Using non-invasive brain stimulation to access the mind's hidden skills

[bodi]

some really neat stuff here....

Savants are extremely rare individuals who, although often severely brain impaired - frequently by autism, stroke or dementia - can display islands of astonishing excellence in specific areas, including drawing, memory, music, calendar calculations, and arithmetic. Their skills are literal, non-symbolic, and apparently not derived from practice. They often emerge 'spontaneously' and do not improve qualitatively with time, even though their skill might be better articulated. Savants typically have no idea how they do what they do.

The astonishing skills of savants have been suggested to exist in everyone, but are not normally accessible without some form of brain impairment. We attempt to simulate such brain impairment in healthy people by directing low-frequency magnetic pulses into the left front-temporal lobe, a site implicated in the savant condition.

In our papers...we show that by applying non-invasive brain stimulation to the left fronto-temporal lobe, skills such as drawing, proof-reading and numerosity significantly improve.

http://www.centreforthemind.com/images/savantskills.pdf

[GregD]

I have seen the actual video of the entire experiment on Discovery Science I think and I must say yes it is exciting but it is very dangerous because they are just starting playing with it and they have no idea on the effects they are causing.

Perhaps it is totally safe and perhaps they are damaging the brain in some way that they don't understand.

It acts like a switch. You can for example switch the adrenaline production in the body "on" and the person will become a super human, but s/he will die faster due to overburning. This kind of a side effect they completely do not know of their experiment and I would personally not volunteer for it.