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Language Savants | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6739 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 17 of 33 23 November 2011 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thank you for starting this thread. I wanted to ask the same questions a few months
ago, but was afraid to because of how the "Is Ziad Fazah a fraud?" threads always turned out. I think this is an important question for this forum because I remember his extraordinary case was used as the standard in a thread about the maximum capability of the mind to learn languages, and if he is indeed a fraud, we will indeed have to revise many of our ideas and assumptions as Iversen said. Are there any speakers of Icelandic who can comment on Tammet's use of the language? I would think that memorizing a list of word using memorization techniques would be quite different from having a fluent command of the spoken language, if you know what I mean. Edited by Lucky Charms on 23 November 2011 at 3:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5350 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 18 of 33 24 November 2011 at 1:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I commented once before, when I was unaware of any doubts about him, that his interviiews in French and German were very similar. He had obviously rehearsed particular anecdotes, which of course would be sensible preparation by anyone, but clearly his language acquisition wasn't entirely a miracle.
It now occurs to me (being of a cynical nature) that given the sympathy that his case generated, he was probably given an easy ride by the interviewers, and probably had a bit of sneak preview of the questions or even a full rehearsal. I don't know if the TV in other countries still has any remnants of integrity, but here in the UK, pretty much all TV has been revealed to be totally fake (even Blue Peter, heaven forbid). I also commented that he spoke better German after "one week" than French after many months of living in France. I've no idea how good he is now. It's quite sad really, because he would actually be a fairly impressive (but certainly not unique) example of an ordinary language learner, through having been interviewed in three languages (as far as I know) on TV. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5459 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 19 of 33 24 November 2011 at 9:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I have now finished reading the book "Moonwalking with Einstein" which was recommended in one of the earlier
posts. It is a very enjoyable read, and I recommend it to anybody interested in memory and memorisation. Here is my brief summary of the book, with a slant towards its coverage of Daniel Tammet and his "savant- like" abiliities: It is the story of a US journalist, who is commissioned to write an article about a memory championship, and gets caught up in the world of trained memory. Along the way he learns that the US championship is an amateur sport, whereas in Europe is it effectively a full time pursuit for those at the top. The result is that, for example, remembering a pack of playing cards in two minutes would be an respectable result in the US, whereas a good score in Europe would be around 30 seconds. So, he teams up with Europeans in his training, giving him whole new memory techniques not applied by competitors in the US. As a result, a year later he wins the US Memory Championship. He becomes something of a minor celebrity in the US, appearing on the TV circuit for a while, and is soon shipped off to the World Finals in London, to represent the USA. He comes in 13th, with all the top spots, of course, going to the European professionals. Early in the book, he gives a long history of memorisation, and notes that it is only in recent history that developing a good memory was considered unusual. For much of history, students were not just told what to remember, but also taught how to remember it. It used to be quite common to learn whole books by heart, for example. This was necessitated, in large part, by the fact that books were very expensive, and few people owned more than a couple, if that. Nowadays, with cheap printing presses, and the Internet at our disposal, we see remembering as unnecessary. In addition, this has changed our reading habits to extensive (reading lots, and quickly, to get the general idea), whereas when people had only one or two books in their entire lives, reading was very intensive (studying closely, and repeatedly, to extract and savour the deep meaning of every word). As part of his investigation, the author spends time with university labs around the world that study the brains of people with extraordinary talents, including great memories. This includes scanning the brains of folks like Kim Peek (the celebrated savant) - whose brain is physically damaged in a quite unique way, making his abilities likely hard to replicate. Interestingly, savants have in common that the parts of the brain related to speech are damaged, and the theory is that other parts of the brain develop to compensate. What makes Daniel Tammet so interesting to scientists is that he does not have any of the usual brain damage associated with savants. This gives him the unique ability to explain how his "amazing brain" works. He states that a childhood accident altered his brain, resulting in synaesthesia (where the brain senses numbers as textured colours, for example). It turns out there is a lab at Cambridge university that has scanned the brains of folks who genuinely experience synaesthesia, and in all cases the parts of the brain associated with colours and other senses light up when they are dealing with numbers (if I remember correctly). Scans showed that Tammet's brain did not do that. In fact, they could not find any damage at all resulting from his childhood accident. His brain lit up in the way a "normal" brain does. The scientists were diplomatic about this and said Tammet's synaesthesia must be of a unique type, unseen before. The author of the book became suspicious, and dug deeper. He discovered that Tammet changed his last name before announcing his savant abilities. Prior to this, under his original name, he often featured in memory championships, where he did quite well. Indeed, the author's European memory championship friends said they had met Tammet (under his original name) in those memory championships, and they ware quite dismissive of his new claims, saying it is clearly all done with standard memory techniques. Tellingly, Tammet now claims that he cannot remember faces and names, which is quite common for savants. Yet years earlier he actually won the "faces and names" event in a memory championship. The author met Tammet a few times, and decided to test him, with a memory challenge that a savant would pass but which would trip him up if he were using memory tricks. Alas, Tammet failed the test, and went bright red in the face, claiming "I can see the correct answer in my brain, but I can't explain the answer in words." The author also uncovered archived copies of webpages that Tammet had created (and later deleted). The first was a biography from a decade earlier where he was selling a memory course, saying that his own memory had been very poor until his teens, when he started using memory tricks that improved his memory greatly. Another webpage of his (predating his savant claims) stated that a childhood accident had left him with psychic powers, and he could now tell your future for a fee. At one point, he does confess to the author that those webpages were his, and that these earlier business ventures were not successful, and so he moved on from them. It seems that he is much more successful in the business of being a language and memory savant. Edited by Splog on 24 November 2011 at 10:01am 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6340 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 20 of 33 24 November 2011 at 10:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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So Daniel Tammet is a fraud? Interesting, but not completely surprising.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6229 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 21 of 33 24 November 2011 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Wikipedia's talk page about Daniel Tammet's article has some interesting insights. One of the people commenting, Edward Hubbard, is a neuroscience researcher, specialising in synaesthesia, who's examined Tammet. He concludes:
Tammet has a history in memory championships, and has changed his name, but evidence does point to him having synaesthesia. The commentary on the talk page also strongly suggests that "Moonwalking with Einstein" is a poor source on the topic - I haven't seen it, so can't say. The 'faces and names' memory event seems to involve fairly different skills than doing well with faces in the real world. If you're familiar with prosopagnosia, you may have come across an article where it's compared to typical people telling rocks apart: it's possible, but only easy if they're quite different. If the faces are fairly different from each other, linking them to names with memory techniques could be something someone could do quite well at, despite having trouble with faces in general. Being a savant and using memory tricks aren't mutually exclusive. As for his former businesses - if those claims are true, it's disappointing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5459 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 22 of 33 24 November 2011 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
If you read the rest of those comments, you will see: "E.Hubbard (Scientist: U.C. San Diego lab) tested Tammet. E.Hubbard confirmed Tammet passed the tests, but remarked "it is possible (indeed probable) that he (Tammet) is using strategies." (See statements above by author of study). S.Azoulai, researcher (referred to by E.Hubbard as, "the least skeptical" in the team), noted in a particular memorization of numbers test, the results were expressed in a manipulated form, quote "his (Tammet's) answers were written down in pairs, which means he was almost definitely using some memory tricks." (See statements above)." 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| garfield Newbie Germany Joined 5969 days ago 18 posts - 18 votes Speaks: German* | Message 23 of 33 24 November 2011 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The 'Names & Faces' discipline profits the least from memory techniques. You won't get to the top unless you were reasonably good at it to begin with. And unfortunately, faces start to look similar once you get like 150-200 of them and only 15 minutes time :p. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Josh Cohen Newbie United States mnemotechnics.org/ Joined 4666 days ago 35 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese, Esperanto | Message 24 of 33 24 November 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Please read this entire thread carefully. Every point is addressed. Wikipedia is not a credible source of information, especially when controversies are involved. It can be edited by anyone, even if they don't know much about the subject. The value of Wikipedia is that it often links to credible external sources.
The technique is the same in real life and the competitions. A list of the most common techniques is here. If you want to see how powerful the techniques are for yourself, here is a tutorial that will take about 30 minutes to learn, and will allow you to memorize 60 random binary digits (or card colors) by only looking at each digit once. My example is a very basic technique. If you learn more complicated mnemonic systems, you can do much more. Every test they put him through can also be passed with mnemonic techniques.
True -- but everything can be explained by memory techniques in this case. There were serious flaws in the research: "The authors state he hasn't had memory training - presenting no evidence. Ironically, they unknowingly cite a paper which studied several memorisers - including Tammet - which stated that all of the subjects had studied memory techniques. . ." Edited by Josh Cohen on 24 November 2011 at 6:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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