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Science

Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers 498

Posted by jamie 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.
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Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers More

Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers

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  • Screw that (Score:5, Funny)

    by Exiler ( 589908 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:31AM (#6261539)
    I want to flip a switch and get 30 FPS in doom 3

    • Re:Screw that (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DataPath ( 1111 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:05AM (#6261717)
      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?

      • Re:Screw that (Score:5, Insightful)

        by 56ker ( 566853 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @01:36PM (#6262669) Homepage Journal
        I have borderline high-functioning autism myself. Regarding "special talents" (with me anyway) - it comes and goes. I can't switch it on/ off. Regarding the chairs if there were 6 rows of 8 chairs it isn't that hard to count. The ability to remember musical melodies isn't that difficult - and can be learned. It's part of most musician's training to be able to memorise not just a riff but entire pages of music. If you've taken a music exam you have to sing back a few phrases played to you - which is not far off playing them. I get the tension headaches too - one of the downsides of the frustration caused by having a communication disorder and being misunderstood.

      • Re:Screw that (Score:5, Funny)

        by garyok ( 218493 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @02:27PM (#6262956)
        In my own experience I remember a migraine I had come on at work and it transformed me into a savant (of sorts) by giving me a mini Tourette's episode. I couldn't actually tell my colleagues in so many words why I was being a bit odd (apparently muttering "motherfucker" every third word is normal for me when I'm working on something tricky - who knew?) but I developed an amazing ability to communicate my predicament by pointing at my head, grimacing, and saying "shit motherfucker gnnn!"

        Who knew that talent lay latent within me, just waiting for its release through the method of blinding and nauseating pain?
    • I want to flip a switch and get 30 FPS in doom 3

      Try LSD.

      In college, we'd drop acid and go to the arcade (early 1980's) and play video games. I was a pretty good Missile Command player normally, but on LSD, I was basically perfect. The game was slow, smooth, and also had a weird 3D quality (it looked kind of like claymation animation).

      • Re:Screw that (Score:3, Interesting)

        by killthiskid ( 197397 )

        I've done both LSD and psilocybin in quite large doses (ok, warning: I worked up to those doses. Doing psychedelic drugs is a dangerous and unpredictable thing to do. Don't do it, you have been warned.) LSD was interesting and produces interesting hallucinations... but it was geometric and straight lined.

        On the other hand, psilocybin, to me, is an organic fractal entity unto itself. The immediate difference from LSD for me was the process of 'coming down'. Coming down was never a 'downer', and I eve

  • I always new: Queen rulez! (Score:4, Funny)

    by szo ( 7842 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:34AM (#6261553)
    Brian May has amazing powers!

    Szo
    • When I read the headline....i couldn't help but think of.....

      "Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!"

      "Your computer clock may be wrong!"

      "Your computer may be infected!"

      "You may already be a winner!"

      "Your brain may have amazing powers!"

      • I had a different reaction. I recalled these headlines...

        "New Study: Men and Women Are Different!"

        "War Dims Hope for Peace"

        "Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures"

        "Something Went Wrong in Plane Crash"

        "Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers!"

        Well, of course! Who would dispute that? (I refer only to the headline; not the article's content or claims.) Even accounting for the relative meaning of "amazing," it ought to be obvious that the brain is a very, very powerful thing. "We're at the same stage in brain

  • Now if they only had a switch... (Score:5, Funny)

    by aznxk3vi17 ( 465030 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:34AM (#6261557)
    ...to make everybody else stop using their 10%, thus giving you the edge you need to succeed in life.

  • 10% of brain power and 2% of talents (Score:5, Insightful)

    by teutonic_leech ( 596265 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:34AM (#6261559)
    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 :-)

    • Re:(Was the link dead?) (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:44AM (#6261935)
      By LAWRENCE OSBORNE

      n 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 imp

      • 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.

        All that is needed to complete this picture is for the Doc to sigh out:

        My God! Do you know what this tells me? It tells me ... that this damn thing doesn't work at all!

  • Great writep (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fluxrad ( 125130 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:35AM (#6261561)
    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"...

    • re: Great writep (Score:2, Insightful)

      by handsolo ( 672989 )
      It wouldn't make much sense for us to have evolved brains that were 10 times larger than they had to be -- If such a huge portion wasn't being used, those with larger brains wouldn't have been selected above those with smaller brains. Those individuals with the most efficient use of brain would have been selected since they wouldn't have to supply all the extra brain matter with oxygen and food.
      • For some reason I had justified this by assuming that we used approximately 10% at any given time, but that overall just about every neuron was used in some capacity.

        Luckily I discovered the truth of the matter...um...about 20 minutes ago :-P

    • And what about modern CPU's? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by msgmonkey ( 599753 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:46AM (#6261625)
      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.

    • It doesn't make it sound like a legend... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Nindalf ( 526257 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:55AM (#6261671)
      "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.
      • i think they have big brains because they have big heads.. something needs to fill up that big head..
      • If this was the case, then you should be able to remove a large portion of the brain from an adult and they would remain bright and healthy.
        I don't think anyone would argue that a child who has lost a large part of their brain is going to be functionally equivalent to a full brained peer.
        Most of the human brain is used for body control and less exotic processes as those higher functions we attribute to our intelligence; language, problem solving, consciousness, etc. These take place on the neocortex, w
      • Furthermore, it sounds like that wasn't the case for dinosaurs, some of which had little bird-sized brains in enormous bodies.
        True, but many of the larger dinosaurs also had a nerve sac in their asses. This helped them control their lower bodies, since the latency to the brain would have been high enough to make walking clumsy. IANA paleontologist
      • It shouldn't require more data processing just to run a larger body

        Why shouldn't it? Most animals don't do much planning or even abstract thinking- the most important task for the neurons in the brain is to operate each and every muscular fiber in the limbs and organs.

        Let us say "It shouldn't require more Human Resources staff to run a larger corporation". That's obviously wrong- of course you need more as you have more things under control.

        One could imagine a hierarchal system: similarly-sized brains

    • 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"...

      But walking around and smelling things takes a lot of brain power (at least as much as reasoning does). Think about it. When you walk around and smell things your brain is doing a lot of work. Your brian is processing your vision, smells, and balance. Your brain is also regulating your heartbeat, breathing, and other bodily fun

    • Re:Great writep (Score:3, Insightful)

      by iconian ( 222724 )
      Using more of your brain to perform cognitive tasks doesn't necessarily make you good at it. Let's say "brain use" as an increase blood flow/activity to a brain area. Novices show much more activity than experts to the same brain areas. As novices get more experience with the task, their brain activity decrease. So does low brain usage mean low competence? This is one of the many reasons why you must be careful when intepreting fMRI and other brain imaging scans.

      If anything it seems that the more brain you

  • Slashdot Effect (Score:5, Interesting)

    by limekiller4 ( 451497 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:35AM (#6261564) Homepage
    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.

    • Snyder featured in article over a year ago... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cyclopedian ( 163375 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @12:02PM (#6262084) Journal
      Synder was also featured in a Discover magazine article [discover.com] about this same device and its effects.

      Additionally, the Discover article also talked about the various instances of sudden onset autism. One of the examples presented was the case of a 3 year old girl named Nadia, who was capable of drawing a picture of a horse and rider in such detail that it would've taken a experienced artist to do. The article shows one of Nadia's drawings, which IMHO is very beautifully rendered.

      Now, if only to find that machine so I can calculate the Mayan calendar past 2012...

      -Cyc

  • Herbert was right (Score:3, Funny)

    by Verteiron ( 224042 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:36AM (#6261569) Homepage
    The Mentats are among us...

  • This is from the NY Times? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:37AM (#6261578)
    Hmm, do they use these wondrous brain powers to make up stories? Is that how they do it?
  • .. 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
    • Think how good our tech would be if everyone was smart.

      goddamit, I want more smart people to hang out with. This would be much easier if there were more smart people.

    • Re:I want intelligence for everybody (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Smidge204 ( 605297 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:50AM (#6261642) Journal
      I believe there's also a good quote:

      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=
      • I believe Lawyers provide a direct and potent counterexample to your thesis.

        While I believe morals must also be taught, at least having a more intelligent society would be a good start. At the very least it would cut alot of demogogues off at the knees.
        • I believe Lawyers provide a direct and potent counterexample to your thesis.

          I don't know about you, but every lawyer I've ever met has been compassionate, ethical, and an all-around nice guy.

          They just get (very) bad press because they have to do what their clients want, and their clients are often rich, and, ergo, often scumbags.
    • If I could just plug a chip in my brain and suddenly be able to speak, say, japanese fluently, I can't see a problem with that. Certainly for some people the act of learning is as much of a reward as knowing something. I enjoy learning, but there is only so much time in the day. Besdies, it's what you do with the knowledge that counts, not how you obtained it.
    • just as thin does not uniquely imply fit, smart does not imply intelligence.

      Just because one can remember facts, draw cats, or perform fast calculations, does not mean that one can actually solve arbitrary problems. It certainly means that you can impress weak minded people at cocktail parties. It does not mean that you can figure out how to best repair a broken faucet or write a well structured memo.

      It is the knowledge and ability do provide is confidence and perspective. And while some people take

    • Re:I want intelligence for everybody (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @01:19PM (#6262577) Homepage
      If everyone was smart, the smart would loose their advantage. The same goes for knowledge.


      Who cares if the smart lose their advantage? Given the opportunity to make everyone smarter, would we deny the less-smart people this benefit just because the "naturally smart" people somehow deserve to be smart more than anyone else does?


      Even if the elitism of that idea doesn't bother, you, consider that smart people often spend a large portion of their time and energy trying to convince dumb people that their good ideas are in fact good ideas, or trying to explain their ideas to dumb people so that the dumb people can use them effectively. Being surrounded by smart people would make you (as a smart person) much more effective than trying to get your work done with the help of dumb people.


      If there was a really easy way of absorbing knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?


      Knowledge's main use isn't to be fun or make you powerful, it's to help get things done. And in any case, I suspect most people find the skillful application of knowledge much more rewarding then the tedious and difficult process of gaining that knowledge.

  • Draw a tree or a Mona Lisa? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:39AM (#6261594)
    hey, anyone can learn to draw

    Yeh right! Just like Michael Angelo. Leonardo Da Vinci could not only draw and sculpt, but was also a great mathematician and scientist.

    Very very few tap into the brains potential. The few that have AND used it, are some of the most remembered people of all time!

    • Michael Angelo. Hmmm, wasn't he in the original Menudo? OH WAIT! You meant Michaelangelo Buonarroti the renaissance man. Stupid brain, I'll teach you to only work at 10% capacity!
    • I agree. They are so remembered because they contributed SOOOOO much to the world. But it's not all about specialization, like it is in today's society. Think about it...

      A man likes to draw. He also likes physiology, natural studies, math, an science. His knowledge of math will help with his science. His love of pshysiology and anatomy will help with his depictions of the human form when he's painting. His love of art and music will stimulate the more creative areas of his brain.

      I believe these men we

  • I'd rather flip a switch... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cpeikert ( 9457 ) <.ude.tim.mula. .ta. .trekiepc.> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:44AM (#6261614) Homepage
    ... to put my brain in "counting cards" mode.

    Now, off to watch Wapner. Six minutes till Wapner.

  • Newsflash! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:46AM (#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.

  • I bet (Score:5, Funny)

    by handsolo ( 672989 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:46AM (#6261624)
    if your brain was in calculator mode you would find like 40000 variations of "BOOBLESS"

  • Learn to draw, in a generic style (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Yarn ( 75 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:47AM (#6261627) Homepage
    I looked at the 'before and after' section of the learn to draw site. It did seem that the variety of the 'before' pictures was squashed into the standard 'after' style. In particular I personally feel that the before in this picture [drawright.com] shows more promise than the after.

    • I'm glad somebody pointed this out. I teach in the architecture department at a large-ish university, and there are quite a few of these traveling workshops roaming around that supposedly teach you to draw in a few hours. These things are big moneymakers, and I see them as being a few steps away from the memory enhancement infomercials on late at night. Some [beloose.com], I believe, actually degrade a student's drawing skill.

      Betty Edward's books have some good exercises, but nothing you can't pick up by taking a figur

  • text (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:53AM (#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 feli

  • Mine doesn't (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:58AM (#6261684)
    Ever stand in front of a door for twenty minutes because you thought it was locked, and it really wasn't, you just couldn't figure out how to turn a doorknob?

    That's me. Aside from being totally inadept mechanically, I also can't draw, can't understand music to the point where I can't differentiate between different melodies, can't see color, can't reliably do arithmatic computation, can't speak foreign languages, and have no athletic ability.

    I know my limitations. Just thinking "hmm, one day, I shall surpass my limitations and use all the latent abilities in my brain" is wishful thinking. The vast majority of people are stupid, uninsightful, self-absorbed, and pathetic. To assume that you, yourself, are not part of the majority is simply a lie put forward by your self-absorbed sense of self-esteem. Your mind lies to you, makes you think you're special, somehow different from the vast majority of peons on this earth, when you're really not. It's a very destructive lie - it prevents you from realizing that you don't even have the capacity to understand what's really going on 90% of the time.

    Let us delight in our mediocrity - It's people like us that made the world the way it is today!

  • Drawing on the right side of the Brain (Score:5, Interesting)

    by scotay ( 195240 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @10:59AM (#6261693)
    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 guyâ(TM)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.
    • Yup Yup.

      "Don't draw the object, draw the space around the object" was a zen moment for me.

      Most people draw "symbols" of what they see like "a head is a circle, a neck is a tube" and they just break down entire objects like that and it looks like crap.

      But by having people draw the space around the object, it forces them out of "symbol mode" because the space doesn't have a symbol you can identify with and break down, just the actual lines.

      It's like why you can usually draw a picture better if you draw it

  • Large cranium... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TrueJim ( 107565 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:00AM (#6261695) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Large cranium... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Planesdragon ( 210349 ) <slashdot@castles ... .us minus distro> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @12:03PM (#6262092) Homepage Journal
      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.

      Then why do I have an appendix? (Or slim body hairs?)

      Evolution does not look at any one characteristic. It looks at the whole of the being. And, between equally fit species, there's still a measure of chance.

      Let's ignore the obvious rebuttal to your point (use of the brain's savant abilities is proportional; if we have a brain half the design, we might have half of the all-around intelligence) and focus on the evolutionary advantages of having unused brain tissue.

      First off, we're able to survive brain damage much easier. Being able to be thwacked in the head and still bring food home--and maybe go out and hunt some more the next day--is an obvious evolutionary advantage.

      Secondly, it increases mating. Having a bigger brain means our heads are shaped different--in a more asthetically pleasing fashion. The face is a human's primary means of identification and emotional communication--a clearer face is an obvious evolutionary advantage, within the species.

      Thirdly, it's entirely possible that over the uncounted generations of prehistory, human-ancestor-groups who had savants among them simply outperformed other human-ancestor-groups who did not, thus neccistating a retention of the savant abilities. Not a clear evolutionary advantage, but a distinct possibility.

      While your childbirth arugment is a good one, for it to work we'd need to have some mechanism to actually shrink brain mass at the start. Bugger me if I can think of one that'd work--larger hips would be a much easier evolutionary adaptation.

      • Re:Large cranium... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @02:16PM (#6262903) Journal
        I don't think I agree with anything you wrote :-) Just reading through, and this is longer than I intended, but what the hell...

        Then why do I have an appendix? (Or slim body hairs?)

        Because there is very little selective pressure to remove these low-cost (in evolutionary terms) additions to the body. This is assuming that you can get rid of X without affecting Y, which is a heck of an assumption - most of our body parts are created/regulated by the interaction over time of *lots* of different genetic codes, your overall genetic code is not a blueprint you can just erase part of... Besides, they're not useful *now*. They presumably were *once*, and they may yet be again. Not in our lifetime, I suspect :-) but possibly in the future...

        Let's ignore the obvious rebuttal to your point (use of the brain's savant abilities is proportional; if we have a brain half the design, we might have half of the all-around intelligence) and focus on the evolutionary advantages of having unused brain tissue.

        How do you *know* it's proportional ? It may be highly non-linear in nature. Intelligence could be an emergent property, as opposed to intrinsic. There could be a minimum (or maximum) neuron-quantity threshold for intelligence to occur, the decision-surface for relative intelligence could be as complex as a fractal plane. We don't know.

        First off, we're able to survive brain damage much easier. Being able to be thwacked in the head and still bring food home--and maybe go out and hunt some more the next day--is an obvious evolutionary advantage.

        I think you're overlooking the incredibly difficult process humans go through in childbirth. The non-assisted mortality rate (for both mother and child) is far higher than any other mammalian species on the planet. Primate females almost always give birth without excessive labour. Human females labour can last over several hours, although today the child is more likely to be induced or surgically delivered. Only 200 years ago, death in childbirth was commonplace for those who could not afford assistance.

        In contrast, being hit on the head hard enough to significantly break the skull will pretty much cause damage whatever size brain you have. Since all the higher-order functionality is on the outside of the brain (grey matter), that's the area that would be damaged anyway. If you don't break the skull, you're likely to just get a bruise either way, so long as you don't make a habit of it...

        Don't forget that (unless our ancestors were particularly keen on headbutting cliffs) this would be an effect on 1 person. The do-or-die childbirth thing is an issue for every human born. I suspect nature might come down on the side of the majority...


        Secondly, it increases mating. Having a bigger brain means our heads are shaped different--in a more asthetically pleasing fashion. The face is a human's primary means of identification and emotional communication--a clearer face is an obvious evolutionary advantage, within the species.

        Um. No. If we all had faces the size of pygmy monkeys, we'd probably have designs on our chests or backs, or some other method of recognition. Sexual preference is closely tied to genetic fitness, not the other way around.

        Consider that healthy-but-pug-ugly A has a 85% chance of surviving to breeding-age (and hanging around afterwards for protection etc.) because he's got strong arms. Handsome bigheaded B has only a 50% chance of making it, but he looks really cool. Unfortunately for B, the numbers are against him. No matter how many doting females are queueing up (hah!), if he only has a 50% chance of making it, his genes (and those of the doting females, since they choose B) are far more likely to be swept down evolution's sewer. The corollary is that the female

        • Re:Large cranium... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by nathanh ( 1214 )

          I don't think I agree with anything you wrote :-)

          I don't think he wanted to debate individual points with you. I think his overall point was that there are probably several explanations for why evolution has chosen large brains for us and not selected against it (yet). There's probably a fifth explanation that makes even more sense. So don't jump to the conclusion that we "think" with all of our brain simply because natural selection should otherwise have selected for smaller brains; there may be oth

    • Re:Large cranium... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by smallpaul ( 65919 )

      The notion that much of our brain is therefore "unused" doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

      It isn't that there are sections of the brain that are never used. It is that each individual has sections of their brain that they do not use. It sort of stands to reason that there are parts of the brain that mathematicians use more fully than musicians and vice versa, just as there are muscles that sprinters use that wrestlers don't and vice versa. Evolution doesn't know exactly what envi

  • I wonder if this means... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sukottoX ( 601412 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:01AM (#6261702)
    someday I'll be able to sit down, get hooked up to a machine, then say "I know Kung Fu". Then I'd say "Whoa" (and subsequently score with Carrie-Anne Moss) then I'd say "Whoa" again

  • Brain Wars (Score:5, Interesting)

    by limekiller4 ( 451497 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:03AM (#6261705) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Brain Wars (Score:5, Insightful)

      by G-funk ( 22712 ) <josh@gfunk007.com> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:49AM (#6261972) Homepage Journal
      That's because most of the "drugs are bad, mmkay" stem from traditions based on people trying to further their own importance. Marijuana was banned not because it gets you high, but because it makes good rope. Speed was a drug dealt out often for various illnesses and weight loss, but if you have a heart condition and you take a shitload, you can die. No shit? Ecstacy and cocaine, were medicines, until the moral police decided they needed some floor space and "won't somebody think of the children" filled the air.

    • Re:Brain Wars (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mechaZardoz ( 633923 )
      While I support your point about the inherent double standard in the 'developed world,' I wouldn't be surprised if this line of research were decried. To many, including myself (without additional, credible research), this smacks of 21st century charlatanism. Additionally, since this is not a drug in the common sense (ie, produced by some major pharmaceutical company) you will see a great deal of backlash from that sector to debunk and quash this line of research.

  • The Experiment in Reverse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by limekiller4 ( 451497 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:10AM (#6261737) Homepage
    "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.

    • Re:The Experiment in Reverse (Score:4, Insightful)

      by WhiteWolf666 ( 145211 ) <[sherwin] [at] [amiran.us]> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:51AM (#6261996) Homepage Journal
      I can think of all sorts of variations on this experiment. I really want one of these machines!

      For example, do the experiment they did on one group. Do a control group. Then do a pre-treatment on both groups (control and experimental). Does the machine actually cause you to learn faster? Can the author actually draw at a vastly superior level now that he not connected to the machine?

      Or does the machine provide temporary amplification. I imagine that it is something in between. Often, when I have studied a problem, I gain a huge amount of insight into it. Afterwards, I look back upon the work I have done, am *very* surprised that it turned out so well, but end up at a higher level of skill overall.

      If this machine is anything like the way it is described, I'll trade a kidney for one.
  • Anyone remeber Forbidden Planet [imdb.com]?? This sounds like Dr. Morbius and his ancient Krel technology to me! The problem is when we boost the power so much that we begin to project our unconsciousness into material space. Freaky..

  • This is incredibly fascinating, but (Score:3, Insightful)

    by drdale ( 677421 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:23AM (#6261798)
    I took the article to overstate the practical significance to a certain degree, and to ignore the downide. If I read it correctly, the point is that we might be able to gain certain savant abilities by turning off parts of our brains that are responsible for other very valuable abilities. It might be really valuable to be abale to do this to yourself for a short period when you have to do certain kinds of tasks, but it is not like we would want to go through our lives wearing a headband that would keep us in this kind of state. We don't want to become autistic, just so we can be "idiot savants."

  • interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sstory ( 538486 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:24AM (#6261801) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:interesting (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TeknoHog ( 164938 )
      After an experience with LSD and related reading, I agree. For example, human vision has filters that remove much of the visual information and only leaves the essentials. LSD turns these filters off which is one reason you start to see interesting things. It also accelerates your pattern recognition abilities. However, the amount of information is quite overwhelming. It's hard to think deeply or do anything creative while on acid, because of the increased sensory input.

      These filters are probably results

  • NO!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Supa Mentat ( 415750 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:32AM (#6261845)
    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.

  • We use 100% of our brains - just not all at once. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Beardo the Bearded ( 321478 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:33AM (#6261849)
    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".

  • CAUTION ! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by malabar-fraise ( 637726 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:37AM (#6261869) Homepage
    I've met in my country people that tell that humans only use 10% of their brain ability. They usually want to use 100% of the money of their victims.

    -- (but in fact only ÂAPT has Super Cow PowersÂ)

  • Download to brain (Score:5, Funny)

    by dfn5 ( 524972 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:45AM (#6261939) Journal
    but I want to flip a switch to put my brain into calculator mode.

    I would rather get on my cell phone and say "Tank, I need a pilot program for a V-212 helicopter."

  • BS (Score:5, Informative)

    by strook ( 634807 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @11:49AM (#6261971)
    This is almost certainly garbage. I'm working in a transcranial magnetic stimulation lab right now, and I've never even heard of the guy doing this stuff. However, the people who criticize his work are basically the most respected people doing TMS right now. I get the sense that he's trying to infer a meaningful pattern from a small number of poorly designed tests.

    The usual effect of TMS is just to slow you down by a couple seconds at whatever you're doing. For example, right now we're doing this experiment where we flash words on a screen and have the subject read them out loud. Then eventually we just put a * up on the screen, and they have to recall the last word they saw. By changing the device to send pulses into different parts of the brain, you can find out what is responsible for what. The subjects slow down a bit when you're hitting the right part of the brain.

    I mean, this guy could be insanely revolutionary and in five years we'll all be using his machines on our heads to make us geniuses... but I don't think so.

    btm
  • Everytime I see a posting here about a website I crash it with my mind.

    Will power baby.

    Works everytime!

  • EM waves, eh... (Score:3, Informative)

    by drix ( 4602 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @12:29PM (#6262278) Homepage
    In other news, exposure to electromagnetic radiation has been linked to brain cancer [nzine.co.nz]. There's some sort of diminshing returns argument to be made here, but I spent too long frying my brain with the Savant-o-Matic(TM), and now it just won't come to me.

  • There's a name for 100% brain usage (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nimblebrain ( 683478 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @02:07PM (#6262863) Homepage Journal
    It's called a grand mal seizure. Well, even that is likely less than 100% ;) I had always thought the origin of the 10% myth was a misquote on 10% "at a time" - thanks for some more of the origins regarding it. It's pretty unlikely that there's masses of unused neurons hanging around. Neurons are kept alive by having connections - past their initial growing stages, they die by apoptosis voluntarily. This is not a bad thing - one condition, synaesthesia, arises from neurons connecting auditory and visual parts of the brain not dying off. Most of the 'information' in neurons comes from the connections; on the order of 10,000 in and 10,000 out - the stained cell micrographs you see in textbooks do the real picture no justice. Thoughts are akin to a travelling contour amplitude modulation map (sorry, everyone, your brain operate in AM, not FM :) - the 'contour map' can suffer some degradation of detail from dying neurons or forgetfulness before losing meaning. Walter J Freeman's book "How The Brain Makes Up Its Mind" is full of interesting information. Someone should help him make a next edition in English (instead of merely using purportedly English words as "limit cycles" and "zero-point attractors") to widen the audience for the fascinating discoveries in the book.

  • shufflebrain: where is the mind? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gobbo ( 567674 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @02:51PM (#6263079) Journal
    If this kind of stuff gives you a charge, you HAVE to check out Paul Pietsch's work [indiana.edu] on trying to relate brain to mind. He swaps brains in amphibians, mushes them up, etc., and watches the wee beasties more or less get along.

    I thought of this because of the question raised in the article about identity: "It probably would change people's ideas of themselves, to say nothing of their ideas of artistic talent."

    Another interesting angle is to look into the way the brain may rely on quantum processes... Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell [edmitchellapollo14.com] has done some interesting, if nigh-kooky, summaries of work on this.

  • Coming Soon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sunlighter ( 177996 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @04:13PM (#6263441)

    This reminded me of two things. First, Larry Niven came up with the idea of a tasp, a device which can remotely stimulate the pleasure center of someone's brain. He also came up with the idea of people running wires directly to the pleasure centers of their brains and thus achieving perpetual electric happiness (like a drug addiction). This might be around the corner.

    Second, I am reminded of the "focused" people in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky. They were basically slaves, but their masters made them into savants by using machines to permanently disable parts of their brains. That, too, might be around the corner.

    Cool in a scary sort of way; science fiction still has predictive power.

  • Disturbing thought re copyrights (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) * <jmorris@[ ]u.org ['bea' in gap]> on Saturday June 21, 2003 @07:35PM (#6264312)
    This gadget is playing a pattern of magnetic signals, apparently through an 8bit DAC for each emitter. So by all appearances the patterns are copyrightable 'works' and copyright is eternal. (for all intents and purposes unless we kill Eisner/Disney) So assuming this guy isn't a quack for a minute, soon he will have an entensive library of all the patterns to enhance various mental abilities and perhaps even cure some mental diseases. But unlike the current medical companies which only get a patent for 10-19 years for a new drug or device, this guy could have an eternal monopoly on the 'content' to be played on this new machine. So while the machines themselves would eventually be dirt cheap, being knocked off in China, one person/company would have almost unlimited pricing power in making use of the new tech.

    Where have we seen this pattern before? Talk about an oportunity for a vulture capitalist!

  • In other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Saturday June 21, 2003 @08:31PM (#6264566) Homepage
    In other news, SCO has claimed that 10% of the human brain contains unlicensed code owned by SCO. In a breif press confrence, a PR representative from SCO hinted at plants to sue God, and possibly revoke his license.

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