I like this stuff. These things are in all of us and can be unlocked using many methods.
When a baseball smashed into the side of Orlando Serrell’s head as he made a frantic dash to first base, the then 10-year-old fell to the ground and stayed there, for several minutes.
Once he slipped out of his daze, he climbed to his feet, and with a splitting headache, continued to play the game.
He did not tell his parents about the accident, so did not receive medical treatment, despite a headache that would persist for months.
Serrell, from the US, was an ordinary child before he received that blow to the head on a Virginia baseball field in 1979. But one year later, when the headaches had cleared, it dawned on Serrell that he had been left with an uncanny side effect, one that has stayed with him.
He could perform complex calendrical calculations in his head with dizzying speed and complete accuracy.
The number of days between two dates, the number of times January 6 has fallen on a Saturday – Serrell could answer questions such as these in his head, and in an instant.
Since the accident, he remembers things in minute detail – the outfit a friend wore on a certain day years ago, the number plate of each car that has crossed his path, his every meal.
Serrell had become what the scientific and medical worlds refer to as an acquired savant: Someone who is perfectly ordinary until an injury to the brain, after which they possess a remarkable ability, such as a photographic memory, a talent for a musical instrument despite no prior training, a sudden propensity for complex mathematical equations, the ability to sculpt or draw scale replicas of objects they’ve only glimpsed.
Brain damage, usually to the left hemisphere, unlocks something in their brains as the right hemisphere compensates for the injury. The result is, very rarely, great skill, unfathomable to the ordinary person.
Not all savants acquire their skill – some are born with these abilities and are known as ”classical savants”.
They usually fall somewhere on the autism spectrum and their skills tend to appear in early childhood.
Classical savants may have great difficulty carrying out seemingly ordinary tasks such as social interaction or tying shoelaces, but despite this, possess remarkable talent in a specific area.
But what if these skills could be unlocked in ordinary people without having to inflict damage to the brain?
Founder of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Dr Allan Snyder, a neuropsychologist, is working to unlock extraordinary potential in ordinary minds. It is an area he has been investigating since the early 1990s.
”I had a radical idea that these skills must be latent within everyone,” Snyder said.
”It’s just that unlike savants, we don’t have access to them.
”I thought maybe I could release it myself by decreasing the influence of the left brain hemisphere and enhancing the right.”
Savants are exceedingly rare, and while estimates vary, it is thought about 10 per cent of the autistic population possess savant abilities, compared with less than one per cent of the rest of the population.
Male savants outnumber females by about 6:1. Savants have a range of abilities. Some can speak dozens of languages, learning them at a rapid pace. Others are exceptional painters, sculptors and drawers. Many have memory skills that allow them to memorise telephone books. Their skills seem so remarkable because they would take years to learn, or seem impossible, for an ordinary person.
”I was inspired by the fact that music, art, mathematics and even memory are taken by many to be an exceptional ability in humans requiring laborious hours of study and training,” Snyder said.
”And yet here, we have a group of people without a bigger or better brain than we do, just a different one, able to do these things.”
Snyder’s first attempts to bring out the latent savant skills in his subjects were ”not so successful”.
He and his researchers used magnetic pulses on participants’ brains to temporarily make the area underneath the pulses less inhibited; in other words, simulating a lesion or damage.
”That was our first experiment,” Snyder said.
”The results were good, but not brilliant. They were constant, but not enormous, people didn’t suddenly show any enormous savant skills.”
Then, he turned to transcranial direct-current stimulation, where non-invasive and weak electrical currents are applied to the brain.
It is considered safe, and is used as a treatment for conditions such as migraines and depression. Using this method, Snyder can make the networks of neurons near the surface of the brain less likely to fire.
An electrode is placed on each side of the heads, over the anterior temporal lobes just above the ears.
A weak electric current then passes between the electrodes. The dose given, Snyder says, changes the behaviour of the underlying neurons in participants for about an hour.
His experiments have shown during that 60-minute window that people are able to solve arithmetic problems that would ordinarily stump them.
During one experiment, 33 participants were asked to solve the notoriously difficult nine-dots problem, the goal being to connect all nine dots in a square formation using four straight lines, without lifting pen from paper. In the laboratory, Dr Snyder says, about 5 per cent of participants manage to solve it, even with hints and added time. In his experiment group, no participant could solve it.
After receiving the stimulation, however, 14 of them cracked it. Snyder and his researchers calculated that the probability they had gone on to solve it by chance was less than one in a billion. The results were published in the journal Neuroscience Letters last year.
”We go through a rigorous scientific protocol to separate placebo affects from real affects,” Snyder says.
”I’m really very confident there’s no way this ability could be due to any other affects other than the stimulation.”
What had stopped participants from solving the problem initially was that people have rigid mindsets, researchers suspect, which make them less receptive and even resistant to novel interpretations and ideas.
In a piece he wrote for Scientific American last November, Snyder describes prior learning and experience as shaping the way we see the world and allowing for mental short cuts.
While these mental filters mean our minds are more conceptual, the savant mind, Snyder says, is more literal, their mental filters less powerful.
As an example, he describes a savant who, when asked about the ending of a book, recited the last page word for word.
”We look at the world through filters, through our mindsets, which are carefully evolved to be able to manoeuvre rapidly in our world,” Snyder says.
”We see the forest, not the trees. Savants see the trees, not the forest. It’s why savants do very badly in tests where you ask them things like, ‘What does it mean by the grass is always greener on the other side?’ They want to interpret it literally.”
Rest Here:http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/8900869/Unlocking-incredible-brain-powers