illuminating science

As a follow up to my previous post on autistic savants, I mentioned in that article that savants can often perform incredible calendar feats. My mum, a psychologist, used to work with a boy who could, given any date, tell you what day of the week it was. He explained it with a combination of intuition and mathematics (”I knew that mum’s birthday was on a Wednesday last year, and so 8 years before that it would have been a Monday, so September 20th must have been a Friday.” (I completely made up those days…))

I got interested in this, and found that there are a number of ways to do it mathematically while only having to memorise a few simple numbers. Lewis Caroll (of Alice in Wonderland fame) worked out one method, which is what I use - it’s very algorithmic, and can be done for any date (I use a slight variation, which I might post at a later date). There’s also the Doomsday method, which notes that 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, 7/11, 11/7, 9/5 and 5/9 always fall on the same day each year (bizarre, isn’t it?!) Lots of variations can be found through Google (if you search for the right thing!) I never really practised much, but in my prime I could tell you the day for any date in the 1900’s in about 10-15 seconds, using Lewis Caroll’s method. Not bad, but not quite up to the level of a savant. Have a go, and see how quickly you can do it!

It makes me wonder what connection a savant’s abilities has with “intuition”, where you can predict an answer without consciously being aware of the process you used to obtain it. This can be very valuable in physics, as well as many other areas of life, as it helps to focus your research direction and give some idea of where you should be aiming for. Could we learn to make even intuition more quantitative, or is that a contradiction of terms?