Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Hats off to Tomas!

All the credit goes to the comment-writer "Tomas", for making three intelligent comments about the short article by Dr Darold Treffert (famous as an authority on savantism) that is a part of a debate about the origins of creativity or greatness or genuis or something, at a website titled "The Creativity Post". Tomas has also engaged Dr Treffert in a mini-debate in the comments section, and the impressive Tomas also wins my respect for demonstrating that he has read the Routes to Remembering study about superior memorizers with thoroughness and understanding, and he has generally done his homework on the interesting subjects of savantism and Daniel Tammet. Tomas is clearly not one to simply accept that something is true just because someone in an elevated position says or writes that it is true. What a place the world would be if there were more people in it like Tomas!

The Creativity Debate. The Creativity Post.
http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology/debate/talent_or_practice_what_matters_more

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tomas learned much of what he knows from your excellent blog, so the credit belongs to you, not him.

Mr Anon (aka Tomas)

Lili Marlene said...

Oh! It all makes sense then :-)

You might find it of interest the "Blind Tom" Bethune is one of the many fascinating people in my list of famous people thought to be autistic. Is autistic savant talent the result of inborn factors or practice? I would argue both - autism is genetic and inborn, and it somehow endows a personality that is more likely to pursue an interest with great persistence and a tolerance for repetition. This can make extreme practice possible, leading to talent or mastery.

What this all has to do with "creativity" is anyone's guess. The discussion about Tammet was about memory and calculation, wasn't it? They are surely two areas that call for accuracy rather than creativity.

Anonymous said...

I agree that Daniel Tammet doesn't have much to do with creativity - apart from perhaps his rather creative descriptions of his synaesthesia. That said, Scott Barry Kaufman, the co-founder of the creativity post, thinks maybe he does:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/200912/conversations-creativity-daniel-tammet-part-v-creativity-mind-and-the-br

Tomas (no longer quite so anonymous)

Lili Marlene said...

I think Tammet's ideas about creativity are not a lot more than a second-hand mistaken version of thinking about synaesthesia from US researchers of the ilk of Ramachandran (a populist scientist if ever there was one). I might have more to write on this after a nanna nap.

Lili Marlene said...

A quote from Tammet at that Psychology Today article in which Tammet attempts to explain autism:

"My theory is that the connectivity that we see in pretty much every young child up until perhaps the age of five or six- where the brain in essence overdevelops the connections between the cells and then quite literally prunes them back to prevent information overload, psychosis, and so on to make the activity in each separate part of the brain as efficient as possible- perhaps that pruning back doesn't take place or doesn't take place in the same way for the those on the autistic spectrum."

Tammet doesn't know jack about the stuff which he has discussed here. For a start the process leading to hyperconnectivity that he describes is a description of synaesthesia, not autism. They are two different, but possibly sometimes related things. In fact there is one theory about autism that it is the result of a lack of connectivity, like dyslexia and prosopagnosia, which seems to make sense in the cases in which a person has autism and also problems with literacy and/or faces. One could also question how Tammet, or any supposedly autistic person could have issues with face recognition if autism is caused by a general hyperconnectivity, while prosopagnosia appears to be associated with under-connectivity. Tammet's theory that autism has hyperconnectivity as it's basis might apply to some cases, but is highly questionable as a global explanation.

The second big blunder in Tammet's theory is that he associated hyperconnectivity in the brain with psychosis or a vulnerability to psychosis. In fact, the opposite is more likely true. One of the most credible explanations of the psychotic mental illness schizophrenia is that it is caused by an EXCESS of the normal brain pruning process that happens in adolescence to the 20s. Tammet couldn't be more wrong on this point, but i think his error is interesting. I think it explains the unlikely proposition that he has epilepsy, autism, schizophrenia and also rampant synaesthesia in his family, as asserted in his books. I just don't buy this. I believe either the schizophrenia or the synaesthesia (or both) are fictional. It just seems too unlikely to me that Tammet should be a synaesthete son of a schizophrenic, considering that neither condition are common, and they appear to be caused by processes that could be seen as opposites. I think Tammet has assumed that syn and Sz are similar, because non-synaesthetes often think that synaesthesia is a type of hallucination (a mistake that most synaesthetes don't make), and therefore he has mistakenly thought that the story about a family history with both syn and sz sounds credible. Quite to the contrary - it undermines his credibility with me.

Laura said...

Well, you're certainly much better of an amateur scientist that Tammet is ... :P

Lili Marlene said...

You are kind Laura. I'm not so sure I'm the smartest one - he's got a stack more loot that I have.

Lili Marlene said...

I'm a bit slow - the thought just occurred to me - Mr Anon AKA Tomas, are you Tom Morton or TM?

Anonymous said...

No, I'm not TM.

Tomas

Lili Marlene said...

Just a bit of a coincidence with the names.

Anonymous said...

There's another set of replies from Darold Treffert and me up now. I'm surprised by how strongly he defends an "all talent and no practice" view of savant syndrome. He claim some savants are able to "calendar calculate, never having seen a calendar". That appears to me to be an extraordinarily far reaching claim that, if true, would cause a revolution in scientific understanding of the brain. I'll be interested to see if he stands by that claim.

Tomas

Lili Marlene said...

It's ridiculously late here, but I do love the lack of company at this hour of the day, so here I am.

I know that Treffert makes claims about savants having knowledge that they have never learned. I can't see how this could be anything but mumbo-jumbo, rather like one of Carl Jung's wacky notions. I think there might be more about this idea of Treffert's in his 2010 book about savants from Jessica Kingsley Publishers. I've only read parts of the book, because life is too short to read shite when there are so many worthwhile books out there unread.

And by the way, calendar calculating is no big mystery. Lewis Carrol figured out how to do the party trick of telling which day of the week one's birthday falls on, and there is a book about his work that gives the method. He was certainly plenty weird in a hereditary way, but a savant? No, a mathematician. I recall that the late biologist Stpehen Jay Gould explained the method used by his autistic son in his book about the millenium, quite an old book now. I recall that he figured that it was done via visual thinking or something.

Lili Marlene said...

How the heck does Treffert prove that some savant has never seen a calendar? Sounds like the mistake that neurotypical people often make of assuming that autistic people have less of a life than they actually do.

Lili Marlene said...

I suspect that Treffert is failing to make a proper distinction between savants being unable to explain their methodology because they don't know how they do it, or because they don't know how to put into words how they do it. If their method is purely visual thinking, one cannot assume that an explanation would come easily. Serious problems with communication in general are at the heart of many cases of autism, and many savants are autistic.

Lili Marlene said...

Is perceptual learning the same process as the supposed knowing without learning that Treffert claims is a characteristic of savants? I think it might be.

http://www.perceptuallearning.com/plearn.php

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328482.100-learning-without-remembering-brain-lab-goes-to-school.html

Anonymous said...

Now this is interesting - I noticed from a blog posting that there's been another TV show about Tammet aired on Saturday.

http://beuteiful.com/2012/03/becoming-a-superhuman/

What caught my eye on the blog was that theres a quote:

“his superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or differences in brain structure.”

Which is directly from the Routes to Remembering study. This study was not connected with Tammet in previous documentaries and papers, so there's a new angle here.

I suspect that the quote may have been picked up via Wikipedia, where it is quoted in the article on Tammet.

Tomas

Lili Marlene said...

That is interesting, but it I'll bet the journos and many of the viewers will be too dim or disinterested to realise that if Tammet's difference is not due to any "exceptional intellectual ability or differences in brain structure" then his whole story about having an IQ of 150 and synaesthesia is blown out of the water. Synaesthesia IS a difference in brains structure. Asperger syndrome probably is too. Can't be an autistic synaesthete if your brain structure is stock-standard!

Lili Marlene said...

You can view a 2010 video "The Mathematical Genius" from here:
http://abcnews.go.com/2020
Don't have time now to view it all. The more recent story (which might be made up from the 2010 item) can be seen here I think, but I'm not in the US so it wont let me view:
http://abc.go.com/watch/2020/SH559026/VD55178182/2020-33-my-extreme-affliction

Lili Marlene said...

I hate to disappoint you Tomas, but I have doubts that the ABC TV piece actually included the assertion that Tammet's "superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or differences in brain structure.” I think this is just an added note added by the blog writer, derived form their own reading, possibly from the Wikipedia. I'm assuming that the incredibly rubbish video from 2010about Tammet "The Mathematical Genius" that can be viewed at the 20/20 website was reused, along with other individual stories about ppl with brain conditions, in the Tv special "My Extreme Affiction", which had a date of broadcast that I don't know. I can find nothing in the 2010 piece that quotes from the Routes to Remembering study, not a shred of skepticism or critical thinking at all. It's all garbage.

Laura said...

The 20/20 special "My Extreme Affliction" aired in the US this past Saturday, March 17th. The section on Tammet certainly wouldn't have been worth your time, as a good number of basic scientific facts were incorrect, even when discounting the issue of whether Tammet is even a savant at all.

I guess the whole "Is this guy a savant or not?" controversy wouldn't get as many viewers, unfortunately. If only the guys from Mythbusters would consider this curious case...

Lili Marlene said...

I recall a comment in the video that I viewed at the ABC (US)website saying something to the effect that "different parts of the brain don't normally communicate with each other" when explaining synaesthesia. If that's true I've got to wonder what is the point of all of that white matter and the corpus callosum!

Laura said...

Precisely what I meant by "incorrect basic facts"...