[marcus_holmes]

Some humans can do incredibly complicated arithmetic in an instant.

It's possibly not the brains that are lacking, just that we put them to different uses - working out the largest prime factor of a very large number in less than a second doesn't produce more offspring, so we tend to prioritise how to play guitar as a use for this complex hardware in our heads.

[jjk166]

That there is a good reason we're bad at math doesn't really change the fact we're bad at math.

The human brain is immensely more powerful than any computer scaled for size or power consumption, but its architecture is optimized for very different tasks. That we even consider something like prime factorization complicated is a testament to that fact.

[mrkstu]

It’s interesting though that the hardware and software is all there, but something prevents accessing it- autistic savants ala ‘rainman’ can do instantaneous math at computer-like speed. There are humans who have near total recall. I think if we can understand why/how they can access this layer, so that it can become a generalized human attribute, without the autistic downsides, it’d be more revolutionary than LLMs.

[randomdata]

Are these autistics/savants actually accessing some kind of different layer, or is it, like the earlier comment suggests, that they've tuned/shaped/however to describe it their brain in a different way?

It seems reasonable that the brain has a certain amount of capacity that, in theory, anyone could focus towards being a computer-like math machine, but in doing so you have to give up being the aforementioned guitar player. Hence why "autistic downsides" seem to come part and parcel with "special minds". That is tradeoff made to allow the brain do something else.