Couple cool things about this - one is that Ive read many journal articles written by the doctor in this video (how could I forget another notable Brit w/ last name of Baron-Cohen) AND the person featured here does quite a similar thing to an American man who can calculate huge sums of numbers - they use shapes. At first I thought it was some quirky idiosyncratic method special to the American. However - there are only a handful of people in the world with the ability of this degree (of processing power) - so then I realized - what they are doing is something ... some mechanism of higher thought ... that has allowed humans to grow intellectually - the use of symbolism / analogy - that is - the use of further abstraction - yet with relational aspects that can be further applied to find answers. Its almost as if these two people have taken abstraction to the next level. And its analogous to the step from picto-grams, to logo-grams to words (or characters if you prefer a more Eastern interpretation) that we have experienced in the 200,000 years that we have been here. For instance - use say ... something in primitive hunting ... deer - we would have first said there are 1111111 deer or draw out seven little deers, then we developed numbers to represent (and that is the key word here) the deer by writing 7 (its ancient equivalent actually). Now these two thinkers took it the next step and used a shape and / or pattern to represent the already abstract thing called a number (e.g. 7). Sort of synaesthesia-esque. And a private mathematics system. My next thought is to see if I can in some way connect this with how Einstein began describing General Relativity in a higher level geometry. If you look at space-time - its best illustrated not by numbers but by a beautiful (of great depth) geometry - that can account for four dimensions (3 space / 1 time). Not sure if they are in some way connected ... but something has been giving me a proclivity toward that relationship. I know its sort of Schopenhauer-esque and that could mean some order to the world - but thinking lately about a very simple - one might say - harmonious system (i.e. John Conways Game of Life scenario) - that can naturally evolve into complexity.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 04:28:24 +0000
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