The recent book by Britisher Daniel Tammet gives an interesting first person account of the life of an autistic savant with the bulk of material being a summary of current scientific thought regarding the mind.Why should anyone be interested in autistic savants? Simply because figures from the recent Bill Gates to historical Newton, Tesla, Einstein and Mendel (of botany fame) are thought to have that particular mix of obsession, narrow concentration and high IQ leading to creative breakthroughs (and otherwise inexplicable, odd behavior e.g. Tesla living for years in a hotel room, Newton locking himself into his home for decades and Bill Gates rocking back and forth in his chair infront of Congress unable to answer a question).
Many themes in the book are analogous to those in this blog, for example, music and oral histories but especially the web of interconnectedness he describes in music, writing and mathematics, reminiscent of the masterpiece Godel, Escher, Bach of a generation ago, which inspired this blog's author to research much more widely than the world of science and technology.
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