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Ramachandran, Dr V S - On savantism
Identifier
001670
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Enhanced functionA description of the experience
Phantoms in the Brain – Dr V. S. Ramachandran [Professor and Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, University of California and visiting fellow All Souls College, Oxford]
Savants are persons whose mental capacity or general intelligence is abysmally low, yet who have islands of astonishing talent. For example, there are savants on record with an IQ of less than 50, barely able to function in normal society, yet they could with ease generate an 8 digit prime number …. one savant could come up with the cube root of a six figure number in seconds and could double 8,388,628 twenty four times to obtain 140,737,488,355,328 in several seconds. Such individuals are a living refutation of the argument that specialised talents are merely clever deployments of general intelligence.