I don’t think we really understand childhood, child development and what happens to the child in the nature/nurture struggle that goes on unless you understand the self-organizing properties of the brain and the idea of fields of intelligence and what happens with the Savant, why the Savant is important. Why we learn so much from damage to the brain and in the idio Savant we have a tremendous message to tell us right from the beginning. I recognized that 30 years ago and I said here’s the most significant single phenomena I’ve ever come across and following through on all that it just keeps building up and building up and all that was, I was now looking at things from this 12 years that I spent in Eastern meditation and some astonishing things that I had found there both in very ancient theory and in direct and dramatic personal experience such as the experiences of how the greater process takes place inside our skull, right within our body.
And then that propelling me into the search for the particularly kind of scientific material that lent itself to that. In fact I found myself overwhelmed with it, that is that’s where the whole drift science has gone and what direction it’s taken, science has taken in the last 20 years. And so the evidence was overwhelming. And from that personal experience this skewed every computer process in my brain. I then looked at all this wealth of information in a different perspective and I saw how it all fit together and how we could make sense out of it.
The public movie that they made called “Rain Man” was based on an autistic person who had Savant characteristics and here’s a person who is severely retarded according to any ordinary criteria and he had unusual capacities which could not be attributed to any training or learning of which he was not really capable. But he was an autistic type to begin with and in a different category entirely than the ordinary Savant. The model that they were using was a chap who held down a regular job and so forth and was quite strange but normal on many levels.
Now some of the Savants who give us our most astonishing capacities are literally unable to feed themselves, dress themselves, and have to be led around by the hand, and of course are institutionalized from a very early age but they have one particular capacity which is literally opening to a field of potential or a potential field of intelligence.
And then you have Howard Gardner’s flurry of multiple intelligences that is there. These intelligences which we are capable of developing and if you follow through on that in the issue of language, beginning in-utero and so on, you’ll realize these intelligences have to exist as what the quantum-mechanic people would think of as what he feels which are non-temporal. They’re not in time-space. We translate them into time space through the brain structure. And suddenly the beautiful brains in focus and an enormous amount of research into the brain.
Prebrum saying 20 some years ago that the brain was apparently translating from frequency realms that are not in time space but cutting through it and so on. And all the rest of the stuff that’s come up on the vibrational aspects of the brain and so on. The Savant opens the door to that.
Just look at what the Savant can tell us. There are some that we teach by piling in information into a child. All evidence has been heavily against that for a long time. The really great educational systems are that you stimulate a child with some kind of a model, of a possibility, and trigger them into pursuing that. And then just furnish them with kind of what we call the nurturing environment which means the information of whatever it might be around that they can explore and it opens up a capacity that’s rare. So the Savant doesn’t have any of the advantages of an ordinary intellect. They can’t read or write. They can’t be educated. They can’t be trained or any of those things. And yet some very early either uterine or early post-birth experience has apparently activated a neural field in their brain structure, the brain system, that can translate a potential field that apparently is a field of intelligence.
Now if this is true then every idea we have of education is immediately called to question. Why is education so terribly difficult? Why does the child have to spend 12 years learning a small body of material and apparently retaining only 3-5% of all the information supposedly he was exposed to? Because information and education are not really the same thing at all.
My position of information is not, the whole thing falls into a radically different category. The other thing about the Savant is even with the Savant is it takes a trigger of an external environmental experience happening to trigger the internal response. So you’ve got the stimulus coming from without and the response which is automatic from within and then begins to just simply unfold, we call canalizes. The more it’s activated, the bigger and more powerful it becomes.
But the other thing is that the Savant can’t interact with the field of intelligence. If we provide him with the stimulus of a question, the field is activated and acts through him and he has no idea of how it takes place. He’s delighted it does because it attracts attention to him and it’s his specialty but he has no idea how.
And so we find these capacities to give it incredible information or answers of voluminous stuff coming for hours if it indicates or incredible mathematical things can come through if he’s a mathematical Savant.
For example, we have a couple of examples, my favorite one is the Savant being asked to tell what would happen if you take a grain of rice and double it on every square of the checkerboard from the top to the bottom. Which turns out to be 264 power, which turns out to be a number greater than our estimate of atoms through the sun or running into the quintillions. If I’m not mistaken it’s 128 quintillion and then all the quadrillions, the trillions, billions, and o on and so forth. The only number greater than the national budget or debt.
And so how does he do it? It takes an extraordinary high powered computer to compute that huge a number and it takes a Savant quite a while to spell it out because it’s all slow in translation through his muscular vocal system and so on. How does he know? He doesn’t know how he knows. But if that capacity is there you see, within the neurons of a brain, where is the information? You can’t say it’s in the neurons anymore than you would say that the information you’re looking at on the television screen is in the transistors and wires of the television. We know that would be ridiculous. This is translating from something happening a thousand miles away perhaps. So the full of it he translates from then becomes the source of interest and then how the brain is operating. Obviously the brain is operating in fields that aren’t in time space and have to be to translate into. Some of the other experiences of Savants which won’t fall into such an easy category as mathematics.
The self-organizing structure of the brainTheme:brain self-organizing, fields of intelligenceSummaryTranscript