Sudden Savant Syndrome

Saw this linked from the Daily Grail. I'd heard of Savant Syndrome as a result of injury or, of course, present since birth but this article describes cases where the subject had no significant event yet suddenly became a genius.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...knows-why/

The Case of K. A.

A 28-year-old gentleman from Israel, K. A., sent his description of his epiphany moment. He was in a mall where there was a piano. Whereas he could play simple popular songs from rote memory before, “suddenly at age 28 after what I can best describe as a ‘just getting it moment,’ it all seemed so simple. I suddenly was playing like a well-educated pianist.” His friends were astonished as he played and suddenly understood music in an entirely intricate way. “I suddenly realized what the major scale and minor scale were, what their chords were and where to put my fingers in order to play certain parts of the scale. I was instantly able to recognize harmonies of the scales in songs I knew as well as the ability to play melody by interval recognition.” He began to search the internet for information on music theory and to his amazement “most of what they had to teach I already knew, which baffled me as to how could I know something I had never studied.”

Thanks for this Kamarling. Fascinating stuff.

It seems there’s hope for us all! 

Interesting!

My thoughts are that, quite possibly, he was a great pianist in a past life, and that moment of hearing piano somehow inexplicably reawoke those memories, albeit subconsciously. That is, he knows how to play, but doesn't explicitly remember said past life.

Saw this linked from the Daily Grail. I'd heard of Savant Syndrome as a result of injury or, of course, present since birth but this article describes cases where the subject had no significant event yet suddenly became a genius.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...knows-why/

This seems slightly less mysterious after learning a wee little bit about AI neural networks and deep learning. A neural network is columns of neurons that get trained through a stimulus/response feedback loop and after training each neuron has threshold values at which it either fires or doesn't fire. So a skill or knowledge set could exist as a matrix of values created by a trained neural network.

Whether it is sudden Savant Syndrome where someone acquires a new skill or cases where someone suddenly acquires a new accent or a "download" of information about some topic... perhaps it is the matrix of a trained neural network being literally downloaded onto the untrained network in someone's brain?

The obvious question is where or when is this matrix stored and how does it get downloaded.

My assumption is that there is something to the Hammeroff theory that neurons have structures that are sensitive to fluctuations in quantum randomness and can cascade down to macro events.

Maybe the matrix of values that defines a trained neural network for a human brain is not "stored" in a way that we would ordinarily think of physical storage, but is stored in some way that is capable of being accessed or re-manifested in the elements of the brain that are sensitive to the quantum randomness.

Whether it is Savant Syndrome, new accents, downloads of information, terminal lucidity, or the many other forms of Psi, it seems clear that there is a way to "store" and "download" complete mental programs that we don't yet understand.

Does the brain even act like a computer-like neural network? I feel confident that brains don't act anything like computers. All the brain does is act as a hub for mind to interact with the body...

Besides, I cannot see how simply hearing a piano playing would give a person sudden great skill without having gone through the plenty of experience in learning about the art and thereby gaining a rich understanding of the art. A brain acting like a neural network doesn't seem like a good explanation, because
otherwise, SSS would be a lot more common, wouldn't it, going by your hypothesis?

Since childhood I've had dreams in which I can play the piano. In the dreams my hands and fingers seem to move naturally and skilfully over the keys but in waking life my attempts to learn to play the piano (or any instrument) have been miserable failures. Perhaps that is because, deep down, I expect to be able to just play without going through the tedious learning stage? 

So while the Sudden Savant Syndrome case may be mysterious on an intellectual level it *feels* familiar and true. The best rational explanation to me is a past life association.

Does the brain even act like a computer-like neural network? I feel confident that brains don't act anything like computers.

Brains don't operate much like computers of the past, but with the growing widespread use of AI neural networks and deep learning, computers are beginning to work a lot more like brains... even having wild "dreams": https://deepdreamgenerator.com/

All the brain does is act as a hub for mind to interact with the body...

I don't think that is all the brain does, but I do think it is sort of an interface between what we consider the "physical" and something "other". And what I was loosely describing is how that interface might work. The brain's elements that are sensitive to quantum randomness might be the "antenna" that is able to pick up and magnify the "signal" from the "other" which you are calling "mind". ...sorry to use so many "quotes".

Besides, I cannot see how simply hearing a piano playing would give a person sudden great skill without having gone through the plenty of experience in learning about the art and thereby gaining a rich understanding of the art. A brain acting like a neural network doesn't seem like a good explanation, because
 otherwise, SSS would be a lot more common, wouldn't it, going by your hypothesis?

Whatever the brain is accessing or interfacing with could have parts of it switched out like replacing one program or one dataset with another without having to actually train the network. For example, an AI neural network was trained to play Go and got so good that it beat the best human player. That AI agent that is really good at Go could be copied and loaded onto other hardware and so suddenly this other untrained machine is instantly good at Go because some other agent did the hard work of training.

I'm not suggesting the person acquired the skill by simply hearing a piano, but I'm saying they acquired the functionality of an already trained neural network... whether that was them in a past life or someone else... it doesn't really matter. Someone trained a neural network for piano skills and this person stumbled into it somehow. Somehow their brain got access to that program or dataset. It is possible this dataset doesn't exist in a way we presently understand existence, but could be thought of as a trans-temporal field... so maybe their brain is resonating with a brain state they had in a past life or resonating with someone else. It seems that close emotional connections are usually the keys that grant a brain access to the information in this field. In the theory of the Morphogenetic field, the more similarities there are the more likely there are to be more similarities or a "resonance".