Advanced development: Daniel Tammet on labels and intelligence

Daniel Tammet Scott Barry Kaufman notes, “Although their unusual abilities compel considerable attention, there are fewer than 100 known prodigious savants living at the present time.”

He interviews one of these extraordinary people for his Beautiful Minds blog. Here is an excerpt:

Daniel Tammet: I don’t think it serves very much to label someone. IQ is a very good example of that and the example that I explore and critique in Embracing the Wide Sky, this idea that we can take the population and according to the Bell Curve say ‘well look you are 119, he is 85, she is 107′. I’m not really sure that it tells us very much.

I recently read an interview with Steven Pinker and he said something I would definitely agree with. It was an interview he gave about genetics and the fact he had his own genome studied and the results published, and he was discussing the genetics of intelligence. In the interview he said that regardless of people’s attitudes about IQ, it’s a very difficult subject, it’s something that gets people very heated up, it’s intelligence that matters and not differences in intelligence. That these are the things that scientists need to focus on, these are the things that are really interesting, and will tell us a great deal about the mind and human behavior and so-on, and differences will tell us very much less.

It’s very hard to know what intelligence is (again, I make that point very clearly in Embracing the Wide Sky) and we don’t really know what it is. It’s one of those big abstracts and everyone has an opinion but it’s difficult to narrow down so let’s look at that, and let’s look at ways of teaching children methods that work, the real essentials, literacy, numeracy, and so on. Rather than dividing children according to a kind of astrological division, saying look you’re Aquarius, you’re smarter than he is because you’re a Leo. That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Look at height as another example. You want to look at the nature of height and how people grow and so-on rather than looking at creating a bell curve of people and saying ‘well look, he’s a dwarf, he’s a giant, and you’re somewhere in between’. I don’t know if differences in height are much less interesting from a scientific point of view than the phenomena of height itself, of how people grow, and so on. I think intelligence is effectively the same principle.

Scott Barry Kaufman: You say in your book that as a child you had difficulties with abstract thought, but that you now lead a successful life with relationship, friends and intellectual pursuits. In light the fact that in your childhood you report having difficulties with abstract thought, do you think your IQ has increased over the years? Especially considering you now have a high IQ and doing well on an IQ test does require high levels of abstract thinking.

Daniel Tammet: I’m sure it has. I didn’t have an IQ test as a child, but if I had had one done, I’m sure it would have been lower. I’m sure it would have been above average and depending on the particular test – of course they vary quite a lot – if it focused on vocabulary for example, and on memory and on numerical ability and less on abstract thinking, then it would still have been a high score but there’s no doubt that that score would have gone up over the years.

I think a large part of that has to do with life experience — disability to live in the real world, to interact with people, to undergo experiences that are sometimes not particularly pleasant.

You know, life isn’t always pleasant. You’re standing in a queue, or if you’re shouted at by a stranger because he’s in a very irate mood for reasons that you can’t possibly know or if someone dies suddenly and they seem to be in the prime of their life. Life is going to be complex and the only way we’re able navigate our way through it at all is by living as best we can and absorbing those experiences and somehow making intuitive responses in future situations that resemble them in some way. And I’m high functioning enough to be able to do that in a way or very similar to how normal people do this.

Continued in his post Conversations on Creativity with Daniel Tammet- Part IV.

See a video of Tammet in the High Ability post Savant abilities and learning differences relate to developing multiple talents.

Books:

Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, by Daniel Tammet

How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker

Photo from post on the Encefalus site: Inside the amazing brain of an
autistic savant.