Reading this review reminds me of Temple Grandin, who is a highly functioning autistic person. Although autism doesn't work quite the same way, a lot of the things she discussed (such as viewing the world in one way and not understanding that everyone else had a completely different perspective) were very similar.

Ultimately, when we get to a high level of bioengineering / genetic engineering capability, we're going to see some very problematic questions arise around the notion of "organic computers"... People with these "disabilities" have already shown us that the human brain can be a very, very efficient processor if arranged in certain, non-standard ways. Will we eventually each have a little custom grown organic brain in our desktop PC's? I think the "ick" factor will probably push that development off to a long time away, but outside the consumer realm we may see some creepy applications of this within our lifetimes - probably not with human brains, but maybe animal brains. What better to run a guard-robot than a fully programmable dog brain, after all?

A friend of mine was hit by a car and lost her sense of smell and taste due to the injury.  It was more of a disability than it seems, because she couldn't tell when food was bad, and she got food poisoning a couple of times.  In addition, she had a cat shelter, and some of the cats weren't house-trained, so whenever guests came over, they had to help find the deposits.

After about four or five years, her smell and taste began to come back synesthetically.  She said different smells and tastes seemed like chords to her (she is a rather good pianist), for instance, chocolate was very bluesy.  As time went on, the sensations got less and less synesthetic until after a year or so she had a normal experience of taste and smell.

I have been interested in meditation for a long time, ever since I realized that a quick temper was seriously interfering with my life and that meditation was one way to get a handle on it. I bring it up because, when practicing meditation, I have often used internal songs that naturally bounce around my head as a 'way in' so to speak.

Usually for me a song will stop once I become consciously aware of it. One of my meditations would be to see how long I can let  a song play out , or unfold, even though I am conscious of it, sort of promoting a peripheral consciousness. I have other methods too, but most of them boil down to achieving this particular quality of consciousness.

Am I a great person? Hell no - by most metrics I'm pretty much an asshole. -TSlothrop