Comment by bgroat
4 years ago
In the incredible story "Funes the Memorious" the eponymous Funes has an absolutely perfect memory, but is functionally mentally handicapped.
He can't even abstract to the existence of "trees" because he can recall and diff all of the details of every tree he's ever seen.
He can't even identify that he's seen a particular tree before, because he can diff how different it looked in a particular configuration of leaves and shadows because of different wind and cloud cover
Makes me think of … Asperger’s.
I would think it's being an megasavant, sort of like Kim Peek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek
Not capable of functioning independently or surviving for any long period unassisted but having a brain and cognition setup that allowed for amazing feats of mental wizardry. If you could have that ability and function normally in society you could do some astounding things.
That's how I understood it.
A great story about a mega-savant who can function is "Understand" by Ted Chiang, if you're interested
I thought that the idea of Mentats (human computers from the Dune novel) were kind of ridiculous, but yeah, when you look at savants like Peek, makes you kind of wonder if such a thing would be possible.
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