Idiots Savant

Before you click on the link in this post, I must offer a disclaimer: PLIM.org proclaims some ... shall we say ... unique doctrine relating to a special, "divine revelation," supposedly received by a Dr. H. C. Kinley back in the 80s. The problem is some of it sounds reasonable. But remember this: All convincing lies wear the cloak of truth. An article by Lee Warren, of PLIM.org treated the subject of "idiots savant" in a fascinating way, but ignored one possible explanation as to where they get the knowledge that enables their narrow-but-deep range of ability. I've observed developmentally disabled people trying to grasp information and concepts. While learning is as complex as any other human ability, some aspects seem fairly consistent across the board. One is what I might call "the light bulb factor": given enough information, the cognitive light bulb blinks on. Compared to a genius, I'm a decidedly dim bulb, and idiots are about that dim when compared to me. When I see or otherwise sense something, my neural, sensory-receptor system converts the stimulus to electrochemical patterns. My brain automatically tries to match those patterns with others already residing in memory. If no match occurs, I experience confusion and disorientation. When even an approximate match occurs, my mind drags all the related data out of hiding for comparison with the new information. Those comparisons are then stored for future comparisons, and so on. Sensory input, however, isn't the only source of neural stimulation. The mind also creates a cognitive database, corresponding to the sensory one, of conceptual interpretations of outside thoughts, ideas and concepts that run parallel with sensory stimulation analyses. What we call creative thought is simply oblique sequences of relational database hits, processed to become "new" ideas. In fact, nothing is really new, but simply fresh interactions of old information, rather like a cow chewing her cud. Everything we sense or think contributes to that bi-polar, relational database. In some people, however, the process of analyzing what they sense is skewed. Due to an organic inability to correctly assign stimuli to the corresponding faculties, the broad range of sensory information is processed in terms of the one receptive faculty, giving the affected person the appearance of genius in that one area. Most of us have looked through color filtering material to see that filtering effect in action. A red filter makes all red objects in the field of view look white, due to our visual cortex automatically adjusting to the filter's overall color cast. The red-tinted picture with the white stop sign seems perfectly normal. That is analogous to the skewed perceptions mentioned above. Because its only frame of reference is itself, the perceptually-challenged mind seems, to itself, perfectly normal. The idiot savant is an extreme example of the "normal" skewing within each mind's conceptual structure. We all have "blind spots" in our thought process, just as we have blind spots in our visual field. Our marvelous brains, the creation of our infinitely MORE marvelous Savior, accommodate to missing or skewed information so they can continue functioning with minimal disruption. Part of the social adjustment process called maturing is realizing that we have such blind spots in our frames of reference. And once we reach that realization, we must seek a source of objective, unskewed information--or maybe I should say, the only Source of objective Truth: the self-existent, eternal One.