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Comment by thunkingdeep | Hacker News Reader

Aren’t people who are good at anything in possession of different brains?

I know a guy that plays chess around the 2000 level, but cannot read. I have a cousin who can memorize a deck of cards, in any order, in just a few minutes. Everybody has different talents, but who gets to decide which brains are worth understanding?

We should be trying to combine and analyze all of the different ways that different brains have capacity for incredible feats of human accomplishment.

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I couldn't agree with your last sentence more. I'm, I guess, "quite obviously neurodivergent" (so I'm told), I have all these comobribities, like apparently I'm brilliant and xyz, but literally cannot do these other things other humans can do (read at 0.25wph, but audio books can't go fast enough). We'd really be great at building "society teams" if we could figure this stuff out at a more philosophical AND scientific level.

I dont think anyone is suggesting otherwise. The quest is to understand how brains work- full stop. This means what you said is true, as well as the exact inverse. There is interest in knowing why people cant do things. Why are some people face blind, suffer from amnesia, or incapable of complex thought.

It all boils down to understanding a complex system.

It’s something so complex and yet so simple, the brain is just an FPGA. it creates the wiring for a task and the more you do said task the more it optimizes it, perhaps the difference for some people is just the ability to create or optimize the connections in a faster or easier way.

I think the thing is there is weird stuff about how stuff manifests no? like I can't do math to save myself, but maybe I can "imagine math" (I've heard some people do math this way) - so just pair me with a math person and use my particular connection configuration to solve or invent new math, you know? That would be truly interdisciplinary teaming, you gotta wonder how far on the spectrum of "dysfunction" there is actually incredible function poorly implemented from a society perspective.

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