Posted by
jamie
on Saturday June 21, @11:30AM from the uptake dept.
I've never given much credence to the "only use 10% of our brains" urban legend, but this article,
Savant for a Day,
is making me reconsider. I'd like to see controlled, double-blind
studies, but Snyder's machine already sounds very interesting -- hey,
anyone can learn to draw,
but I want to flip a switch to put my brain into calculator mode. EM-brain experimentation has taken off since
Michael Persinger's work and
other recent research.
Along these lines, my brother-in-law gets autism headaches where he
hears a guitar riff and can copy it instantly, and can look at a row of
lockers and say how many there are without counting. Was I ever
shocked to be talking with him one day, he pauses, says "48", says he
has a headache, and goes home. It turns out there were 48 chairs in
that room.
If that kind of autism can be turned on with a "switch", why not other aspects?
Isn't that what Einstein said? Anyway, that link
[nytimes.com] seems to be down, but I just saw a documentary yesterday
night on the telly, where they trained people to modify their brainwave
activity to move a player through a video game. I think this only
scratches the surface - there's a lot of potential that we probably
don't even know about... I would be glad to add a few more percent to
mine, that's for sure - LOL:-)
On the "10% of your brain" legend, here [urbanlegends.com] is a pretty cool writeup. The best quote from the article:
In
other words, the "humans only use 10% of their brains" canard would
more correctly be phrased "humans only use 10% of their brains for
walking around and smelling things"...
flux After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network.
Since most of a modern CPU's transistor count is cache memory
you'ill probably find that outside the control unit at any one time
even less than 10% of the transistors are active. If you include the
number of transistors present for main memory in the mix that
percentage gets even lower.
"they were of normal or above-normal intelligence... their cerebral hemispheres had been compressed into a slab less than an inch thick"
If
kids can lose large portions of their brains and still grow up bright
and healthy, then I think that suggests pretty strongly that most of
the brain is either functionally redundant or simply unused.
That's a great quote about the 10%, though.
What
I want to know is why large animals need a larger brain to handle their
bodies, and brain:body mass ratios are considered more important than
absolute brain mass. It shouldn't require more data processing just to
run a larger body, when most of its processes are regulated without the
brain. Furthermore, it sounds like that wasn't the case for dinosaurs,
some of which had little bird-sized brains in enormous bodies. --- RPG That Teaches Japanese [lrnj.com]
At first I just chalked up the down webserver to some poor schmed's
server going belly-up under the weight of the slashdot effect. But no,
that link is sitting on the New York Times server:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22S
But
for some reason I can get to the NYT.com frontpage, albeit after some
delay. Their search results do not show anything matching that article
name ("Savant for a Day") and Google doesn't have anything either.
Ca bien. Will just have to wait for it to die off.
My.02,
Limekiller
It's much easier to mod me down than to post an intelligent reply.
.. about as much as really fit people want instant and fully working diet pills for everybody.
If
everyone was smart, the smart would loose their advantage. The same
goes for knowledge. If there was a really easy way og absorbing
knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?
Besides,
I don't generally buy the notion that education for everyone would lead
to world peace. I know about lots of extremely smart and knowledgable
people that are just as (if not even more so) greedy, corrupt and
violent as average Joe. Nyheter p� norsk.
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. -Theodore Roosevelt
A
good education really needs to be earned, that way you (are more likely
to?) get decent character traits like patience, dedication and sound
morals instead of just facts. =Smidge=
Newsflash! (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday June 21, @11:46AM (#6261620)
The USB forum has named the two kinds of brain power 'Full Brain
Power' and 'High-speed Brain Power'. Both are now collectively known as
Brain Power 2.0.
text (Score:5, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday June 21, @11:53AM (#6261661)
By LAWRENCE OSBORNE
In
a concrete basement at the University of Sydney, I sat in a chair
waiting to have my brain altered by an electromagnetic pulse. My
forehead was connected, by a series of electrodes, to a machine that
looked something like an old-fashioned beauty-salon hair dryer and was
sunnily described to me as a ''Danish-made transcranial magnetic
stimulator.'' This was not just any old Danish-made transcranial
magnetic stimulator, however; this was the Medtronic Mag Pro, and it
was being operated by Allan Snyder, one of the world's most remarkable
scientists of human cognition.
Nonetheless, the anticipation of
electricity being beamed into my frontal lobes (and the consent form I
had just signed) made me a bit nervous. Snyder found that amusing.
''Oh, relax now!'' he said in the thick local accent he has acquired
since moving here from America. ''I've done it on myself a hundred
times. This is Australia. Legally, it's far more difficult to damage
people in Australia than it is in the United States.''
''Damage?'' I groaned.
''You're not going to be damaged,'' he said. ''You're going to be enhanced.''
The
Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by
stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed
doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also
produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients'
mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak,
another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic
errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the
possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people
undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly
exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike
mental ability that most often appear in autistic people.
Snyder
is an impish presence, the very opposite of a venerable professor, let
alone an internationally acclaimed scientist. There is a whiff of Woody
Allen about him. Did I really want him, I couldn't help thinking,
rewiring my hard drive? ''We're not changing your brain physically,''
he assured me. ''You'll only experience differences in your thought
processes while you're actually on the machine.'' His assistant made a
few final adjustments to the electrodes, and then, as everyone stood
back, Snyder flicked the switch.
A series of electromagnetic
pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing.
Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to
draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''
I've
seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have no
trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and how
do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some sort
of stick figure, perhaps an insect.
While I drew, Snyder
continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying
machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs
like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it
is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of
us.''
Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was
instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third
cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and
the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first
felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been
subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation,
their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were
personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever
expressions.
I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings,
though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail.
Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional
instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very
impressive artist of the feline form.
When I was in high school, this Book Drawing on the Right of the
Brain was quite popular with the art teachers. It was said to be a new
way to teach people to draw. From what I remember it worked quite
nicely for me and did not require magnetic fields.
To
use the technique, we were told to lay out our drawing pads, place our
hands into the middle of the pad and never to look at our hands as we
were drawing. We were supposed to focus on what we were drawing and
then try to remember where we left our hands in space without actually
seeing where they were. I was told that I could glance down at my hand
from time to time, but that I should not look at my hands while
actually drawing.
Whatever the technique did do my cognitive
process seemed to work. My normal drawing style looked like figures 1
and 2. While I used the right side technique, my drawing looked like
figure 3, with my lines conveying more movement and being more a
stylized reproduction.
Maybe this guy’s apparatus is simply
forcing the participants not to look at their hands while drawing.
Seems a lot more controls would be needed to say magnetic fields have
anything to do with this phenomenon.
As I recall from college anthropology, human childbirth is painful
(and sometimes even fatal) precisely because our craniums are so large,
relative to other mammals and relative to the size of our frames.
(Humans have the highest ratio of brain mass to body mass; whales come
in second.) If so much of our brain mass were hypothetically
unnecessary, then humans with smaller brains would be more likely to
pass on their genes, as those childbirths would less frequently be
fatal. Over time, humans would come to have much smaller craniums (90%
smaller, if the urban myth were true), not the large craniums that we
currently possess. The fact that evolution is willing to pay such a
high penalty (increased childbirth fatalities) for large brains
indicates that there must be an offsetting evolutionary advantage to
having large brains. The notion that much of our brain is therefore
"unused" doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
From the article: "While
I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a
creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of
mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the
raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the
unconscious mind of all of us.''"
What I find seriously
funny is the fact that while drug use is seriously shunned around most
of the so-called "developed" world, there will be no such outcry over
such mental manipulation utilizing this method. So it isn't the end
we're concerned about, it's the vehicle.
Do you realize that
roughly 6x as many people have died either outright or by drowning
after inhaling fumes while behind a motorboat since 1991 than have
while taking MDMA (ecstacy)? And that doesn't even include the people
who drowned and nobody suspected the poisoning.
Do you realize
that between cirrhosis of the liver (alcohol) and deaths resulting from
drunk driving accidents there are 60,000 killed in the US every year?
And ephedra, creatine and ecstacy are the problems?
Sorry for
going off on a rant here. I welcome this sort of research. But it
does point out that what Americans are against is not people doing
things to their own bodies. What people fear is a boogeyman that has
been fueled by a multi-billion dollar industry that they need to
maintain. Ie, jobs.
w00t.
My.02,
Limekiller
It's much easier to mod me down than to post an intelligent reply.
I'm saying that people should be allowed to do to themselves what
they want. This is not to suggest that people should be allowed to do
things like drive
while intoxicated. Then you begin to create a hazard for other people.
If you want to do ecstacy, go ahead. And if you want to shower your
brain with electromagnetic stimulation, go bonkers.
One might
object that drug use creates a burden upon the rest of society. Well,
so does a belief in a god yet that isn't made illegal.
My.02,
Limekiller
It's much easier to mod me down than to post an intelligent reply.
"Two
minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try
again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due
course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were
removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and
stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10
minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown
more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing.
They were even beginning to wear clever expressions. I could hardly
recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render
each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very
few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an
incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form."
I
would think a more convincing experiment would be to start with the
machine turned on for the full "10 minutes", the cat drawing made, then
the machine turned off and another made. If this is correct then the
second should actually be worse than the first.
The idea that the ability to draw better cats improves as you practice doesn't seem terribly startling.
My.02,
Limekiller
It's much easier to mod me down than to post an intelligent reply.
And FWIW, which often isn't much in the realm of science, it makes
sense that it could be important from a survival standpoint to hide
some hypothetical lower structures which, say, count 87 toothpicks, and
just send to the upper level an exectutive summary, like 'lots of
toothpicks'. Considering what kludges biological things are, it
wouldn't surprise me if researchers found that's what was going on.
Repeat after me: the idea that you only use 10% of your brain is a myth. That's right, it's complete bullshit,
utter crap. It makes me angry to hear it so often. It's odd really,
this is not a case where there is a small group on the fringe claiming
this is the fact, no one in the field (mine is
computational/integrative neuroscience, which as you can see from just
its name is full of buzz-words:P) has held this
theory for as long as I've been in it (maye even ever but I don't know
that). It's quite non-sensical really, 10% of what? Of the brain's
potential? Do you really think we have a quantitative way of measuring
that, or of "how much of it you're using even? Do you only count
cognition or subconscious functions as well? Which method do you use to
measure these and how do you differentiate between the cognitive and
the non-cognitive? This pissed Stephen Gould (rest his soul) off enough
that he penned an entire article about myths concerning evolution that
opened by bitching about this stupid idea. Please, for the love of all
that is scientific and good, STOP PROPAGATING THIS STUPID MYTH! At very
least on slashdot, you're supposed to be a geek damn it, you ought to
know better. *grumbles* 10%, I gotcher 10% right here bub.
"A witty saying proves nothing."
- Voltaire
Come on, guys. Every single one of us has seen brain scan images of
people remembering or doodling. In those images, different parts of the
brain do different tasks.
For example, I don't use my occipital lobe when I'm not looking at stuff. Once I start doing visual work, ol' occy goes to work.
The
idea that we only use 10% of our brain is silly. We're not latent
psychics or telekinetics, nor does the other 90% hold penguins. We just
don't use all of our brain all of the time. Throughout
the day, though, you'll use all of your brain, unless part has been
removed via surgery, accident, or believing the US "President".
--- Echelon? Isn't that where the government searches for words like bomb, plutonium, anarchy, and assassinate?
Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers
