 Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing: The
Mind's Secret Arithmetic
by Allan Snyder and John Mitchell
Provocative new research from the Centre published in March
as the cover story in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B
266 (1999) 287-292, suggests that all of us have the ability
to perform astonishing feats of arithmetic but this facility
is not normally easy to access.
ABSTRACT: Unlike the ability to acquire our native language,
we struggle to learn multiplication and division. It may then
come as a surprise that the mental machinery for performing lightning-fast
integer arithmetic calculations could be within us all even
though it cannot be readily accessed, nor do we have any idea
of its primary function. We are led to this provocative hypothesis
by analysing the extraordinary skills of autistic savants. In
our view such individuals have privileged access to lower levels
of information not normally available through introspection. |
