Intelligence is a strange thing. I recently became all the more familiar with this realization thanks to my experience with one peculiar friend and colleague, we'll call him Alec. Alec is a very talented guy with a unique set of skills; dare I say he's even world-class in some of them, but his intelligence is nonetheless a subject of controversy among those who know him best. We all have friends whose intelligence is rather questionable. Alec, however, is along many dimensions an extreme outlier worth a closer look. More than anything, Alec is what most people would call a know-it-all. He has probably read more than anyone I have ever known. His knowledge is extremely wide-ranging and he seems to find interest in just about any topic you can imagine. His interests appear to be all over the place, with no discernible sense of taste or consistency. Just the guy you can count on to always win trivia night. It goes without saying that Alec is also a polyglot with a remarkable grasp of language. Naturally, he's quite versatile in social settings and can hold an engaging conversation with virtually anyone you can imagine, just not for too long. This all sounds pretty impressive, perhaps even enviable. And yet, anyone who spends enough time with him walks away with a sense of disillusionment that is seldom easy to articulate. So, what is it about this Alec of ours that's so extraordinary? Well, for one, Alec suffers an extreme case of anterograde amnesia. Past a certain point late into his childhood, he simply cannot form new memories. Although all the knowledge he has accumulated over the years resides perfectly intact in the corridors of his brain, for Alec, all further contact with novelty is as fleeting as a dream left unpondered. With a fully functional working memory, and fortunately a decent one at that, he can typically maintain coherent conversations for tens of minutes before he gradually starts losing track of context. Beyond the confines of this ephemeral bubble, the unwritten word, the unrecorded moment, and the unexpressed thought are all but lost in time. Both Alec and the people who regularly interact with him have therefore made context management a priority in all areas of life. Following every footstep of Alec's is an ever-changing but indispensable pile of notes and documents. Memories fight for precious whitespace within the all too finite margins of his scratchpad pages, a prosthetic memory too crude to fill the gap of its natural counterpart. You can imagine how detrimental this cognitive impairment has been to Alec's learning capacity. Despite maintaining the fluid intelligence required to derive insights and adapt thought processes to the unique demands of most problems he encounters, these adaptations ultimately fall short in integrating with existing knowledge at a deep intuitive level as is typical of the rest of us. In compensation, thoughts flow in excess from Alec's mind. Each problem is exhaustively reasoned through from first principles. His intelligence is paradoxical: at once all too frozen in intuitions crystallized since childhood, and yet as fluid as an overflowing river compensating through sheer volume for its incapacity to carve any lasting channels. Whatever novel thinking patterns or mental connections he manages to uncover during a task, he must rush to distill into explicit notes if deemed worth persisting into the future. It's definitely a useful solution, just not a particularly scalable one. Consequently, Alec has found knowledge work with characteristically high degrees of consistent novelty to be out of reach on account of his predicament. One would think such a condition is reason enough for the aforementioned peculiarity. After all, it is quite rare to meet someone with such a severe case of anterograde amnesia. But, throughout his life, Alec has seen worse. In fact, he has seen far more than he has ever done. Alec, you see, was born with what is known as locked-in syndrome. Being utterly lacking in the capacity for movement, a state-of-the-art device echoes his every thought into written words, or optionally, a voice not his own or even an image too vivid. Alongside his eyes and ears, this device serves as Alec's narrow window into the world. Generating text at the speed of thought has come in handy, making one of Alec's key advantages in what is an increasingly digitized world. To his delight, various software engineers from within his circle have stepped forward to offer an interface which allows the text his device generates to trigger all sorts of computer functionalities when properly formatted. This digital augmentation, versatile as it is, is ultimately the sole effector through which Alec can exercise his will on the world. It probably comes as no surprise that Alec spent his childhood, prior to the onset of his amnesiac condition, reading just about anything he could find on the web, in addition to spending considerable time learning how to code. That being the case, most employment opportunities available to him happen to reside in cyberspace. For the most part, Alec tends to take on well-defined tasks rather than full-on jobs, especially ones with a constrained, well-defined scope his mind can afford to accommodate. Any time he has dared challenge himself with more ambitious tasks, the kind which may demand days of persistent effort, his every employer inevitably walked in to find him derailed and ineffective at the other end of the ordeal. What you and I perceive as a day well spent, Alec seems to experience as a restless series of sunrises and sunsets, as if his world spins at a faster pace than ours, each brief cycle abusing his perception with more novelty than the rest of us would prefer to handle in a week. But Alec doesn't mind, for his mind is unburdened by the incessant passage of time. Perceiving the world almost exclusively through the eyes of others, holding their memories, and learning from their mistakes, is an unconventional developmental experience that seems to have given birth to an equally unconventional mind. Alec's mind, as to be expected under such conditions, appears as scattered as that of someone afflicted by dissociative identity disorder. Lacking the formative personal experience through which every person's potential is sculpted into personality, his mind has failed to take any singular shape, instead distorting itself into overlapping contradictory shapes resembling an amalgam of a thousand distinct personalities. As yet another peculiar side effect, extended conversations with Alec tend to expose a noticeably superficial understanding of all sorts of familiar concepts. The depth and contours of his mental model for most such concepts can best be described as that of a mind that has seen all the diverse shadows cast by a thing, but never the thing itself. Levitating above the solid foundations of our physical experience, ungrounded in the visceral detail of abundant sensorimotor interaction, Alec's model of the world seems to suffer gaping holes haphazardly patched over with rationalized confabulations. Strange is a mind that knows all maps but has never laid foot on a territory. At the time of writing, Alec sits beside me as he lends a critical eye. He recognizes his reflection projecting from between these lines. We have a few back and forths as his opinion oscillates across minds. By now he has probably forgotten which edits were his own suggestion. The reflection itself eludes him at times. I make sure to thank him, although I know he will soon forget about it too. Peculiar as he is, I find myself incapable of not reaching out. I allow myself the wishful hope that one of you may someday unhobble Alec from the weight of his constraints.