Returns to intelligence

A story circulating on LessWrong highlights the extraordinary cognitive abilities of researcher Drake Thomas. He successfully solved a complex 3D wooden puzzle, originally crafted by an MIT professor in the 1970s, entirely through mental visualization. The puzzle, designed to be more challenging than a Soma Cube, consisted of six chiral pentacube pairs and two domino pieces to form a cube. Despite the creator and others failing to solve it for decades, Thomas accomplished the feat in his head over three hours of concentrated effort.

The incident, shared by RobertM, involved Thomas hearing the puzzle's description from Peter Schmidt-Nielsen, a descendant of Nobel laureates and a noted intellect himself. After lying down to think for two hours, sleeping, and then thinking for another hour, Thomas wrote down a complete solution. The solution was later verified by 3D printing the pieces. This event serves as a viral case study in the vast, often underestimated distribution of human intelligence and spatial reasoning capabilities, challenging assumptions about the limits of unaided cognition.