# 22, Wednesday ```elm Theory about memory: when i was a kid i was able to quickly memorize things word for word. I don't know but i really think aside from having a lot more neurons (kids are sponges), i also had no entrenched brain patterns yet, like adults. like patterns which your mind flits through such as thought processes and associations during the particular encounter with a specific passage which could impose on the passage's word-for-wordness in the act of recall. future older child will have learned how to heuristic or paraphrase which is why sometimes you get errors in word equivalent or preposition/conjunction/etc. i was basically tabula rasa, or blank slate, or close to it. that's why savant people? really? maybe. ``` WTF [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/where-do-savant-skills-come-from/](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/where-do-savant-skills-come-from/) “Also consistent is research involving elderly patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). [Bruce Miller and colleagues](http://www.neurology.org/content/60/10/1707.short) found that some of their patients with degeneration in very specific regions of the frontal and anterior temporal lobes on the left side of the brain suddenly expressed interest and skill in art and music as their dementia progressed. The paintings that the patients produced were generally realistic or surrealistic without symbolism or abstraction, and the patients approached their art in a compulsive way, repeating the same design many times. For some reason the colors **purple, yellow, or blue*** were commonly repeated. Some of these patients described their experience as though their brain was **“taken over” by a compulsive need to create.”**** *WHY THOSE COLORS THOUGH WHY OMG IS THERE A SIGNIFICANT REASON?????? THEY ARE SEEING SOMETHING FROM WHAT **COMPULSIVE NEED ??????????? “Treffert believes savants are the best example of innate talent and "represent ‘nature’ in its most basic form.” To explain the emergence of savant skills, Treffert proposes the notion of “genetic memory,” which he defines as the biological transfer of proclivities and knowledge that don’t require additional instruction or learning**. He argues that this knowledge is “factory- installed” in all of us but remains dormant because we tend to use the same well-worn pathways and circuits that serve us well. He believes this inhibits the "little Rain Man in all of us.””** OMG I CAN BECOME SAVANT AND POLYMATH???????????????????? WITH THE HELP OF AI!!!!!!!!! “What remains far more controversial, in my view, is Treffert’s notion that genetic memory consists of built-in knowledge that doesn’t require any learning or experience. In a recent review paper entitled "[Savant Syndrome: Realities, Myths and Misconceptions](http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Savant-Syndrome-Realities-and-Myths.pdf)," Treffert writes: "The only way to know things one never learned-- sometimes at complex levels-- is for that knowledge to be factory installed, genetically transmitted." It's not clear to me how this is possible. After all, our genes don’t code for traits; they code for the production of proteins. Although it’s true that proteins are the building blocks of everything we do— they contribute to the formation of cells and the transport of elements from one location to another, and are the foundation for chemical reactions—they are far removed from anything we would recognize as psychological traits.” *Well I really think, it’s “unlockable” and I kinda agree. Something about 10,000 hours. Deliberate practice. Ericsson book? It’s a genetic lottery after all, and some people are born with more potential than others. “Compared to conscious, deliberate thought, our implicit learning structures are much faster and more efficient. In their review of the literature on the implicit acquisition of knowledge, [Paul Lewicki, Thomas Hill, and Maria Czyzewska](http://www.zoxpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Nonconscious-Aquisition-of-Information-Lewicki-199221.pdf) argue that implicit learning must be considered intelligent, if “intelligence is understood as ‘equipped to efficiently process complex information.’ ”” Perhaps savant skills are learned, just like any other skills. But the reason their skills appear to burst forth without any prior practice or explicit instruction is that their learning operated _implicitly_, facilitated by their unique brain wiring.?* *Please I swear I have been a wannabe savant all my life in exchange for any real life. *My skills: I think in order of mastery, as much as I could have developed them up to this point: 1. Writing - lol misery and incel tears made me this way. have you met any writer who is happy? have you met anyone who is truly happy on this earth? happy as in joyful? joyful in the Lord? i have to see the light no matter how dark things are. college was just one big block of ice. 2. ?? possibly i sometimes think i am funny but i can’t really do it on command. Or maybe i can sometimes come up with good analogies or defamiliarization? 3. Obsessive implicit Sherlock? - “intuition” - assuming the sin principle - fallenness. 4. Bible principles because of background 5. Music by ear (for some reason my skills in reading sheet music “correctly” was never developed). I can adequately transcribe music. 6. Transcription lol 7. Whatever is required of copywork and creative juice —> ALL_WRITERS_GOTO_HELL? 8. Practically copywork in general, facsimile. Idk where all my time went but I was always writing as if I was male. I noticed I tend to write the male perspective. Just weird coincidence or says something about my gender non-identification with “female” 9. Voiceover - American accent honed because I never spoke to Bisaya children and preferred to speak Chinese-American English. Lol. Somebody in UP told me I sound Chinese when I was first year in the chem building. And then the VO practice led to me developing it further. Maybe technology like Adobe Audition really had a hand in this also because I have no natural voiceover skills. I was able to earn more money doing impressions of what I thought was the general American accent - I wouldn’t know about regional accents lol. And then for some reason someone hired me for child voices when I noticed I could dial the pitch to the left or right? Oh wait, right. And then I thought I did a really good Toph Beifong impression. 10. In HS it was mainly drawing portraits. sister has this naturally and she is a natural!!! i am not lying when i die and suddenly become important LOL people will also say something about her drawings. i drew like ambiguously 2D almost 3D portraits. could never get shading right. she was very skilled at this. she won drawing competitions. she was taught by my dad because he had been a painter in his spare time when he was a framer of pictures etc. explains why she’s so good at a e s t h e t i c and photoshop and org pubmats. 11. ? Internet fluency? not really though the internet is huge? I don’t know if it counts as a talent but the ability to weather mental suffering. As if I had become the jelly teal-haired nonbinary character in Land of the Lustrous, as she evolved. because i am a digital native as in i got internet access at 9 or 8? omg who knows how future kids will handle this. two-year-olds literally go on tiktok now. THE CHILDREN ARE NOT ALL RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! we have outliers like elizabeth filips and ali [forgot his last name] who can handle all that overabundance like demigods. how do you survive please!!!!!!!! 12. I was always good at STEM and was known for memory - lol Bible memory and PACE Bowl and spelling bees. I became good at physics in HS and ok probably in Chem in HS, maybe kinda ok or good in math trigo and pre-calculus (lol could never place in the MTAP tho because i had no kumon)? I skipped 2nd year so geometry was missed as well as biology (but i really didn’t skip that it was just in Shekinah, we had sir sid make us watch biology dissection videos of 1990s kids from America filmed by ACE curriculum, because the school really had no budget for it - lol college prep “the simulations” aka porn). I don’t know if i remember anything from it. i think filling in the blanks education of PACEs were sort of useful but it really didn’t train critical thinking. explains why i like facts. 13. i have once thought i might possibly be a chameleon brain. i think. i generally have aptitude in a lot, but if i choose to focus on one and really hone it, maybe my other skills will all be lost. valedictorian imbalance? lol kim tee was known to be imba by other upperclassmen. i don’t know her personally so i don’t know what they meant. rae grepaldeo i think had really good skills even in writing and all of the skills a valedictorian that i was aware of. i think i read her stories in the witness magazine and i was thoroughly amazed. her parents seemed to be really invested in their kids’ educations. she got sent to admu. kim tee got sent to lasalle. 14.) I really think i owe a lot of my ‘talent’ no matter how much it cost me personally, to my jealousy and envy and competitive nature. i think. it was always kate tumala. i copied her writing interest. ? maybe she had a tumblr, or she did, IIRC. I even made fun of her wattpad stories. i liked tumblr not only because i could design the layout with some HTML and CSS but also because maybe it was mimetic desire. my interest in beauty was sparked by her when she came in that grade 1 class and was suddenly the tallest girl in the red dress (whereas i was the tallest before). i heard stories about how both her mom and dad were both sexually appealing and able to pull anyone (my parents are also like this?). i heard how she had been a heavy baby and that is why she is so tall and nourished and well-adjusted. i was only 7lbs or something. i experimented in the drawing competition of the rabbit coloring activity with trying to create gold out of my box of basic crayons and she got the nice encyclopedia award by scholastic? or some other company invited to our school. i felt like really deprived when i saw her pink gameboy with the barbie princess and the pauper game. i really really liked barbie as in obsessed with it. like wow i saw this toy in toy kingdom and it was just a pipe dream and she had it like she could just let anyone borrow it at school??????? wtf — lol that emmily magtalas rhodes book felt like UUUUGGGGGHHHHHHHHH IS THAT ME???? i even copied her planner in HS. she had a planner for tasks and i thought, wow ok i never have a planner so why not? i was really jealous of her thick hair. like she could cosplay katniss better even though i had drawn her portrait. somebody told her she looked like she could be katniss. she must have sensed me staring at her in seething envy lol. in hindsight i do stare a lot. i just don’t want to remember every single time i have stared at people because it’s just too embarrassing ugh. i forget that people also have sensing capabilities wherein they can tell if somebody is surreptitiously looking at them or not!!!!! OH GAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH and i can literally tell if your eyeballs move without looking at you!!!!! i mean people have this unconsciously or not. UGH wtf. like every other person who seemed to care about me in ocgs hs days seemed to assure me of something - like dancing around this insecurity that is so obvious to everyone except me (or so i thought had been private) - like kurt literally told me i look like kate once, and then jazel said something about my hair or something or some other feature that could be like kate’s. wtf WTF!!!!! there is a whole nother world i am now remembering but suppressed only because i was very introspective about myself and not other people’s behaviors. 15.) oh wait i can harmonize really well when i sing, just that i don’t really have a naturally nice voice. i am just an alto. but not the nice alto. i can’t reach soprano or mezzo-soprano. i can’t really reach lower octaves or registers like most altos. my voice is really limited. i sound really young. but i can harmonize. my sister also has this skill - like she has a better voice than me generally, and i am being objective. i don’t really have singing capabilities unless science makes a way in the future????? lolol all this ‘talent’ comes from hours of choir practice since grade 4 all the way to high school in competitions and church sundays. time spent. not like this talent is innate in me? although other people may also be better than me. 16.) ok i have some form of synesthesia and i don’t recall when this started. i associate numbers and letters with colors? i think i wrote about this in evernote. possibly interesting factoid. maybe all those classroom illustrations of big numbers and letters in childhood. associated meaning. “Theoretically, all that is required to explain savant skills is an innate predisposition to find redundancies and sequential regularities fascinating and an intact implicit learning system that gradually extracts those regularities over many hours of experience. Consistent with this idea, my colleagues and I have found that although the explicit learning functions of individuals with autism spectrum condition (ASD) are impaired, [their implicit learning mechanisms are _preserved_](http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Brown-et-al.-2010.pdf).” —currently don’t know what this means “Due to their language impairment, perhaps for musical savants, their improvisation [_becomes their main source of communication_](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0088665). Also, perhaps they are drawing on the same implicit learning mechanisms we all implicitly employ whenever we listen to music or engage with language.” -wow ok “I wouldn’t go _that_ far—clearly Mozart’s musical skills went well beyond the ability to memorize pieces and improvise within a particular structured framework. But these findings do highlight the notion that prodigious skills of savants and [prodigies](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2014/02/10/the-mind-of-the-prodigy/) aren’t superhuman. Their phenomenal feats can be explained by the same powerful learning and motivational mechanisms that the rest of us use to make sense of our world.” -yay i am mini prodigy ## Intentions: 1. Read Logic Made Easy 2. Study statistics again - probability combinatorics - statistical thinking book? 3. Harry Potter 4. Percy Jackson 5. TOYS!!!!!