The Phenomenology of a Memory Whiz
UC Riverside philosophy grad student Alan Moore pointed out these YouTube videos to me, of a fellow (Daniel Tammet) who recites pi from memory to more than 20,000 places without error. The videos also show him doing multiplication in his head into the hundreds of millions.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Oddly, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, whom Tammet travels to San Diego to visit, does fairly little with him. (His student gets more air time.) Ramachandran could just have been too busy, but I'd have thought he'd have more to say. Hmmm....
The videos are fun and suggestive, but I'm also struck at how creduluous the researchers (Ramachandran less than others, maybe) seem to be about Tammet's phenomenological reports of how he does such incredible calculations -- by fitting together imaginary shapes in his head. Is it even topologically possible to model multiplication in this way? That's not obvious. And the direction of causation is open to question -- do the images lead to the answers or do the answers lead to images?
All that said, this is the kind of radically different capacity that gives some credibility to claims of radically different phenomenology, unlike most of the time when people claim radically different phenomenology (no imagery vs. tons of it, for example) with no behavioral differences to show for it....