The parapsychologists aren’t describing it, but musicians often talk as if their compositions are somehow external and they are able to tap into them.
The prodigee I was thinking of said, in response to ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’, ‘It’s like catching a split second in time and if I catch that, all the rest (i.e. the full composition) follows’.
I asked my son, who’s reading maths, if there could be a formula to explain this description and he said, ‘Mum, to be honest, I don’t know what you’re on about.’
But there was a very good Horizon programme not long after, I think presented by a mathemetician, and he came to the conclusion that one day we will have mathematical formulae for consciousness.
Imagine trying to find a good piece of music, you could just create random notes and see how good they are, but that wouldn’t be very interesting music. So instead you have to have an algorithm to generate interesting pieces of music. The algorithm might take a small piece of work and build upon it.
I didn’t say where the algorithm came from, likely we build it in some way as we get experience. This building of skills is in turn is another search problem, that of finding good specialist searches. So in answer to your question, the gifted people might be those that are lucky and find good search algorithms (at a variety of different levels).
The parapsychologists aren’t describing it, but musicians often talk as if their compositions are somehow external and they are able to tap into them.
The prodigee I was thinking of said, in response to ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’, ‘It’s like catching a split second in time and if I catch that, all the rest (i.e. the full composition) follows’.
I asked my son, who’s reading maths, if there could be a formula to explain this description and he said, ‘Mum, to be honest, I don’t know what you’re on about.’
But there was a very good Horizon programme not long after, I think presented by a mathemetician, and he came to the conclusion that one day we will have mathematical formulae for consciousness.
Nitpick - it’s “prodigy”, plural “prodigies”.
My brief attempt to outline one possible explanation for the phenomenon.
Read if you not familiar with search algorithms/spaces the wikipedia article on it.
Imagine trying to find a good piece of music, you could just create random notes and see how good they are, but that wouldn’t be very interesting music. So instead you have to have an algorithm to generate interesting pieces of music. The algorithm might take a small piece of work and build upon it.
I didn’t say where the algorithm came from, likely we build it in some way as we get experience. This building of skills is in turn is another search problem, that of finding good specialist searches. So in answer to your question, the gifted people might be those that are lucky and find good search algorithms (at a variety of different levels).
Aaah, Thank you.