swbluto
Veteran
Joined: 26 Feb 2011
Age: 38
Gender: Male
Posts: 2,899
Location: In the Andes, counting the stars and wondering if one of them is home to another civilization
08 May 2011, 6:04 pm
Kon wrote:
swbluto wrote:
That's largely explainable within the context of evolutionary theory. Verbal ability has been selected for over the past millenium years just as spatial ability has been that enabled spear-throwers and archers to be effective hunters in the tribe and there were other various "creative qualities" that were selected for(Such as arts, humor and the such -- this evolutionary trend persists to this day). The development of writing made the transmission of ideas much easier, and then the individuals with the best verbal, creative and/or spatial abilities .
I think there's a difference between our comprehension of numerical quantity and "common-sense" physics also seen in many other animals (so as to avoid dangerous objects/predators, find food, etc.) versus our unique ability to abstract/separate mathematical objects from their connection to the physical world and study it on its own. I doubt such abstract abilities could have been selected for because they weren't even used in our distant past. I can't see how our cogntive ability to study the properties of N-dimensional space, etc. could have conferred a survival advantage. Maybe Aspies, on average are better in this kind of stuff?
Well, there's a difference in the content between each the two topics (The concrete vs. the abstract), but there really isn't a "huge" difference in the fundamental cognitive abilities needed to understand both. The greater amount of spatial working memory you have, the more symbols and imagery you can simultaneously imagine. The difference between the abstractions/symbols of the "real world" and abstractions of the "theoretical world" is largely in its origin (The "real world" is more immediately understandable), but it's still fundamentally "symbolic"/representative either way, and a greater amount of spatial working memory would you allow you understand a greater amount of symbols and thus complexity from each domain. Of course, there isn't just one big monolithic ability of memory called "visuospatial memory", but there are multiple different types of cognitive abilities that underlie your ability to both understand symbols/representations of the "real" and "imagined" worlds. (Such as the "imaginary" world of String Physics.)
And, yes, spatial ability was selected for (The best hunters mated.) and there's variation in spatial ability in the population which means there's a few who have the ability to handle the complexity of theoretical physics. I don't honestly know if I'm one of them -- I did pretty well in quantum mechanics, but I felt like I aced the "multiple choice test" rather than the actual content.
As far as what the typical cognitive profiles are for Aspergers, I have nary a clue. One part of me thinks that they have a nonverbal disadvantage on the WAIS in common with its close brother NVLD, but other research shows many do actually quite well on the Raven's Progressive Matrices which is considered a more "pure" measurement of fluid reasoning.
