I think it's interesting to understand how feral children/adults adapt into society, as this gives a glimpse of what people are actually capable of learning in extreme niche cases.

I had done a fair bit of research on this topic in the past, out of sheer curiosity. Mostly to see determine what animalistic instincts are retained, if any at all, and how well someone can acclimate learning a language like English in different age brackets. Also to determine what the fine line between what human/animal instincts /intuition actually were. As you get older, it becomes much more difficult to learn new things, due to new stigmas associated with things you had learned previously. You have to unlearn just as much as you have to learn (e.g. smarter everyday, riding bike backwards). I would watch videos on this topic, gauging effectiveness of speech information rate VS years of learning based on how long someone has lived in animalistic captivity.

I compared this with people who had been born without vision or sight growing up, or if it was lost later in life. Whether learning to speak without ever hearing a word spoken was possible. Extreme examples would be things like Helen Keller, amongst others. Using niche cases like these is one of the best ways to validate a theory, as there are less unknowns and its in a more controlled environment. Its qualitative research over quantitative

On the other end of the spectrum, I would research things on child prodigies. People who were austic savants and prodigies in music, or were off the scale in what was considered average.

On another spectrum would be prisoners of war, during WWII and the effects of solitary confinement / deprived senses for extended periods of time and its effect on human psychology. I wanted to compare the effects of PTSD studies and how this compares to feral humans / PTSD research here.

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The research was mostly just my obsession over optimization of learning patterns & discovery of learning antipatterns. I wanted to validate what was truly effective and what was not, based on actual research with extreme examples, and narrowing it to down what I personally found works for me, and basing it on different personality traits found in myer-briggs/disc/etc.

I don't even remember all the impliciations of this research I did. I would read psychology papers/books on these topics and compare it with things in DSM. Learn about linguistics, etc. Spent 2 months interested on this given topic. I narrowed it down to 2 distinctive methods of thinking, with potential subsystems inside of those. The first being fast, e.g. recognizing someone you've seen before, simulated mostly by sensory information. The latter being triggered as a result, based on "slower" iterative thought processes.

And I would test to see the limitations of expanding the "slower" approach by seeing how much information I could cram in short term, e.g. how many words could I memorize short term with a memory palace. It was only like 10 words/locations at best, for one given type of application. Meaning I could remember at most, 10 todolists for a given day if I really made an attempt, but it became extremely difficult to do.

With this system of (faster) thinking, I was curious how someone who lacks one sensory resource (sight) and is able to compensate elsewhere (sound). People who are blind generally process audio information at a much higher rate, if you ever watch a programmers NVDA speech program the number of words it spits out is incomprensible to most people to understand.

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I would conduct studies on myself, seeing if I could apply these same principles, in speedwatching youtube videos with captions, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. I would be obsessed with learning about speedreading, shorthand notetaking, incremental reading, among other things. I ran tests on myself to see if I would watch 2 videos at the same time, one with captions at 2x speed, the other at normal playback rate with audio, and see if I could comprehend both well enough.

I have always been interested on how people like Tom Scott are able to do a 5 minute video shot in one take, without ever reading a script. Or how book writers like stephen king or brandon sanderson are able to generate these unique works of worldbuilding art, in book format. I would also learn things like memory palaces/competitions, chess champions, speed math competitions, and space repetition learning.

I'm starting to read a book called "Thinking fast and slow". It describes everything that I had tried to formulate in words.