escape的用法英语高级视听说unit-4

2021年1月26日发(作者：2811)
Unit 4 Brain Man
Almost
25
years
ago,
60
Minutes
introduced
viewers
to
George
Finn,
whose
talent
was
immortalized
in
the
movie

Man.
George
has
a
condition
known
as
savant
syndrome,
a
mysterious disorder of the brain where someone has a spectacular skill, even genius, in a mind
that is otherwise extremely limited.

Morley Safer met another savant, Daniel Tammet, who is called
most
savants,
he
has
no
obvious
mental
disability,
and
most
important
to
scientists,
he
can
describe
his
own
thought
process.
He
may
very
well
be
a
scientific
Rosetta
stone,
a
key
to
understanding the brain.

________________________________________

Back in 1983, George Finn, blessed or obsessed with calendar calculation, could give you the day
if you gave him the date.









George Finn is a savant. In more politically incorrect times he would have been called an
savant
brilliance.

Asked if he knew how he does it, Finn told Safer,
can do that.

If
this
all
seems
familiar,
there?s
a
reason:
five
years
after
the
60
Minutes
broadcast,
Dustin
Hoffman immortalized savants like George in the movie

Which brings us to that other savant we mentioned: Daniel Tammet. He is an Englishman, who is
a 27-year-old math and memory wizard.




That's
a
prime
number.
1931.
And
you
were
born
on
a
Sunday.
And
this
year,
your
birthday will be on a Wednesday. And you'll be 75,

It
is
estimated
there
are
only
50
true
savants
living
in
the
world
today,
and
yet
none
are
like
Daniel. He is articulate, self-sufficient, blessed with all of the spectacular ability of a savant, but
with very little of the disability. Take his math skill, for example.

Asked
to
multiply
31
by
31
by
31
by
31,
Tammet
quickly
-
and
accurately
-
responded
with



And it?s not just calculating. His gift of memory is stunning. Briefly show him a long numerical
sequence and he?ll recite it right back to you. And he can do it backwards, to boot.

That
feat
is
just
a
warm-up
for
Daniel
Tammet.
He
first
made
headlines
at
Oxford,
when
he
publicly
recited
the
endless
sequence
of
numbers
embodied
by
the
Greek
letter

Pi,
the
numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle, are usually rounded off to 3.14. But its
numbers actually go on to infinity.

Daniel studied the sequence - a thousand numbers to a page.


time,

It
took
him
several
weeks
to
prepare
and
then
Daniel
headed
to
Oxford,
where
with
number
crunchers checking every digit, he opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory.

Tammet says he was able to recite, in a proper order, 22,514 numbers. It took him over five hours
and he did it without a single mistake.

Scientists say a memory feat like this is truly extraordinary. Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and his team at
the California Center for Brain Study tested Daniel extensively after his Pi achievement.

What did he make of him?


introspect on his own-abilities,

And while that introspection is extremely rare among savants, Daniel?s ability to describe how his
mind works could be invaluable to scientists studying the brain, our least understood organ.


jelly in your brain doing that computation? We don't know that,

It may seem to defy logic, but Ramachandran believes that a savant?s genius could actually result
from
brain
injury.

possibility
is
that
many
other
parts
of
the
brain
are
functioning
abnormally or sub- normally. And this allows the patient to allocate all his attentional resources to
the
one
remaining
part,
he
explains.

there's
a
lot
of
clinical
evidence
for
this.
Some
patients have a stroke and suddenly, their artistic skills improve.