I used to teach Sunday school, and some of it involved having students do a little singing. I was shocked at the number of ten-year-old kids who could not sing back a pattern of pitches by ear. I'm not talking about singing beautifully, or in tune; I'm talking about distinguishing flat, rising, or falling tones. The scary part? These were kids who had taken music lessons. I still don't understand it; maybe it wasn't inability at all, just passive resistance because they didn't want to be there.
I've spent about eleven years of my life in various choirs, and I am still effectively music illiterate. I'm capable of singing perfectly well, but the terms "flat, rising and falling tones" mean nothing to me. I can't read sheet music, remember the names of notes, I'm not even sure I remember what a scale is...
It's not that I haven't tried to learn these things, but for some reason I've found myself completely unable to retain any of it, despite having plenty of opportunity to make use of the information. I can only speculate on what the reasons for this might be.
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Last Friday I bought a very simple toy: a set of 216 little magnetic metal balls, about the size of ball bearings. Since then I've been completely entranced by it and unable to put the thing down. Here's a Flickr group to show what I mean. The little balls seem to want to come together in symmetrical patterns: you can make square and hexagonal flat patches, curved patches with 3/4/5/6-fold symmetry, stable 3D cubic lattices, fcc and hcp lattices and many hollow and solid polyhedra. So far I've managed to make a tetrahedron, two varieties of cube (1, 2), an octahedron, an icosahedron, and other stuff (my current favorite shape is the solid truncated octahedron). It's like crack for the right type of person.
And there's the rub. Carrying this toy around and showing it to my friends has made me realize with forgotten clarity that I'm special. Practically no one reacts to it the same way as me. The word "aspie" has been uttered, half in jest, half seriously. Even though my intelligence may be pretty average (judging by online tests I have lower IQ than most LW regulars), I seem to have this rare natural ability to get deeply interested in things that "normal" people find boring.
This ability... this instinctive desire to tinker with symmetrical patterns... has shaped my entire life by now, because it's what first attracted me to math and then programming. But how could it ever be environmental, if I remember having it since my earliest childhood? Is it genetic? Is math success genetic, then? What do you think?