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Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers
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text (Score:5, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday June 21, @11:53AM (#6261661)
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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.
Snyder looked over my shoulder. ''Well, how about that? Leonardo would be envious.'' Or turning in his grave, I thought.
As
remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of
Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has
used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect
on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult
mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked
up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary,
and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these
remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than
just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a
revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence
-- and the functioning of the human brain in general.
Snyder's
work began with a curiosity about autism. Though there is little
consensus about what causes this baffling -- and increasingly common --
disorder, it seems safe to say that autistic people share certain
qualities: they tend to be rigid, mechanical and emotionally
dissociated. They manifest what autism's great ''discoverer,'' Leo
Kanner, called ''an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of
sameness.'' And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral
way, using ''a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve
interpersonal communication.''
For example, Snyder says, when
autistic test subjects came to see him at the university, they would
often get lost in the main quad. They might have been there 10 times
before, but each time the shadows were in slightly different positions,
and the difference overwhelmed their sense of place. ''They can't grasp
a general concept equivalent to the word 'quad,''' he explains. ''If it
changes appearance even slightly, then they have to start all over
again.''
Despite these limitations, a small subset of autistics,
known as savants, can also perform superspecialized mental feats.
Perhaps the most famous savant was Dustin Hoffman's character in ''Rain
Man,'' who could count hundreds of matchsticks at a glance. But the
truth has often been even stranger: one celebrated savant in
turn-of-the-century Vienna could calculate the day of the week for
every date since the birth of Christ. Other savants can speak dozens of
languages without formally studying any of them or can reproduce music
at the piano after only a single hearing. A savant studied by the
English doctor J. Langdon Down in 1887 had memorized every page of
Gibbon's ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'' At the beginning of
the 19th century, the splendidly named Gottfried Mind became famous all
over Europe for the amazing pictures he drew of cats.
The
conventional wisdom has long been that autistics' hyperliteral thought
processes were completely separate from the more contextual, nuanced,
social way that most adults think, a different mental function
altogether. And so, by extension, the extraordinary skills of autistic
savants have been regarded as flukes, almost inhuman feats that average
minds could never achieve.
Snyder argues that all those
assumptions -- about everything from the way autistic savants behave
down to the basic brain functions that cause them to do so -- are
mistaken. Autistic thought isn't wholly incompatible with ordinary
thought, he says; it's just a variation on it, a more extreme example.
He
first got the idea after reading ''The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a
Hat,'' in which Oliver Sacks explores the link between autism and a
very specific kind of brain damage. If neurological impairment is the
cause of the autistic's disabilities, Snyder wondered, could it be the
cause of their geniuslike abilities, too? By shutting down certain
mental functions -- the capacity to think conceptually, categorically,
contextually -- did this impairment allow other mental functions to
flourish? Could brain damage, in short, actually make you brilliant?
In
a 1999 paper called ''Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental
Processing? The Mind's Secret Arithmetic,'' Snyder and D. John Mitchell
considered the example of an autistic infant, whose mind ''is not
concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level
details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals.''
These children, they wrote, seem ''to be aware of information in some
raw or interim state prior to it being formed into the 'ultimate
picture.''' Most astonishing, they went on, ''the mental machinery for
performing lightning fast integer arithmetic calculations could be
within us all.''
And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, ''to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.''
''In
a way, savants are the great enigma of today's neurology,'' says Prof.
Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional M.R.I. Research Center at
Columbia University. ''They exist in all cultures and are a distinct
type. Why? How? We don't know. Yet understanding the savant will help
provide insight into the whole neurophysiological underpinning of human
behavior. That's why Snyder's ideas are so exciting -- he's asking a
really fundamental question, which no one has yet answered.''
If
Snyder's suspicions are correct, in fact, and savants have not more
brainpower than the rest of us, but less, then it's even possible that
everybody starts out life as a savant. Look, for example, at the ease
with which children master complex languages -- a mysterious skill that
seems to shut off automatically around the age of 12. ''What we're
doing is counterintuitive,'' Snyder tells me. ''We're saying that all
these genius skills are easy, they're natural. Our brain does them
naturally. Like walking. Do you know how difficult walking is? It's
much more difficult than drawing!''
To prove his point, he hooks me up to the Medtronic Mag Pro again and asks me to read the following lines:
A bird in the hand
is worth two in the
the bush
''A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,'' I say.
''Again,'' Snyder says, and smiles.
So
once more: ''A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.'' He makes me
repeat it five or six times, slowing me down until he has me reading
each word with aching slowness.
Then he switches on the machine.
He is trying to suppress those parts of my brain responsible for
thinking contextually, for making connections. Without them, I will be
able to see things more as an autistic might.
After five minutes
of electric pulses, I read the card again. Only then do I see --
instantly -- that the card contains an extra ''the.''
On my own,
I had been looking for patterns, trying to coax the words on the page
into a coherent, familiar whole. But ''on the machine,'' he says, ''you
start seeing what's actually there, not what you think is there.''
Snyder's
theories are bolstered by the documented cases in which sudden brain
damage has produced savant abilities almost overnight. He cites the
case of Orlando Serrell, a 10-year-old street kid who was hit on the
head and immediately began doing calendrical calculations of baffling
complexity. Snyder argues that we all have Serrell's powers. ''We
remember virtually everything, but we recall very little,'' Snyder
explains. ''Now isn't that strange? Everything is in there'' -- he taps
the side of his head. ''Buried deep in all our brains are phenomenal
abilities, which we lose for some reason as we develop into 'normal'
conceptual creatures. But what if we could reawaken them?''
Not
all of Snyder's colleagues agree with his theories. Michael Howe, an
eminent psychologist at the University of Exeter in Britain who died
last year, argued that savantism (and genius itself) was largely a
result of incessant practice and specialization. ''The main difference
between experts and savants,'' he once told New Scientist magazine,
''is that savants do things which most of us couldn't be bothered to
get good at.''
Robert Hendren, executive director of the
M.I.N.D. Institute at the University of California at Davis, brought
that concept down to my level: ''If you drew 20 cats one after the
other, they'd probably get better anyway.'' Like most neuroscientists,
he doubts that an electromagnetic pulse can stimulate the brain into
creativity: ''I'm not sure I see how TMS can actually alter the way
your brain works. There's a chance that Snyder is right. But it's still
very experimental.''
Tomas Paus, an associate professor of
neuroscience at McGill University, who has done extensive TMS research,
is even more dubious. ''I don't believe TMS can ever elicit complex
behavior,'' he says.
But even skeptics like Hendren and Paus
concede that by intensifying the neural activity of one part of the
brain while slowing or shutting down others, TMS can have remarkable
effects. One of its most successful applications has been in the realm
of psychiatry, where it is now used to dispel the ''inner voices'' of
schizophrenics, or to combat clinical depression without the damaging
side effects of electroshock therapy. (NeuroNetics, an Atlanta company,
is developing a TMS machine designed for just this purpose, which will
probably be released in 2006, pending F.D.A. approval.)
Meanwhile,
researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and
Stroke found that TMS applied to the prefrontal cortex enabled subjects
to solve geometric puzzles much more rapidly. Alvaro Pascual-Leone,
associate professor of neurology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center in Boston (who, through his work at the Laboratory for Magnetic
Brain Stimulation, has been one of the American visionaries of TMS),
has even suggested that TMS could be used to ''prep'' students' minds
before lessons.
None of this has gone unnoticed by canny
entrepreneurs and visionary scientists. Last year, the Brain
Stimulation Laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina
received a $2 million government grant to develop a smaller TMS device
that sleep-deprived soldiers could wear to keep them alert. ''It's not
'Star Trek' at all,'' says Ziad Nahas, the laboratory's medical
director. ''We've done a lot of the science on reversing cognitive
deficiencies in people with insomnia and sleep deficiencies. It
works.'' If so, it could be a small leap to the day it boosts soldiers'
cognitive functioning under normal circumstances.
And from
there, how long before Americans are walking around with humming
antidepression helmets and math-enhancing ''hair dryers'' on their
heads? Will commercially available TMS machines be used to turn prosaic
bank managers into amateur Rembrandts? Snyder has even contemplated
video games that harness specialized parts of the brain that are
otherwise inaccessible.
''Anything is possible,'' says Prof.
Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition
at the University of California at San Diego and the noted author of
''Phantoms in the Brain.'' Snyder's theories have not been proved, he
allows, but they are brilliantly suggestive: ''We're at the same stage
in brain research that biology was in the 19th century. We know almost
nothing about the mind. Snyder's theories may sound like 'The X-Files,'
but what he's saying is completely plausible. Up to a point the brain
is open, malleable and constantly changing. We might well be able to
make it run in new ways.'' Of those who dismiss Snyder's theories out
of hand, he shrugs: ''People are often blind to new ideas. Especially
scientists.''
Bruce L. Miller, the A.W. and Mary Margaret
Claussen distinguished professor in neurology at the University of
California at San Francisco, is intrigued by Snyder's experiments and
his attempts to understand the physiological basis of cognition. But he
points out that certain profound questions about artificially altered
intelligence have not yet been answered. ''Do we really want these
abilities?'' he asks. ''Wouldn't it change my idea of myself if I could
suddenly paint amazing pictures?''
It probably would change
people's ideas of themselves, to say nothing of their ideas of artistic
talent. And though that prospect might discomfort Miller, there are no
doubt others whom it would thrill. But could anyone really guess, in
advance, how their lives might be affected by instant creativity,
instant intelligence, instant happiness? Or by their disappearance,
just as instantly, once the TMS is switched off?
As he walked me
out of the university -- a place so Gothic that it could be Oxford, but
for the intensely flowering jacaranda in one corner and the strange
Southern Hemisphere birds flitting about -- and toward the freeway back
to downtown Sydney, Snyder for his part radiated the most convincingly
ebullient optimism. ''Remember that old saw which says that we only use
a small part our brain? Well, it might just be true. Except that now we
can actually prove it physically and experimentally. That has to be
significant. I mean, it has to be, doesn't it?''
We stopped for
a moment by the side of the roaring traffic and looked up at a haze in
the sky. Snyder's eyes contracted inquisitively as he pieced together
the unfamiliar facts (brown smoke, just outside Sydney) and eased them
into a familiar narrative framework (the forest fires that had been
raging all week). It was an effortless little bit of deductive,
nonliteral thinking -- the sort of thing that human beings, unaided by
TMS, do a thousand times a day. Then, in an instant, he switched back
to our conversation and picked up his train of thought. ''More
important than that, we can change our own intelligence in unexpected
ways. Why would we not want to explore that?''
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