Savants, Science, and Bible Stories

Introduction

Imagine for a moment what you would do if you were suddenly, without warning, called to a meeting with God or an alien who was 1,000,000 years more advanced than mankind. If you had 10 minutes to ask questions what would you ask? Would you ask for the meaning of life? Would you ask for the Power Ball Lottery numbers? Would you ask for the cure to cancer?

It is a wild concept, but it is not as far from reality as you might think.

As a child growing up I was brought up with the idea that all knowledge that one could need was found in the Bible. The idea was that the Bible was the inspired word of God and therefore infallible. There are a number of people today who still believe in just such an idea that the Bible or the Koran is inspired knowledge.

That upbringing left me with a constant awareness that there might be such things such as inspirations or downloads. There might be pure and advanced concepts that are given to people through various methods. The idea seemed worth checking. It seemed like a no-brainer.

I have now identified 15 areas where people appear to be getting inspirations and downloads from somewhere else – from somewhere outside the physical ideas of rational calculations and reason. There have been stories such as two independent people who told me of being on a spacecraft and being shown a formula they did not understand, and then being told by the same aliens about the cure to cancer. It seemed like a no-brainer to try and run that story to ground.

I came to discover that many of our inventions and scientific discoveries came from this world of inspiration and download. The more I looked the more inspiration and download appeared to a part of our world. It appeared clear that there might actually be inspired word and direction from some non-local realm.

One of the most amazing areas of inspiration and download appeared to come from prodigies and prodigious savants. This is because they appeared to be receiving a pure signal of whatever it is that is being downloaded. Some maintain that the accuracy of the prodigious savants is 100% and that is almost in the same category as the Biblical claim as being the inspired word of God.

The accuracy of the savant is such that if you ask someone like Indian math prodigy Shakuntala Devi to multiply in her head 7,686,369,774,870 and 2,465,099,745,779 she will come up with the correct answer the first try after only a few seconds.

View in Tammet's Head as he
multiplies 53 x 131

Then there is Daniel Tammet who sees numbers as colors, shapes, textures and sounds who sees shapes in his mind when he is given complex math to do. He simply see the shape of the two numbers he is given, and a new shape, which is the answer, appears in between. He does no calculation but always has the right answer.

These are only two of many stories which provide a powerful indicator of the ability of the human mind to tune into information that might be very useful to humanity.

The World of Savants

 

 

While studying the scientific explanations for prodigious savants I suddenly had flashbacks of being back in Sunday School listening to stories of great miracles. I have had this feeling before having heard scientists explaining the mysteries of UFOs as prosaic things that make no sense.

What I have come to understand is that science explains nothing. It only describes.

Science looks at events and describes what nature, evolution, or the creative force is doing. A example of this might be the making of an oak leaf. The scientific description of how this happens is that an oak tree makes an acorn which falls on the ground and becomes covered with soil. A combination of moisture and heat help the acorn to sprout and form a small plant which eventually produces leaves.

The oak tree did the whole thing and the scientist did nothing. The scientist simply described how the oak tree makes a leaf. If the scientist had not been there the whole process would still have happened. Yet the scientific image put out by science is that they have control over nature and are busy creating and inventing things.

Like a Bible story science has set up a cast of characters and given them names. There is the oak tree, and genes, and DNA, and weather conditions, and energy from the sun. This naming technique, however, does not tell us who actually did the magic trick of making an oak leaf, or exactly how the trick is done.

Science has created lots of names for things they cannot explain. Science will talk about placebo, singularities, genetic memory, DNA blueprints, chance, and instinct to describe the magic of nature. They however, never explain how the trick is done, and they certainly can’t do it themselves.

This is called naming theory. Give it a name and make the mystery go away. It works all the time.

The question becomes - who are placebo, singularity, genetic memory, DNA blueprints, and instinct? Each of them sound very much like an all-powerful old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud. They sound like people who are mysterious and all powerful because they are the ones doing the magic. The scientist is just the play by play announcer. Their names could easily be replaced with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.

Terance McKenna spoke up about this type of mythical naming when he talked about the scientific explanation for the origin of man and the magical process described by science that is used to describe extraordinary natural events.

The dominant and virtually unchallenged myth or our origin is either that God created us in 7 days along with the rest of creation or that the universe was born out of nothingness in a single moment for no reason. These are the two choices on the menu – neither terribly compelling to rationalists. Interesting to note that this scientific explanation – the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant however we may think of it in terms of its veracity- notice that it is the limit case for credulity. You understand what I mean?

I mean that if you can believe that – hell - you can believe anything. Sit down and try and think of something more improbable than that contention. So it’s like they open up with the one two punch and say put that in front of them. If they can swallow that then the hydrogen bond, the gene segregation or whatever will follow hard pace because the hard swallow comes first.

I maintain that it is a very odd place to look. What that’s called is a singularity, and many theories require a singularity. That means to kick start the intellectual engine you have to go outside the system and you get one free hypothesis and then once you have used that up your system has to run very very smoothly clear down to the end.

So science uses up its one free miracle with the big bang. Give me the first 10 to the high 12 nanoseconds and if I can do smoke and mirrors in that then the rest will proceed in an orderly fashion. Now that is orthodoxy you have to understand. That’s what the straight people believe.

McKenna talks of one singularity being needed but when it comes to explaining savant abilities, science is required to pull a whole string of miracles out of the hat in order to get the whole thing to work within the physical world view.

The general physical based savant theory is that the brain (usually the left) is damaged through birth, disease, or injury. When this happens the theory states that a rewiring of the brain takes place “by a) ‘Recruiting’ and substituting still available, still intact, unused brain capacity for those brain areas that have been damaged by a variety of developmental, traumatic or disease induced processes or b) ‘releasing’ stored, dormant brain capacity from non-dominant brain areas which are freed up after the dominant brain areas have been damaged.”[1]

Then the rescue brain employs the Hail Mary pass of all singularity/miracles and uses genetic memory to perform calculations like the 23^th root of a 201 digit number,  or a six year old boy who cannot multiply 5 x 5 but can tell you the day of the week in seconds for any date you wish to put forward, or the famous Sacks twins who could tell you day of the week for any day in history, but who replied to questions that there were 10 minutes in an hour and 10 seconds in a minute.

What is inherited, according to the theory is “not specific music or mathematical knowledge or skills. Rather what is inherited are the music, art, or mathematical ‘templates’ or ‘unconscious ‘rules’ of those specialized skills.”[2]

The theories proposed to physically explain savant syndrome are of course just made up ideas with no evidence to link to the savant or reproduce it in a laboratory. They are much like the explanations or “weather balloons,” “USAF dummies,” and ‘swamp gas” that have been used to provide earthbound physical explanations for UFOs.

Like the dumb UFO explanations the savant theories come crashing down with any investigation whatsoever. If the right brain is rewiring to do the job of the left brain why does it not take over the left brain functions such as speech and reasoning? It takes over NONE of the left brains task. They still can’t talk, dress themselves, or do thinks that require evaluation and reasoning.

The new brain wiring simply gives the savants some extraordinary ability to do massive mathematical calculations without ever having had a math lesson, or allow someone to compose 5 symphonies by age five, or play like a professional without a single music lesson. The poor savant is left without the ability to talk, count to ten, or dress themselves.

If genetic memory is involved why can many of the math savants do very complex mathematical calculations, calendar calculations, and yet not be able to add 4+2? What is the genetic memory mechanism for a person’s drive and ability to name Pi to 22,514 places, or be able to accurately draw the entire skyline of NYC after flying over it for 45 minutes in a helicopter? Did their ancestors practice these skills and pass them down in their genes? Why are savants 100% accurate in the area of expertise? How can physical genes provide instructions to the mind which was shown by research done already back in the 1950s to be non-local?

In the end the physical savant explanation reminds me greatly of Bible stories I heard as a child. The right brain is in trouble through injury, birth or disease (The children of Israel are escaping from Egypt). The right brain (Moses) quickly rewires itself and comes to the rescue. Then the new brain somehow taps into genetic memory (Moses’ staff) and is able to create musical, artistic, and mathematical talents that clearly look like miracles (dividing the Red Sea) so the children of Israel can escape.

What we have to be interested in is not the story but how is the trick or miracle done? The right brain rescue and genetic memories are nothing more than multiple miracles being asked for again by science.

The description of the physical mechanism for savant talent is total smoke and mirrors. It is nothing more than a stop gap theory to keep the physical universe intact, because if the physical world theory comes under attack it will be the disastrous situation described by George Costanza in Seinfeld – Worlds will be colliding!!

A new mechanism is required to explain the savant miracle. That mechanism will involve the consciousness which science has also tried to explain with singularities, nonsensical explanations, and Bible stories. It will involve morphic fields[3] and many other things that physical reductionist scientists will do everything in their power to keep out of the doctrines of belief.

It will come with a model of some sort in inspiration download mechanism.

Until then we will have to contend with the smoke and mirrors.

Postscript


We may not have to wait to long. According to Dr. Diane Powell who spent the first part of this year doing scientific controlled tests on non-verbal autistic children exhibiting telepathic abilities, "I have the data that could mute the Amazing Randy challenge."

Dr. Powell did experiments on children who were able to telepathically read long digit target numbers. The highlight was one young girl who was able to accurately give back a 162 digit number with no mistakes. 

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[1] Darold Treffert, “Islands of Genius,” Page 53

[2] Ibid page 59

[3] Rupert Sheldrake on Morhic Fields, http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/morphic/morphic_intro.html