I remember him. Did a wonderful drawing of St Pancras Hotel and station in the same way when he was a nipper, eight or ten years old.
'idiots savants' they call them. Some are similarly brilliant at maths. You bark out some date in the distant future and they will tell you what day of the week it falls on, counting leap years and the like.
Shows how clever humans could be if they weren't all neurotic and criminal.
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The human brain is an immense storage device, its memory is cleverly staged and sorted with lots of obscure indexes and access methods.
Yeah if you chuck out all the other indexes, dump the staging for fast, medium or slow recall, you can store loads of stuff in amazing detail.
Trouble is, to manage in life you need all the features.
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My memory of him as a youngster is of him taking one look at the subject matter, then sitting with his back to it and producing the drawing.
No further looking.
Just did it.
Apparently the usual/normal memory management trick is deciding what to throw away.
Whereas those of us with some damage, know some peripheral detail of the thing/word/person we want to tell another about, and have to root through the other baggage relating to the subject to get the link to fire which gives the information wanted.
But on other occasions the (same) thing is there straight away.
The head really is a funny bag of soup.
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If there is anyone interested in the way the mind works who hasn't yet read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" then give it a go. Sacks is very readable on this subject.
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Stephen Pinker's "How the Mind Works" is good
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I met Stephen Pinker when he was debating with Richard Dawkins on the circuit sometime around 1998. He signed a copy of How the Mind Works for me but I never read it. I think I'll take it on holiday this year though and give it a go.
The debate wasn't that interesting - they agreed with each other on everything.
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So you think that you can draw? - Armel Coussine
