A husband and wife (or perhaps brother and sister) team of readers sent me this note:

Dear Jonah,
We don’t believe a word of the reports of Indian ambidextrous child activity – at least as far as its functional use. The midbrain/limbic brain, which is shared by animals as well as humans, controls motor abilities and is multi-pointed in its focus, which is why we can handle two motor functions at the same time: walking and chewing gum, to give a popular example. But the upper cortex, unique to humans, which synthesizes creative ideation and abstraction and organizes it into language constructs (sometimes known in linguistics as ‘mentalese’), is utterly ONE-POINTED. It can share tasks with the motor centers of the brain – we can walk while pondering over a problem. But the cortex has never demonstrated an ability to share focus – even when we THINK we are listening to a speech on TV and reading at the same time, we are in fact bouncing back and forth with that single-pointedness from one stream of thought to the other.
Now it may be possible that these kids are memorizing so completely certain passages of writing that they are able to be controlled entirely by the motor-midbrain; that is, that they are transforming such writing into a purely motor function, requiring no upper cortical activity, as we must do when *thinking* about what we will write. We can see this transformation of upper brain skill descending to purely midbrain control when we learn to drive (or play the piano, golf, etc.) At first we need to involve the upper brain to perform the new skill; behold, the student driver cannot rationally converse while trying to parallel park! Within a few weeks, the skill becomes midbrain/motor, however, and the rascal is able to yap away on her cell phone even while parking.
Here’s an even more relevant example you can try out for yourself. Say, “Mary had a little lamb, her fleece was white as snow.” Keep repeating it, out loud. While you’re repeating it, you will be able to continue reading this letter, albeit with some difficulty. Now try to repeat the nursery rhyme BACKWARDS while reading this. That becomes impossible, because you now have to use your upper cortex to figure out where the words go, and, *because of its single-pointed nature*, it is no longer available to simultaneously read. The memorization transforms an upper cortical skill into a midbrain (motor) skill, and that is what we suspect is happening with the Indian students who appear to be producing two lines of cortical activity simultaneously. As a parlor trick, it looks astounding, but functionally, it will lead nowhere in raising a student’s potential, intellectual or otherwise.