Proof, if it were needed, that we know very little about the human brain

Only imagine how many calculations are needed for someone to observe a situation, realize what it is, anticipate it, react to it, and without a mistake. And yet, we think it's hard to do 91949491 - 49194 * 2 ..
 
As a musician, I understand the difficulty in playing a piece by ear...doing it after just listening to the piece--and on the piano, no less, which combines multiple parts (i.e. on trombone, I'd only play the melody, without the chords as well)--is rather impressive. I know several people with autism and their intelligence and abilities are always astonishing. :)
 
This is called the Savant syndrome (see my link to the Wikipedia) and only a few hundred people in the world are known to have it.

There is one Savant who is able to fly with a helicopter over a large city like London and draw a gigantic detailed picture of the whole city without any error....

Another example is Kim Peek who inspired Rain Man.
 
It is proof positive that when you deprive yourself of a sense every other sense becomes stronger.

I would also guess that aside from whatever disabilities (I mean after watching him...I almost feel like it is wrong to call it that.) he may have, being able to replicate the sounds he can hear would make him one in the small group of people that can hear absolute pitch. Maybe because of not having sight, he can feel the pressure waves of the vibrations whereas you or I would have to deal with all of the input going to our visual cortex (which is a big part of where our brain use is dedicated to) and merely hear sounds. Not having to visually process literally everything in sight in ones world may give them an ability to process things we simply don't have available process for as a quote-unquote "Fully abled persons".
 
I was really amazed when he listened to that song on the guys Ipod thing, then played it back instantly

It's just, well, amazing

Can you imagine what a human would be capable of, if all the gifts we know of so far, that Savants have, were unlocked for everyone?
 
Treo creator Jeff Hawkins urges us to take a new look at the brain -- to see it not as a fast processor, but as a memory system that stores and plays back experiences to help us predict, intelligently, what will happen next.

Your brain would still need basic instructions at least to pour over that many experiences (any experience can be put under a microscope and further examined which would require more processing..example.. yesterday I went for a ride in my car, under a microscope with more detail and processing I recall going for a ride in my car and seeing two people on a bike built for two) and then execute a decision making process against that memory system filled with chunks of data in such a short amount of time. So if anything the memory itself must just be a piece of the brain system and not the entirety of it.

For my theory... it could just be a fast processor who's architecture is capable of rewriting itself and debugging itself when wired efficiently and the rest of the brain a storage bank with some chunks acting like buffer overflow protection like canary words stored at random as an array and wired according the brain's constantly rewritten architecture.

All we can do is theorize for now and try to reverse engineer it down to it's most basic functions. It is all pretty much theoryville at this point...but it has to start somewhere.

anyways that's enough out of me for today...I don't even know what I am talking about anymore. My brain stopped working.
 
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