Understand (1991): Intelligence as Pattern Recognition, Optimization and Self-Control

Leon's brain is damaged after an accident but when treated with Hormone K, he not only recovers, but finds his memory improving and his thinking getting sharper. As his treatment progresses, Leon becomes more perceptive, more coherent, more self-aware. He gains control of his somatic functions. He sees gestalts and connections. He invents a language to aid his thinking. In Chiang's Understand, super-intelligence is like coding and involves architecting cognition via strategy, recursion and symbolic optimization. Links to the short story's original publication in Asimov's Science Fiction, August, 1991.