The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2008, Síða 31

Vol. 62 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
29
Magnus Eliason: A Savant?
by Kevin Jon Johnson
Recent internet surfing took me to the
60 Minutes website featuring savants, taken
from their Monday 4 August 2008 broad-
cast, and it reminded me of Magnus
Eliason. In the documentary Dr. Oliver
Sacks remarks that the human brain is far
more complex than any supercomputer;
the neural web that creates consciousness
baffles science although it draws many like
physicist Roger Penrose to speculate on it,
a trend already well under way when Julian
Jaynes published The Origins of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind in 1976. The final word on
consciousness may remain a generation or
two down the road, at a bare minimum.
Savants exhibit striking skill in visual-
ization, memory, mathematics, or music
most often in a mind otherwise handi-
capped or defective, Dr. Sacks comments.
Only around 50 true savants populate our
world today, a rare breed indeed. Because
most savants have severe retardation or
autism they cannot communicate to us as
to how they accomplish their breathtaking
acts. A lone exception to this rule, Daniel
Tammet, has normal intelligence and has
made his way in this world like most of us;
he visualizes numbers, and has a visual
image of every number up to 10,000. For
Daniel numbers come in unique colours,
shapes and textures, thus 289 is ugly but
333 is round and beautiful to him. An
answer to a mathematical question comes
to Daniel as a colourful, textured landscape
that he simply describes to give the answer.
George Finn, a savant obsessed with
dates, inspired the memorable portrayal of
a similarly gifted individual by Dustin
Hoffman (Raymond Babbitt) in the 1988
Oscar winning Rain Man, a few years after
Finn’s uncanny ability received note on a
60 Minutes television broadcast. What day
of the week was 30 May in the year 1 ?
Wednesday, Finn answered after a
moment’s pause; this and other such
answers all proved correct!
Magnus Eliason shared this ability, at
least to some degree, with Finn, but unlike
the mentally handicapped Finn the mind of
Magnus was much better than average and
he made his way successfully in this world.
Once when Magnus overheard me say that
my birthday was 20 August 1963, he quick-
ly responded, “You were born on a
Tuesday.”
Without question Magnus had a prodi-
gious memory like many Icelanders and
Icelandic Canadians, but unlike most he
had impaired vision due to his albinism
with only ten per cent vision as a child,
then regarded as clinical blindness in
Canada . Only Douglas Lloyd Campbell
(1895 - 1995), Magnus commented,
exceeded his political memory. Campbell
served as a member of the Manitoba
Legislative Assembly for 47 years and as
Premier of Manitoba from 1948 to 1958.
For those who have read Magnus
Eliason: A Life on the Left, they may have
noted the plentiful statistical data, but
many may not know the process by which
this book was created. Magnus spoke with
Melinda McCracken and his conversations
recorded onto cassettes, so the source of
this Canadian social history was Magnus’s
unaided memory. I transcribed the oral
into a written text, strengthening the verb
integrity, style and grammar, and checking
the numerous dates and recollections of
political election results against the pub-
lished historical record. Magnus made no
errors.
Winnipeggers may also recall how
Magnus would frequently recite poetry
most often in Icelandic at our Icelandic
Canadian Fron events to the delight of our
guests from Iceland. On Monday, 12
February 1996 we recorded Magnus recit-
ing seven poems at CKJS in Winnipeg;