The paper "A Review of the Savant Syndrome and its Possible Relationship to Epilepsy" by neurologist John R. Hughes has some astonishing accounts of extraordinary mental abilities. We read of "the hyperlexics, who (in one case) can read a page in 8 seconds and recall the text later at a 99% level." We read of "one savant who could recite without error the value of Pi to 22,514 places," a reference to Daniel Tammet. Later more specifically we are told that "on American TV many viewers witnessed Daniel at 26 years of age in front of Oxford University dons reciting (without a single mistake) the value of Pi to 22,514 decimal places over a 5-hour period."
We read this:
"Thioux et al.. [5] described Donny, a young autistic savant, 'who is possibly the fastest and most accurate calendar prodigy ever described'. The title of this report likely justifies the latter statement : 'The day of the week when you were born in 700 msec.' "
This seems to be reference to an ability to name the day of the week in which anyone was born, while taking less than a second to perform such a calculation. We read of a case of hyperlexia:
"The life of one of the most famous savants, Kim Peek, was dramatized in
the popular movie, 'Rain Man', played by actor Dustin Hoffman. Kim reads the left
side of a page with his left eye and simultaneously the right side of the page with
his right eye (without a corpus callosum). The time taken for these two pages for
Kim is usually 8 seconds and upon testing for retention he was 99% correct of the
material just read [2]. These values are in contrast to 45 seconds for reading and
45% correct on testing seen in a group of normal individuals."
The corpus callosum is the bundle of fibers connecting the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain. We might expect under "brains make minds" assumptions that not having a corpus callosum would produce terrible cognitive problems everywhere. But Kim Peek (born without a corpus callosum) had enormous memory abilities and way-better-than-normal reading abilities, as the quote above suggests. It is widely reported that Kim Peek remembered almost everything in thousands of books he had read, a claim that Hughes makes on page 7 of his paper.
On the same page Hughes refers to acquired savant syndrome, which he describes as when "after some brain injury or brain disease, savant skills unexpectedly emerge, sometimes at a prodigious level, when no such skills were present before injury or illness.” He states this:
"Many examples were given by Treffert, including a 10-year-old boy knocked unconscious by a baseball, then later could do quick
calendar calculations, an 8-year-old boy with the similar talent after a left hemispherectomy [removal of half of the brain] and a 3-year-old child after meningitis was later considered a musical genius. Also included was a 9-year-old boy who was shot with a bullet to the left brain, leaving him with a right-sided hemiparesis, later developing special mechanical abilities. Finally, two painters were mentioned who had significant qualitative improvements after strokes involving the left occipital lobe and thalamus."
An old newspaper article describes a very fast reader:
As impressive as the case above is, the article below reports a speed-reading ability ten times faster: a rate of 8000 words per minute. We read that the subject had a 100% comprehension of the material read at this blazing-fast speed, based on test questions he answered about the material.
The paper here documents an extraordinary "page at a glance" reading ability in two "super reader" subjects, an ability that may be related to photographic memory. We read this:
"In the test situation, the 15-year-old girl read a 6,000 word essay from Brown's 'Efficient Reading' at a rate of 80,000 words per minute with 100 percent comprehension. The 12-year-old girl attained a rate of 54,825 words per minute with 90 percent comprehension on a more difficult essay."
In the paper here we read this: "Gifted rapid readers (who can maintain 70 per cent or above comprehension at rates above 20,000 w.p.m. [words per minute] on Browns workbook Efficient Reading ) appear in her classes at a rate of 1 out of 100 or 1 per cent of the trained population." Later we read this conclusion after tests were done: "The three subjects in this study did achieve at least the above rates of 20,000 w.p.m. with 70 per cent or better comprehension on an article from Brown’s Efficient Reading before impartial reading experts."
The newspaper article here notes that a 1990 version of the Guinness Book of World Records recorded that Howard Berg could read at 25,000 words per minute.
In the paper here, we read this:
"Some hyperlexic children can read anything placed before them, even though they may never have heard or seen those words before,
nor do they understand them. They rarely mispronounce even the most difficult words."
An old newspaper article refers to the phenomenal reading ability of William Gladstone:
"Perhaps the fastest reader the world ever knew was Gladstone. He could read and digest a novel of 50,000 words, a scientific work as large or larger, a political treatise or a history by merely glancing at the leaves as he turned them over. His eye and mind seemed to photograph with the rapidity of an instantaneous camera."
A 1972 newspaper article tells us this:
"Glen Pesely may be the world's fastest reader. The 18-year-old California boy can read 27,000 words per minute with nearly 100 per cent comprehension."
The 1972 newspaper article below gives us more details on this Glen Peseley, saying he could read up to 27,000 words per minute:
You can read the story here:
A 1969 newspaper article tells us this: "Jeanne Crandell, age 11, sixth grade, probably is the fastest reader in the world, reading as many as 70,000 words a minute."
Reading some papers on Google Scholar, after searching for "hyperlexia," it seems that there exists a small number of super swift readers, often autistic, who have a stunning ability to read with astonishing speed, one that does not seem to the result of practice using speed reading techniques.
The ability of humans to read at any fast rate is something beyond any explanation of neuroscientists or evolutionary biologists, who are also unable to explain the origin of language. We can imagine no "survival of the fittest" scenario that would explain the origin of language. All fast reading involves symbol recognition occurring at a blazing speed. Neuroscientists have no credible tale to tell of how any type of recognition could occur by means of the brain. Humans manufacture things such as books and computers that allow a fast recall of information. From such activity, we know the type of things that make possible fast recall: things such as addressing, indexing and sorting. The human brain has no such things. The brain has no addresses and nothing corresponding to indexes; nothing in a brain is sorted; and the brain has no indexes. The brain has many severe slowing factors which should make impossible very fast reading if such reading were to happen purely by brain activity. Such factors are discussed in my post here.
The severe slowing factors include relatively slow dendrites, and synapses which each require a synaptic delay to transmit a signal. Because there are very many synapses for every neuron (as many as 1000), the cumulative delay caused by synaptic delays should utterly rule out phenomena such as very fast reading, if such phenomena occur by brain activity. Then there's the fact that only about half of the axons in the cortex of the brain are the faster myelinated type of axon (as discussed in the scientific paper here). The other half of the axons are very much slower unmyelinated axons, which have a transmission speed 10 to 100 times slower than myelinated axons. The diagram below schematically depicts the "speed bumps" in the brain. Such "speed bumps" vastly outnumber the fastest parts (myelinated axons). The result is that brains must be too slow to explain phenomena such as very fast reading with good understanding of what is read.
An ability to read fast is something we should never expect to occur in any naturally arising organism. An ability to read fast is something we should expect to arise in a species only if some higher power or higher agency wanted for a species to develop a civilization like humans have, one with things like cities, architecture, literature and art.
In the diagram below we see four colored areas. At the center is the simplest phenomenon of consciousness, merely being awake and aware of something. The yellow area represents some of the commonly known mental phenomena that are more than mere consciousness. The orange area represents little-known powers of the human mind (or types of human experiences) that are not disputed by professors. The green area represents paranormal abilities of the human mind or types of paranormal human experiences that are disputed by professors, even though the evidence for such abilities and experiences is very good. The professors who dispute the reality of such abilities and experiences are typically those who have never bothered to seriously study the evidence for such abilities and experiences. Almost none of the items mentioned in the diagram can be credibly explained as being caused by the brain. You might call the phenomena mentioned in the green part of the diagram "icing on the cake" for the person arguing that the brain cannot explain the human mind. The phenomena mentioned in the green part of the diagram strengthen the case against thinking that your brain is the source of your mind and the storage place of memories. But that case can be adequately made without even appealing to such disputed phenomena.
Some of the items mentioned in the green part of the diagram are discussed in my posts and free online books here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here (some of which may require pressing Older Posts at the bottom right of the page to fully explore the relevant evidence).
The diagram helps show the stupidity of the approach taken by many of today's thinkers, an approach in which the thinker tries to make his explanation task a million times easier by the silly trick of describing a mere "problem of consciousness" that needs to be solved. The human mind and its capabilities and experiences is a reality a million times more than mere "consciousness." It is an absurd problem misstatement to describe the problem of explaining human minds as a mere problem of explaining consciousness. The person who makes that mistake is committing a blunder as bad as the person who tries to reduce the problem of explaining the arising of human bodies to a mere "problem of solidity origination."
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