TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Seymour Papert, an MIT mathematician famous for his work on artificial intelligence and theories on learning, suffered severe brain damage in Hanoi when a motorbike hit him. His wife and colleagues have worked to rehabilitate him with the same learning strategies he developed, and they say he is sometimes his same brilliant self, and other times incoherent, but that his same mind is still there:

“Are children still using the robots?” Rottman asked.

Papert paused and appeared to reflect. “For this particular group of kids, something of kinetic directed very started getting this moving,” he responded authoritatively, but then lapsed: “So a lot of children gradually are taken vocay and the convense.”

“When I talk to you,” Rottman said, “do you understand everything I say?”

Papert nodded. “Somewhat,” he said, and smiled.

Rottman said it’s disconcerting, sometimes, to watch Papert speak and know he’s conveying only a small percentage of what he’s thinking. “When he’s talking to you, obviously in his mind it’s correct, but coming out of his mouth it’s not. Every now and then he’ll string together three or four sentences and they’ll just be perfect,” Rottman said. “But if he can put together three or four, why not five or six? That’s the fascinating part. We don’t know.”

I loved playing with Lego Mindstorms as a kid, something Papert inspired. It’s an excellent article, and I hope that he is able to overcome this.