Is Autism Really a Disease? Could It Be the Next Step in Brain Evolution?

You’re struggling to get a better grasp of lien avoidance in consumer bankruptcies. It’s 2 AM and you’re frustrated with yourself and your apparent inability to retain facts and concepts from one page of the 600-+ page treatise you’re studying to the next.

Or maybe the book is a record on appeal, and the facts and concepts are the past proceedings, the details of the arrest and interrogation and tainted confession that didn’t get thrown out at trial but should have been because the detective … or was it the arresting officer…. forgot to Mirandize … or maybe he did but too late … wait, what was his name again?

Bookmark this post first. Then, the next time this, or something like this, happens to you — the next time you’re struggling to remember and process details and feeling like it’s an impossible task, remember that you bookmarked this post. Come back here at that point, and watch this video one more time:

You can read more about Stephen Wiltshire, the remarkable artist featured in this video, at his web site.

What I find most interesting about Stephen’s experience drawing this convoluted, complex city with a byzantine layout is that he did make some errors — minor ones, to be sure. But it suggests to me that there’s something else going on besides pure eidetic memory. To me it suggests something far more fascinating: an amped-up but entirely human memory.

The distinction: if this is eidetic memory, it’s fascinating but we’ve seen it before. We see such people as admirable freaks of nature — a genetic anomaly. But if this is a fallible but amped-up human memory, then the ramifications for us get more interesting, don’t they?

There’s the old saw that we use 10% on average (some versions say less) of our brain’s potential. Is Stephen using 60%? 40%? What if it’s just 20%?

What, in short, are we capable of, if we just knew how to tap it?

Even more interesting to me: some people are going to view that video when they’re struggling with learning some new subject and instead of being galvanized and inspired, as I am, they’re going to feel depressed and even worse about themselves.

Moral: Choose different.

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