The madness behind the scenes of @jammin. I swear there is a method!
Forget what you know | Jacob Barnett | TEDxTeen
Forget what you know | Jacob Barnett | TEDxTeen
Never miss a talk! SUBSCRIBE to the TEDx channel: http://bit.ly/1FAg8hB Help us caption and translate this video on Amara.org: http://www.amara.org/en/v/BWTt/ Jacob Barnett is an American mathematician and child prodigy. At 8 years old, Jacob began sneaking into the back of college lectures at IUPUI.
This kid is awesome and adorable. It makes me happy to see someone able to escape the fates that society assigns them at birth. He would never talk or learn anything! Muwhahaha!
You may want to read "Thinking in Pictures" or "Animals in Translation" (and maybe "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime") to get a clearer picture of what it's like to be autistic, but simply put it's visual sensory overload. Today's "normal" human brain filters out most sensory data in the environment. You walk into a room and immediately zoom in on the couch, have a seat and then study the items one at a time. An autistic walks into a room and sees everything immediately at once, down to the tiniest detail, because the brain isn't filtering information.
The brains of our ancestors undoubtedly worked much more autisticly. Hunter-gatherers had to pay close attention to all environmental details in order to survive. That type of brain doesn't work so well in most modern societies, because there is much more information to process, and that create disorders like autism and ADD. Is this brain less evolved? Absolutely not. It can still be intensely focused on a specific item, whereas an animal brain has a limited capacity to focus. It could even be argued that the modern brain is at significant disadvantage because it will fail to see important environmental clues (which gets us absolutely idiotic things like PRESIDENT TRUMP), and would definitely be considered disordered in a hunter-gatherer society.
Our insitutions assume everyone works the same and casts away those that don't fit those definitions. Autistics and ADD'ers have the ability to hyper-focus, which is a potential superpower because having that highest level of attention to detail could make tremendous contributions to society. Rigid definitions of what humans should be works against harnessing those abilities.



