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Comment by dannyb | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the sentiment of your point, but this does represent "normal mental faculties" in any way. They are clearly extraordinary in this one sense and that alone doesn't allow them to be classified as normal.

I watched this spot on 60 minutes and I am not convinced that these people are normal with respect to mental health. They had a very odd affect at times. Still, it was amazing to watch people recall things that happened over 20 years ago with clarity and precision.

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When I was in high school, I could recite nearly 1,500 digits of pi from memory. This wasn't because I had number-memorizing superpowers, it was because I was a geek and I spent time memorizing numbers. If you look at interviews with top competitive mnemonists, you find very few who claim to have (let alone actually have) any sort of "photographic memory" or even autistic savantisms. It's just a mundane subject with strategies and tricks. People don't close their eyes and see numbers, they break them up into convenient chunks, look for symmetries and patterns, and memorize them.

You can't underestimate what people can accomplish when they have severe abnormalities in their interests. Calendar-counting to compute days of the week is not hard. Weather patterns are easily mentally compressible, with natural chunking points from the seasons. Most people's work schedules are highly regular, so it's easy to break weeks into patterns and exceptions. And so on. Everything that's demonstrated in this article is well within the realm of feasibility for a sufficiently dedicated person without superpowers.

I'm sorry to inform you, but you in fact do have number-memorizing superpowers (or, alternately, "focusing on task and persevering" superpowers).

I think the point he was trying to make is this: would you consider someone who could completely crush you at, say, basketball, to have "abnormal powers"?

I'm not talking pros, I'm talking about people who've played sports all their lives. They can probably beat most people at their chosen sports. And a lot of perfectly "normal/average" people are really good at one sport or another. We don't talk about them as if they're "abnormal".

Haven't done it, but I'm guessing that memorizing 1500 digits of pi is easier and less time consuming than getting to a decent level at some sport. Except that for most people, playing sport is fun, so they don't think about it as "extreme concentration". For the op, memorizing digits of pi was fun (I'm guessing?).

No,

It is normal for a person to have superb mastery and recall of an area of study on which they spend considerable time and effort on an ongoing basis.

You can find an ornithologist who has a really amazing knowledge of birds too.

I think you're completely misunderstanding the thrust of the article. This ability goes far beyond memorizing knowledge in one specialized area. These people go through hours (up to 8 at a time) of testing about the everyday mundane events that have happened as well as the extraordinary things - there is no way for them to trick their testers. In the 60 minute piece, they could recall amazing detail about days from 20 years ago. This goes far beyond memorizing weather patterns and reconstructing information according to the regularity of a work schedule, etc.

I think what a lot of people are noticing here is that this extraordinary ability has not been commensurate with extraordinary accomplishments and it leads them to downplay the significance...

I'm not saying their abilities aren't "extraordinary" or at least very impressive compared to what one might naively imagine. I am more saying that people who spend endorsement efforts in other areas also tend to gain enormous abilities and so these are "normal" extraordinary abilities.

The point others have raised about these people not having abilities in other areas goes beyond this "unique talent" "not transferring". The point is that the people with these "abilities" spend a fair portion of their waking hours maintaining them. The memories may be accurate but they're "honed", time is spent codifying them.

Most specifically, the memories are clearly very different anything "photographic".

Just consider, if a person actually a video tape of their entire life, using said tape to answer questions about "what happen on day X" would take a few hours of mental processing. These people answer such questions instantly.

They've made themselves "experts" on one subject, themselves, and the ability give instant answers on that subject is a clue to this...

'Just consider, if a person actually a video tape of their entire life, using said tape to answer questions about "what happen on day X" would take a few hours of mental processing.'

You're making a huge pile of unsupported assertions, but this is the most egregious. You have the outline of an interesting theory, but little more. For one thing I see no evidence that there is any conscious effort made to maintain these memories, in many cases the people express every desire not to have this happen, yet it happens anyhow. At the point where your "making themselves experts" happens at a purely automatic level and against their conscious will you've stretched the words beyond any reasonable meaning, and I'm not sure your theory can even in principle be converted into something that corresponds to the real world.

The article states that some of these people don't even want to remember everything - so there obviously are people who don't spend a lot of time exercising this skill but who simply have it.

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