Reply #22: I saw a lady like that [View All]

[JohnyCanuck]

When I was in high school a middle aged East Indian lady visiting from India gave a demonstration for the school in which she did incredibly complex math operations involving mentally adding, multiplying, dividing, raising to powers, finding roots etc. of seemingly impossibly large numbers (called out to her at random by students in the audience) all in her head. It's been a while now, but I seem to recollect she said that it was an ability she just found she had as she was growing up, and not something that she had to study how to do, or that came to her after some unusual experience. Although sometimes people with seemingly large mental handicaps can, at the same time, be extremely gifted with extraordinary abilities in music, languages or mathematics, this lady was mentally quite normal in all respects, except that she had an extraordinary ability to do math in her head.