Understanding consciousness is the “hard problem” because the human brain is such a mystery, and that’s if we’re talking about an average model. Savant brains are even tougher nuts to crack, with their clear paths to long-term memory, which makes for amazing gifts and a difficultly in grasping everyday skills. And without comprehending the basics and variations of brain function, without solving the mysteries therein, can we truly understand humans, let alone create significant AI?

The opening of “Where Do Savant Skills Come From?” Scott Barry Kaufman’s Scientific American post:

“There’s a scene in the 1988 movie Rain Man in which Raymond Babbitt (played by Dustin Hoffman) recites a waitress’s phone number. Naturally the waitress is shocked. Instead of mental telepathy, Raymond had memorized the entire telephone book and instantly recognized the name on her nametag.

Hoffman’s character was heavily influenced by the life of Kim Peek, a real memory savant who recently passed away. Peek was born without a corpus callosum, the fibers that connect the right and left hemispheres of the brain. He was also born missing parts of the cerebellum, which is important for motor control and the learning of complex, well-rehearsed routines.

When Peek was 9 months old, a doctor recommended he be institutionalized due to his severe mental disability. By the age of 6, when Peek had already memorized the first eight volumes of the family encyclopedia, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By 14, Peek completed a high school curriculum.

Peek’s abnormal brain wiring certainly came at a cost. Though he was able to immediately move new information from short-term memory to long-term memory, there wasn’t much processing going on in between. His adult fluid reasoning ability and verbal comprehension skills were on par with a child of 5, and he could barely understand the meaning in proverbs or metaphors. He also suffered deficits in the area of self-care: he couldn’t dress himself or brush his teeth without assistance.

But what Peek lacked in brain connections and conceptual cognitive functioning, he more than made up for in memory.“