Funes and sudden genius
This article about how head injuries sometimes (although very very rarely) lead to savant powers made me think (once again) of the Jorge Luis Borges story “Funes, the Memorious.” Fortunately, the work appears in its entirety online, so if you haven’t read it before I highly recommend doing so now.
Borges is somewhat of an acquired taste, perhaps. But I acquired the taste the first time I ever read anything he wrote, which was the collection of stories (although the word “story” doesn’t begin do them justice; they are far stranger than that) in his book Ficciones.
“Funes, the Memorious” tells of a man thrown by a horse who becomes a savant of memory. But it’s really about memory itself, and the paradoxical limitations of having an unlimited memory, which would function as a handicap of sorts if it were to operate without the memory filter most of us possess.
Here’s a lengthy except, which also gives you an idea of Borges as literary stylist:
…I was told that [Ireneo Funes] had been thrown by a wild horse at the Francisco ranch, and that he had been hopelessly crippled. I remember the impression of uneasy magic which the news provoked in me…They told me that Ireneo did not move now from his cot, but remained with his eyes fixed on the backyard fig tree, or on a cobweb. At sunset he allowed himself to be brought to the window. He carried pride to the extreme of pretending that the blow which had befallen him was a good thing. . . . Twice I saw him behind the iron grate which sternly delineated his eternal imprisonment: unmoving, once, his eyes closed; unmoving also, another time, absorbed in the contemplation of a sweet-smelling sprig of lavender cotton…
[He told me that on] falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.
We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.
A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a rhomb, are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of cattle in a pass, the ever-changing flame or the innumerable ash, the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky…
…In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless.
[NOTE: There are people with memories that are at least something like Funes’, although not quite as extreme. I wrote about that phenomenon here.]
A load of horse-pucky. Sorry, Neo.
Frog:
Different strokes for different folks.
Been awhile since I read any Borges, but I was really into him for awhile. Unlike a lot of “magical realists” (i.e. fantasy writers from South America) he was a staunch anti-communist. Also a staunch anti-fascist and an enemy of anti-Semites.
https://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges#Political_opinions
I discovered Borges when I was maybe 20, and found him perhaps more influential than riveting. But I sought out everything available. I also liked Adolfo Bioy-Cesares, a good friend of Borges.
On a political blog, aggressive philistinism is the default setting for most, whether Left or Right.
When I was 20, I read the New Directions collection of Borges stories titled “Labyrinths” and fell in love with him. My first short story was an imitation. It’s not hard to imitate Borges but it is hard to do it well, especially at the age of 20.
Here’s an amazing one-page story he wrote which is one of his most famous and rightly so.
https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2011/05/17/borges-and-i/
Didn’t this happen to Homer Simpson?
Here’s a modern (true) story of a young man who developed savant level math and art talent after a brain injury:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2608861/How-brain-injury-turned-average-Joe-math-genius-40-people-WORLD-released-inner-Einstein-trauma.html
Huxley, thanks for the tip about the article on a brain injury leading to savant math and art talent. That doesn’t happen very often.
Clemente & Bartolo was a long-standing popular comic strip in Argentina, Its author was Carlos Loiseau, a.k.a. Caloi. Years ago, Clemente & Bartolo opined on the failure of Borges to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. It went something like this:
Unfortunately for Venezuela, Venezuela is currently winning the Nobel Prize for Inflation. Also for collapsed economy.
The English author Nicholas Shakespeare gave the 2010 Borges Lecture in London.Reading to Borges.
Nicholas Shakespeare goes on to discuss Borges’s remembering and forgetting literature, and also discusses Funes.
About Borges and his “old enemy Juan Peron:” During Peron’s first time as President, in the 1950s, Peron removed Borges from his librarian position and made him a poultry inspector.
Nicholas Shakespeare is the author of The Dancer Upstairs, a fictionalized account of the capture of Abimael Guzman, the head of Sendero Luminoso/Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist cum terrorist organization. I recently reread it. Good read.
Gringo: And thanks for your Nicholas Shakespeare excerpt!
Borges also remarked on his love of English and its writers in some piece or other.
I was young when I read it and I wondered, isn’t Spanish, Cervantes and Neruda enough?
I’m older now and I have no kick with Spanish, “Don Quixote” or “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.” Neruda remains one of my gods.
But English and its literature is special. I thank Borges for laying down a pointer for me to ponder.
That Borges, among other worthies, did not receive a Nobel in his time is a true indictment of the Nobel process.
and the paradoxical limitations of having an unlimited memory, which would function as a handicap of sorts if it were to operate without the memory filter most of us possess.
🙁
while not unlimited…
enough to ruin my ilfe and make me everyones target
Gringo Says:
May 15th, 2018 at 12:04 am
The English author Nicholas Shakespeare gave the 2010 Borges Lecture in London.Reading to Borges.
* * *
That was a delightful essay, and I would love to quote the final exquisite paragraph but that would spoil the effect.
(PS he also mentions the Funes story)
I know of two true crime stories where serious brain injury led two husbands to become family annihilators.
The first in Colorado Springs was a medium severity stroke victim with very good recovery but a major personality change. There were four dead and two crime scenes and two murder weapons, and the surviving divorced son-in-law was the initial prime suspect. The detective eventually found hand written evidence of an evil devolution of the stroke survivor, now deceased, and solved the puzzle.
A man in TX was the victim of a serious industrial electrocution. He was physically in very good shape, but his personality completely changed. Many months later, his wife escaped an attack with serious injuries while rescuing their toddler son, and the husband committed suicide.
_______
I think we are in the early days of some very significant brain research breakthroughs. A couple decades ago I heard a detailed presentation from two IBM researchers who had developed a magnetoencephalography device using cryogenic SQuID magnetometers.
For the last decade or so researchers have been using fMRI for brain studies. And recently people have developed room temperature devices for magnetoencephalography. This last one may be the first one to make these studies affordable and commonplace, as well as somewhat non-intrusive to the subject.
______
Huxley’s comment about Borges and English is fascinating. I have no familiarity with Borges, but I had read Nabokov’s “Speak Memory” somewhere in my youth. I was amazed that a native Russian would end up writing novels in English, but Wikipedia tells me he was trilingual as a child speaking Russian, English, and French.
on another note
lois lane is dead and so is Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan’s moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.
Artfldgr:
Well, fortunately for you (I think), you’re not quite in Funes territory. But yes, a prodigious memory can be a problem, socially.
Perfect recall is more useful for warriors.
Remembering every frame of every second in a fight 10-30 years ago, is amazingly useful for martial arts progression. Especially now that we have instant video recall with smartphones. Higher level skill is time distortion, when the perceived time on the video does not match the perceived time of the fight. This is Matrix level time dilation differences.
Memorizing verbal linguistics is its own problem.
If Funes was that bright, he should have solved Newton’s Three Body Problem.
Without an objective test, anyone with above average abilities are now labeled a “genius” or “prodigy”.
The three-body problem dates back to the 1680s. Isaac Newton had already shown that his new law of gravity could always predict the orbit of two bodies held together by gravity–such as a star and a planet–with complete accuracy. The orbit is basically always an ellipse. However, Newton couldn’t come up with a similar solution for the case of three bodies orbiting one another. For 2 centuries, scientists tried different tacks until the German mathematician Heinrich Bruns pointed out that the search for a general solution for the three-body problem was futile, and that only specific solutions–one-offs that work under particular conditions–were possible. Generally, the motion of three bodies is now known to be nonrepeating.
Specific repeating solutions have been hard to come by, however. The famed mathematicians Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Leonhard Euler had come up with some in the 18th century, but it wasn’t until the 1970s, with a little help from modern computing, that U.S. mathematician Roger Broucke and French astronomer Michel Hénon discovered more. Until now, specific solutions could be sorted into just three families: the Lagrange-Euler family, the Broucke-Hénon family, and the figure-eight family, the last of which was discovered in 1993 by physicist Cristopher Moore at the Santa Fe Institute.
The figure-eight family is so called because it describes three objects chasing one another in a figure eight shape.
To be precise, the general solution to a Three body problem in Calculus is that it is Chaotic. It is unpredictable. Except for you know, actual 3 bodies such as Sun-Moon-Earth which was predictable even by analog astronomical computers before the Age of Silicon.
There’s an error of 120 zeroes between observed astronomical data and theoretical cosmology, to use a paraphrase from Michio Kaku that was searching for Unified Field Physics.
The moon doesn’t do a figure Eight with the earth and sun, unless they are going to add the whole spiraling through Milky Way patch in.
The calculations of the moon and eclipses doesn’t use Euler’s “solution” geometrically either. It should be unpredictable but it is almost perfectly predictable.
Before scientists start talking about exo planets and the solar system and other stars and galaxies, first they need to fix their Theoretical Mismatches with the sun moon and earth system they like to gloss over and ignore. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/03/physicists-discover-whopping-13-new-solutions-three-body-problem