December 30, 2000

  • Marvlous Ways of Knowing...



    I know this one girl who is of above-average but not stinking haughty intelligence who nevertheless performs like an idiot-savant with regard to her recall of numbers. Rattle off a list of numbers, phone numbers, serial numbers on dollar bills, whatever, and she can repeat the sequence flawlessly. She explains her adeptness thusly: When she was a very, very young girl, with every day constituting a newly-lived life on the horizon of discovery, she received a gift of a xylophone where the keys were different colors and they were consecutively numbered. So for instance, red was "1" and a certain key, say C, and green was "2" and another key, say D, etc. Somehow, in her mind, in the course of play, the assigned numbers became fused with the notes--inseparably. So now whenever she sees or hears a number, she also effortlessly "hears" the correlate tune within. It is the tune assigned to the number that constitutes her savant recall. Ask her to remember a phone number, she whistles the tune, then decodes it back into the appropriate digits. If this is commonplace, then I'm the idiot, because I think this is quite remarkable!

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