[ExI] Superhuman Poker

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 18 18:23:04 UTC 2019


On Jul 18, 2019, at 10:29 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  People were always asking human geniuses like Einstein and Feynman how they got their ideas but they could never give satisfactory answers, if they could we'd all be as smart as they were.  John
> 
> I dispute that.  In math some people just can't go beyond a certain point in complexity.  They just don't have the right brain for it  (Einstein, for example, had more glial cells than normal - I doubt if injecting glial cells into your brain will make you an Einstein)..  If, for example, in geometry you tried to teach someone how to mentally rotate a complicated object and pick out the figure that it looks like from the other side, you would find one, that males are better at it, and two, that it cannot be taught.  Some people are just more spatial than other.  I am spatial.  How about you?
> bill w


Isn’t it the case, though, that brain structure changes depending on experience. For instance, see:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memory/

Now, it might be someone with an early interest in, say, geometry or things spatial simply develops a brain better suited to imagining rotating objects. It could also be that some start with better capabilities here and then they “invest” in them. Maybe Einstein started out with above average capabilities here and through use augments them. And maybe if you don’t start early — like with language — it gets very difficult to make an investment pay off later in life. (Think, too, of how a concert violinist is made: start at an early age and practice a lot. I’m not sure a twenty year old who’s never played an instrument but who invests as much in practice and learning the instrument is going to beat the person who started at five years of age.)

I think the “males are better at it” is mostly because of culture. Males still tend — in the US — to be encouraged more in this area and females are still discouraged.

Anyhow, you’re the psychology expert. Am I far off?

Regards,

Dan
   Sample my Kindle books at:
http://author.to/DanUst
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