TVO has a fascinating series on the mysteries of the mind this week: from brilliant to broken. Steven Wiltshire is featured tonight as an autistic man who draws from an encyclopaedic memory based on a single experience.
I will use author and neurologist Oliver Sacks words, as it best describes my own feelings:
"The combination of great abilities with great disabilities presents an extraordinary (and, in human terms, poignant) paradox and problem - how can such opposites live side by side? There is a strong tendency to see these as organically related - to see the gifts of the autistic (and about 10% of these are so gifted) as stemming directly from their failures and deficits - their narrow 'hyperfocused' attention, and their supposed inability to process visual information, to pass from precepts to concepts, so that, in the visual realm, for example, it has been said that they merely 'see' what is there..."
Lots of great mind games: TVO: Mysteries of the Mind
The world of Stephen Wiltshire
READ THIS BRILLIANT BOOK: Oliver Sacks, has devoted an essay to Stephen in his book "An Anthropologist On Mars" (Picador 1995)
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