Hyperpolyglots Intensify the Explanatory Shortfalls of "Brains Make Minds" Claims

 99% of all adult males have brains about the same size, and 99% of all adult females have brains about the same size. The average brain weight of a male is about 1336 grams, and the average brain weight of a female is about 10-15% smaller. Whenever there is a difference of some type of human mental ability that is more than 200%, this is great problem for those claiming that brains make minds -- because such a difference does not correspond to any difference in brain size or brain speed. 

One such difference is a difference in intelligence. A Reader's Digest article describes several people who had an IQ of more than 200, including William Sidis, who enrolled at Harvard at age of 11, and graduated at the age of 16. There is no evidence that having an IQ above 200 is associated with having a much larger brain. 

Then there are differences in creativity. I know of no test giving a numerical score for creativity. But anyone well-educated about the history of music, art and literature will realize that certain humans have had a level of creativity vastly exceeding that of the average man. Examples that come to mind are Shakespeare, Picasso, Mozart, Wagner, Goethe, Edison, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven.  None of these figures seems to have had a brain much larger than average. 

Then there are huge differences in episodic memory. Late in the 20th century there came to the attention of psychologists that a certain small number of people have levels of episodic memory dramatically better than the great majority of humans.  People with such a memory are now said to have Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory or HSAM, also called hyperthymesia. People with such an ability can typically remember details of almost every day in their adult lives. A well-studied example is the case of Jill Price. The reality of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory had actually been documented as early as the late nineteenth century, as I document in my post here on the case of Daniel McCartney. A modern experiment showed those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory scoring 25 times higher on a random dates test. 

There are also huge differences in the mental calculation ability of humans. Many prodigies with normal brains (and sometimes damaged brains) have various types of extraordinary calculation ability. A widely documented ability is called calendar calculation, and consists of the ability to very quickly name the day of the week, given any date in a period that might go back 100 years or even longer, perhaps 200 years. Daniel McCartney had such an ability, as did many others, including many with autism. 

There are also huge differences in the ability of humans to recall facts or bodies of text. Many prodigies with normal brains have an ability to recall factual information to a degree many times greater than the average person. My post here documents such an ability in Daniel McCartney.  A more impressive case was that of Kim Peek, who supposedly could recall everything he had read in more than 7000 books. Then there are very many cases of people who have memorized word-for-word hundreds of pages of text, such as the entire Quran. Such people seem to have normal brains, but a memorization ability many times greater than the average person. 

Then we have the cases of what are called hyperpolyglots. These are a small number of people who can fluently speak many different languages, more than 10. An article in the New Yorker describing such people is entitled "The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages." We read about Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, who can supposedly speak "fluently" 13 languages, while having a "command" of 22 languages:

"He is a hyperpolyglot, with a command of twenty-two living languages (Spanish, Italian, Piedmontese, English, Mandarin, French, Esperanto, Portuguese, Romanian, Quechua, Shawi, Aymara, German, Dutch, Catalan, Russian, Hakka Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Guarani, Farsi, and Serbian), thirteen of which he speaks fluently. He also knows six classical or endangered languages: Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Shiwilu, Muniche, and Selk’nam, an indigenous tongue of Tierra del Fuego, which was the subject of his master’s thesis."

We read in the article a reference to Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti (17 September 1774 – 15 March 1849), who was famed for his ability to speak more than 30 different languages.  We read of "Corentin Bourdeau, a young French linguist whose eleven languages include Wolof, Farsi, and Finnish; and Emanuele Marini, a shy Italian in his forties, who runs an export-import business and speaks almost every Slavic and Romance language, plus Arabic, Turkish, and Greek, for a total of nearly thirty."

On page 63 of the book Bright Splinters of the Mind by Beate Hermelin, we read this about a gifted subject: "Christopher can understand, talk, read, write and translate from Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Welsh." 

A scientific paper says this about hyperpolyglots:

"There are many multilingual talented language geniuses in ancient and modern China and abroad (see Erard, 2012; Hyltenstam 2016, 2018, 2021; Adriana & Birdsong, 2019). Some famous examples include Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, as well as writers James Joyce, Tolkien, and Anthony Burgess, and also professional linguists such as Rasmus Kristian Rask, who is believed to speak 25 languages and can read in 35 languages. Griffiths & Soruç (2020) noted that Professor Andrew Cohen, an expert on learning strategies in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), is also an authentic hyperpolyglot who is proficient in 13 foreign languages including Chinese through self-study. Cohen has also presented and published related articles at international conferences about his multilingual talents (Cohen & Li, 2013). In addition, there are many polyglots who are diplomats, the most famous being Emil Krebs who mastered 68 languages in speech and writing and studied 120 other languages (Wikipedia)....Tim Keeley from the School of Intercultural Management, Kyushu Sangyo University in Japan is proficient in more than 30 languages, making him a real hyper-polyglot by all measures."

You can make a generalization about most of these cases of extraordinary human mental abilities. The generalization is that there are certain rare humans who have special mental abilities in which the average ability of a human is exceeded by more than ten-fold. Specifically:

• The ability of the best hyperpolyglots to speak languages is not merely twice as good as that of the average person, but more than ten times as good; for instead of being able to speak only 1 language, they can speak more than ten. 
• The ability of the best mental calculation aces to do math calculations or calendar calculations without aid of electronic devices, paper, pencils or blackboards is not merely twice as good as that of the average person, but more than ten times as good. Mental calculation aces such as Jacques Inaudi and Zerah Colburn could outperform average people by a factor of 1000% or more. 
• The ability of the best memorization marvels to memorize large bodes of text is not merely twice as good as that of the average person, but more than ten times as good. 
• The ability of those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory to remember events from their past is not merely twice as good as that of the average person, but more than ten times as good. A modern experiment showed those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory scoring 25 times higher on a random dates test. 
• The ability of the best ESP test subjects to perform well on tests of telepathy (subjects such as Hubert Pearce and the woman tested in the Riess ESP test) is not merely twice as good as that of the average person, but more than ten times as good. 

None of these realities is expected under the claim that the brain makes the mind. The largest human brains are only slightly larger than average-sized brains. There are no humans with exceptional abilities and brains twice as large or three times as large as average. In fact, in none of the cases discussed above is there any very substantial brain difference that can account for the huge difference in ability. For example, people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory do not have much bigger or faster brains; people who can memorize long books do not have bigger brains; hyperpolyglots do not have bigger brains; and mental math marvels do not have larger or faster brains. In fact, in many cases we see brain damage that corresponds to the exceptional ability. For example, Kim Peek was a memory and mental math marvel who could instantly tell the day of week of any day in his life, and who could recall each of 7000 books he had read. But the same man was born without the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.