In Germany, a young man named Ruediger Gamm, who is not autistic and did poorly at math in school, has trained himself to divide prime numbers to the 60th decimal point, calculate fifth roots, and raise numbers to the ninth power in his head – skills previously thought to be the lofty province of math geniuses and savants like the calculating twins. People typically use short-term memory to solve math problems, but PET scans show that Gamm has recruited areas of his long-term episodic memory – the neurological archive of his life story – to perform his lightning calculations. Brian Butterworth of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience in London compares what Gamm is doing to the way “computers extend the capacity of RAM by using swap space on the hard drive to create a larger ‘virtual memory.’

maybe artificial general intelligence and cortical hacking can meet halfway?

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