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Great Party
Stunt:
"Name any date, and I'll tell you what weekday
it falls on."
The single most common characteristic of
autistic savantism is the ability to calculate
calendars. Name any date - in any century - and almost
instantaneously, the autistic savant person (formerly
referred to as an "idiot savant") can name the day of the
week on which the date falls.
Interestingly, most savants cannot even tell you how they do
this. They do not understand the workings of their own
minds well enough to explain any algorithm or process by
which they perform the calculation.
I recently saw a demonstration of this
phenomenon on a television documentary. While I am far
from being a savant, I did spend a few
hours noodling the phenomenon and arrived at a method by which a
person of "normal smart" intelligence can perform mental calendar calculations,
typically in
a range from 15 to 30 seconds.
This is a great stunt to pull in any
"I bet I'm smarter than you" contest.
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