People who can instantly multiply long numbers

[Joe]

Was just wondering if 'science' has any explanation of how some people can do this kind of thing.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1657791056719511560

 

[hally]

Joe , there was a type of learning maths that I was reading about a couple of years ago, being able to multiply huge numbers called Vedic Math, done in India, it might be the answer your looking for... I think they were starting to teach computer programming through this method... I thought I could teach my children this method of maths as they were teaching these Children in primary age....easier said than done..
Hope you are well my friend....

 

[Joe]

I think there's enough evidence from individuals with this ability that at least some of them didn't learn it, but rather just have the ability naturally. What I'm wondering is, assuming 'science' has no explanation for this ability, how exactly are these people getting the right answer to a complex math equation just from a quick look at the numbers? I mean, we COULD just say "information field", and maybe that's the right answer, but there must be a more detailed explanation.

 

[Chu]

Impressive, it reminds me of Daniel Tammet.

Was just wondering if 'science' has any explanation of how some people can do this kind of thing.

The only one I know of is this kind of scientific explanation:

Brain damage, generally in the left hemisphere, is endemic to nearly all congenital savants. (Some people acquire savant-like skills later in life; these nearly always appear in the aftermath of a head injury. More about these “acquired” savants later.) About half of the individuals with savant syndrome have an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), while the other 50 percent have some other form of central nervous system damage or disease. Kim Peek, for instance, lacked a corpus callosum, the bundle of fibers that connect the brain hemispheres. He also had substantial other central nervous system damage. Not everyone with ASD, of course, will have savant abilities. About one out of 10 people with ASD do.

The best explanation of what happens in the brain of a savant (whether congenital or acquired) is this. Damage occurs to the left side of the brain, with higher-level memory circuits also sustaining damage. Parts of the brain that are undamaged are recruited to compensate, as are lower-level memory capacities. Rewiring occurs, and dormant capacity from the newly wired area is released.

Dr. Darold Treffert of the University of Wisconsin — the world’s foremost authority on savants — terms this process “the 3 Rs”: recruitment, rewiring, release. The capacities that savants draw upon come from fast, pre-conscious mental activity; this isn’t the executive level "reasoning" that most of us engage in. In general, creativity and cognitive flexibility are severely limited. In their place: automatic, rigid, rule-based processing.

Why are almost all savants male? One theory suggests that any number of disorders involving the disruption of the brain’s left hemisphere (such as savantism, autism, dyslexia, delayed speech, stuttering, and hyperactivity) will inevitably occur much more often in boys. This is because the left hemisphere typically completes its development later than the right hemisphere — and is, therefore, susceptible to prenatal influences for a longer period. In the developing male fetus, for example, circulating testosterone can slow the growth of the left hemisphere. This can trigger “recruitment,” with the right hemisphere becoming bigger and more dominant. (The cerebral lateralization theory, proposed by Norman Geschwind and Albert Galaburda in 1987, is discussed here.)

I may be misremembering, but I think the Cs once said that savants had a link to 4D perception due to their different brain wiring (more connections in the brain allowing for a 4D-like perception such as smelling or seeing numbers). So, the physical manifestation may be explained by "science", but the interpretation of the phenomena is probably wrong.

And antennae that is tapping into the information field, but also, a wider perception of what numbers, for example, really are? I think Tammet once said that for him, numbers just had an image of fire, water, objects, etc, and that he could make different stories when counting, so as not to forget. Maybe it's a bit like that when your wiring allows you to perceive things in broader ways? Like Lethbridge and his explanation of how a 2D drawing could be way more complex in other "dimensions"...

 

[mkrnhr]

I think it's a mixture of training and innate ability. Until the arrival of electronic calculators, human calculator was a job.
While looking at the 'Mental calculator' entry in wikipedia, there is a reference to a paper about certain brain patterns associated to a given mathematical operation. Most these human super calculators seem to do the arithmetic operations without thinking about it. It's like they've rewired some functions of the brain to operate like a calculator's circuit automatically beneath the level of consciousness.

 

[Keit]

Here's a short video that explains a tiny bit about her methods of calculation. But it only scratches the surface.

Here is more detailed information about her methods from her book:

Apparently she also worked as an astrologer and numerologist in Hong Kong.

 

[Joe]

I think it's a mixture of training and innate ability. Until the arrival of electronic calculators, human calculator was a job.
While looking at the 'Mental calculator' entry in wikipedia, there is a reference to a paper about certain brain patterns associated to a given mathematical operation. Most these human super calculators seem to do the arithmetic operations without thinking about it. It's like they've rewired some functions of the brain to operate like a calculator's circuit automatically beneath the level of consciousness.

Ok, but technically there is no explanation of how a person can bypass normal thinking and data processing to arrive at a correct answer like that. It implies that there IS some dormant and mostly unused function of the brain that can almost literally see or perceive the correct answer to a problem (at least a mathematical one) without any conscious thought. So what part is doing the perceiving and WHAT is it perceiving.

 

[mkrnhr]

Last week I spent some time with some people who have an autistic kid. He can't communicate with people (he doesn't even look at people) but he can do calculations. His father showed me a photo of the classroom's board where the teacher gives single digit addition to the kids (5+7 etc.) and three digit multiplications (389 x 568) to this one kid. Apparently he does these multiplications in his head.
Maybe this "rewiring" of brain circuitry is used by system1 and system2 picks the result as a visual representation of some sort.

 

[Keit]

Last week I spent some time with an autistic kid. He can't communicate with people (he doesn't even look at people) but he can do calculations. His father showed me a photo of the classroom's board where the teacher gives single digit addition to the kids (5+7 etc.) and three digit multiplications (389 x 568) to this one kid. Apparently he does these multiplications in his head.

After watching various videos about Shakuntala Devi it appears that she wasn't autistic. She had good eye contact, good social manners and communication, and even good sense of humor. But we don't know if she had any other form of central nervous system damage.

Impressive, it reminds me of Daniel Tammet.

You mentioned Daniel Tammet, and while Shakuntala Devi never mentioned seeing numbers as colors or having a feel for them, she did have a very well developed ability to see various patterns.

So it's not synesthesia, but maybe there are still similarities?

It's interesting because when you do mushrooms there are those amazing "hallucinations". But if I understand correctly, it's just a shift of focus from inward to outward...

A: Synesthesia.

Q: (L) That's making connections between different parts of the brain that aren't ordinarily connected, like when you smell a number, feel a number... So it just kind of crisscrosses everything; lets everything flow in and all the inputs are jumbled and that seems like a “spiritual experience” to ignorant people.

Just speculating here of course, but maybe for Shakuntala Devi the answer came as a whole, as a finite result, that's why it was so quick. Meaning, that it came from the right brain. Maybe her antennas were so tuned, when she asked, she had a direct access to the information field. And when she made a book about various patterns that she saw, it was already the left brain making sense/order out of all this information.

​

 

[Cosmos]

I found a full recording of a show by Shakuntala Devi:

What I find particularly interesting is that she, at least sometimes, seems to need to hear the numbers for the calculations spelled out loud, either spoken by herself or by someone else.

Further it is interesting that she states that she starts to fumble (and make mistakes, I would guess) when she tries to calculate and/or spell out the answer slowly. That reminds me of playing music. A connection? Usually, if you can play something by heart perfectly, by not thinking about it and let it just "flow", you can play it pretty good and "perfect", but as soon as someone asks you to play it extra slow, you start to fumble and make mistakes, because you start to think about what you do. As suggested earlier, there might be quite some "right brain" "thinking" going on?

Also, towards the end she answers questions about herself and how she is doing it. She says it is basically an intuition and on top of that she calculates as well. She also explains other interesting things, including the books she has written and that she thinks human beings are far better than machines and that she hopes that human beings will not become dehumanized by computers (which more or less happened now, unfortunately). And she asks where "the progress" in science is leading us to:

 

[Navigator]

Impressive, it reminds me of Daniel Tammet.

Here is the relevant session:

Q: (A**) Will we have superpowers like this idiot savant guy... (Allen) He's not an idiot savant, just a savant. (A**) Okay, the savant guy... (C) Daniel Tammet.

A: Some will. That is much like 4D experience.

Q: (A**) So we'll be able to like feel and see numbers?

A: Hear colors...

Q: (A**) That's cool! (C) So does that mean that he's kind of an advanced person or...

A: Not necessarily advanced, but just the luck of the genes so to say. That sort of thing, and much else, is coded in many and now and then it activates.

Q: (A**) So, it was activated by his seizure? It did something to his brain?

A: Partly, yes.

 

[Jimmy Ssaz]

I think there's enough evidence from individuals with this ability that at least some of them didn't learn it, but rather just have the ability naturally. What I'm wondering is, assuming 'science' has no explanation for this ability, how exactly are these people getting the right answer to a complex math equation just from a quick look at the numbers? I mean, we COULD just say "information field", and maybe that's the right answer, but there must be a more detailed explanation.

Joe as a child I threw myself with an umbrella from a roof I thought I was going to float and I also hit myself playing with sticks I hit or knock myself in the head and from experience I can say that skills do not always wake up for example in my case I did not run with that great luck.

 

[mkrnhr]

After watching various videos about Shakuntala Devi it appears that she wasn't autistic. She had good eye contact, good social manners and communication, and even good sense of humor. But we don't know if she had any other form of central nervous system damage.

Indeed. Also, it doesn't have to be a nervous system anomaly. In the case of the kid it's something that accompanies his condition. However, maybe some people can learn to automatize such capabilities. For instance, playing music is a technical skill to some extent, but one can learn to the point of playing automatically without thinking about the notes or the positions of the fingers etc. The same goes for such skills as riding a bicycle. At some point one does it while the conscious attention is elsewhere.

On the other hand, some people have insights that are not rooted in a repeated skill, like a dream about the atomic structure or a symphony etc. Those cases are different IMO because they are not easily explained by an algorithmic procedure like walking, riding a bicycle or doing arithmetics. OSIT.

 

[thorbiorn]

A variation of these people are those that can come up with functions and solve complex problems very fast without much calculation. One example could be Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan FRS (/ˈsriːnɪvɑːsə rɑːˈmɑːnʊdʒən/;[1] born Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar, IPA: [sriːniʋaːsa ɾaːmaːnud͡ʑan ajːaŋgar]; 22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920)[2][3] was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.

Mathematical achievements
In mathematics, there is a distinction between insight and formulating or working through a proof. Ramanujan proposed an abundance of formulae that could be investigated later in depth. G. H. Hardy said that Ramanujan's discoveries are unusually rich and that there is often more to them than initially meets the eye. As a byproduct of his work, new directions of research were opened up. Examples of the most intriguing of these formulae include infinite series for π, one of which is given below:

[...]

One of Ramanujan's remarkable capabilities was the rapid solution of problems, illustrated by the following anecdote about an incident in which P. C. Mahalanobis posed a problem:

Imagine that you are on a street with houses marked 1 through n. There is a house in between (x) such that the sum of the house numbers to the left of it equals the sum of the house numbers to its right. If n is between 50 and 500, what are n and x?' This is a bivariate problem with multiple solutions. Ramanujan thought about it and gave the answer with a twist: He gave a continued fraction. The unusual part was that it was the solution to the whole class of problems. Mahalanobis was astounded and asked how he did it. 'It is simple. The minute I heard the problem, I knew that the answer was a continued fraction. Which continued fraction, I asked myself. Then the answer came to my mind', Ramanujan replied."[110][111]

 

[mkrnhr]

Ramanujaan is very different to mental calculators because he doesn't appear to rely on any internalized automatisms and techniques. He describes his intuition as coming from some goddess so maybe in this case he was tapping into some insights or structures from the information field so to speak, while interpreting this insight as gift from his goddess.