need to be correlated to their abilities in reasoning. I have personally met more than a handful with extraordinary memory skills, and while some would probably be able to achieve a "high IQ" score others would certainly not. The latest I've met did not even pass public school reading tests [0].

As an aside, obtaining a high IQ score is done using a standardized procedure and as such it is only a measure of one very specific class of reasoning skills, not "general intelligence" per se

[0] First hand, he told me

----

Edit to add this: Here I specifically relate to the memory-equilibrists due to the parent comment emhasizing one such specimen. Others in the savant spectrum (it is a spectrum) do have abilities that would correlate better with the measure known as "IQ".

yetanother123453• 2 years ago

These anecdotes have as much credibility as alien abductions, remote viewing, out of body experiences or other self-reported paranormal experiences...

Those types of experiences are not the type of behaviour that is on topic here. Also, depending on perspective what you wrote may well be perceived as derogatory.

People suffering[0] from some degree of savant syndrome generally can display "non-normal" behaviour which is

1) observable, and

2) repeatable

[0] Yes, suffering. To quote the article

      Injury, disease, or disability essentially “unlocks” the brain, leading a particular region to explode in functioning and flourishing.

... but also in the sense of many having difficulties living among "the normies" which are the rest of us

akdor1154• 2 years ago

Urist has come under a strange mood and claimed a jeweler's workshop.

sandspar9• 2 years ago

Lovely reference. As an aside, it seems like jazz is a real example of this kind of thing. The organizational structure of a live jazz band specifically rewards inspiration, strange moods, and claiming the workshop.

richrichie• 2 years ago

How is it possible to write this without references to Oliver Sacks?

ted_bunny3• 2 years ago

Asacksgnosia

sandspar9• 2 years ago

The line between occultism and psychology is very thin in places.

The Mystery of Sudden Genius

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