Hi All;
Back with the "goods".
I mentioned that Maj. Ed Dames had a mandatory read for his course, and that he went into a little detail on Coast to Coast two nights ago. I know many wondered why I posted his appearance notice. Well, *I* usually get something of value from those interviews with Dames and think others do also. Yes, some do not and some tune out.
I assume there are people on the list who have no idea what the "collective unconscious"/ "matrix"/ etc is. I'm also sure that some think remote viewing is nonsense....along with Tarot, I Ching, dowsing, pendulum, tea leaves and many more ways of tapping the collective. No matter how many books are written on the subject or how much proof is offered, many still have trouble accepting it. Just can't be!
Thanks to "The Maj." here is a pretty damn good piece of the puzzle, and that if we *don't* use our heads, we too, can do the impossible. To me that's exciting!
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http://www.newscientist.co.uk/ns/19991009/tuneinturn.html
Tune in, turn off
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
You too could have seemingly superhuman
mental skills. All you have to do is switch
off part of your brain. Sounds bizarre?
Rita Carter investigates
JAMES CAN TELL YOU the precise time--to the
second--without looking at a clock.
Jennifer can measure anything to within a
fraction of an inch just by glancing at it.
And Christopher can speak 24
languages--including a couple of his own
devising. Amazing? Definitely. But unusual?
Not necessarily. According to a
controversial new theory you too can do
these things. Or at least you could--if
only you could just stop being so clever
for a moment.
Christopher, James and Jennifer are
autistic savants--people who score low on
IQ tests and have severe difficulties in
communicating and interacting with others
but who nevertheless have seemingly
superhuman competence in a specific area
like music, art or maths. About one in ten
autistic people have notable talents, but
truly prodigious savants like Stephen
Wiltshire, who can draw spectacularly
detailed and accurate representations of
buildings, or the lightning card-counting
calculator played by Dustin Hoffman in the
film Rain Man are very rare. There have
probably only been about 100 people
described as savants since the phenomenon
was first identified a century ago and only
about 25 are alive at the moment.
Such is our fascination with these people
that nearly all of them are publicly known
and celebrated, and many of their skills
have been studied exhaustively. Yet there
is still no generally accepted
understanding of how savants do whatever it
is that they do. Theories range from
enlargements of certain specialised brain
regions to the simple "practice makes
perfect"--but none of them alone
satisfactorily explains all the weird
anomalies.
The latest contribution to the puzzle is
startling because it proposes that savant
skills--far from being unique--are
possessed by everyone, and might even be
unleashed with quite simple, existing
technology.
The idea comes from psychologists Allan
Snyder and D. John Mitchell from the Centre
for the Mind at The Australian National
University in Canberra. Essentially they
think that savant skills are the
manifestation of brain processes that
happen within us all, all the time, but are
usually speedily swamped by more
sophisticated conceptual cognition. While
this high-level stuff fills our
consciousness, the savant-style
information-crunching that the researchers
suggest precedes it is relegated to the
unconscious back rooms of the brain.
"It's not that savants are cleverer than
the rest of us," says Snyder, "it's just
that most of us go one step further in our
brain processing--from detailed facts to
meaningful concepts--and once we've done
that we can't go back."
Snyder and Mitchell formulated their theory
from analysis of many existing studies of
savants--mainly mathematically gifted ones
. Among the findings they rely on are
brain-imaging experiments, which reveal the
extent of unconscious processing that goes
on before we ever become aware of
perceptions, thoughts and feelings.
A visual image falling on the retina, for
example, takes about a quarter of a second
to pop up in a person's mind as a conscious
perception. Before that moment, each
element of the image--including its colour,
shape, movement and location--is identified
separately by various specialised regions
in the brain. These components are then
assembled into a pattern which is shunted
onwards to regions that attach meaning to
it. Normally we have no idea that all this
is happening--we only become conscious of
it after the detailed processing is
complete and we have a fully constructed
perception.
"What matters for survival is that we have
a concept we can work on--it's a face and
it's friendly, say--not a mass of detail
about how we arrived at that conclusion,"
says Snyder. "So in normal people the brain
takes in every tiny detail, processes it,
then edits out most of the information
leaving a single useful idea which becomes
conscious." Taking these ideas a step
further, he asserts: "In savants the
suppression doesn't happen so they see the
picture in fantastically detailed
components, like individual pixels in a
photograph."
Using the same reasoning, Snyder believes
that if, for example, you were asked to
calculate the day of the week on which any
particular date falls (an obsession
peculiar to savants) or to discern the
precise pitch, length and sequence of notes
in a musical score, you would do it, more
or less instantly, in your unconscious
mind. But because knowing what day of the
week 1 September 2056 would be is of no
practical use, he thinks the information
would be edited out before it passed into
consciousness. Equally, because notes in
isolation usually carry little meaning you
would tend to hear the music as a melody
rather than as separate sounds.
If Snyder and Mitchell are correct in
supposing that savant cognition is
happening in us all, is it possible that we
could learn to shift our consciousness back
a gear and become aware of it? Niels
Birbaumer of the Institute of Behavioural
Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen,
in Germany, an enthusiastic supporter of
Snyder and Mitchell's theory, believes we
could. Birbaumer recently led a team that
fitted paralysed patients with scalp
electrodes that picked up signals from the
brain and translated them into movement of
a computer cursor. The patients first had
to learn to control brain activity that was
normally unconscious (New Scientist, 16
January, p 4). Birbaumer thinks it would be
possible to access pre-conscious savant
cognitive processes in much the same
way--and that some people have already
learnt to do so, without even realising
what they were doing.
Accessing the subconscious
He cites, for example, a non-autistic
student whose calculating skills rival
those of the best mathematical savants.
Electrical monitoring of the student's
brain waves while he was doing a
calculation showed that his brain was more
active than usual at the start but less
active just before he answered
(Psychophysiology, vol 33, p 522). "Later
cognition involves more cortical activity
and is associated with conceptual
thinking," says Birbaumer. "This student
seems to be able to prevent this activity
from occurring when he is
calculating--leaving him free to access the
earlier low-level processes."
Other researchers in the field--though
expressing polite interest in Snyder and
Mitchell's theory--remain sceptical that we
all have latent savant skills. The most
commonly favoured explanation for savant
talents is that they are "islands" of
highly developed ability, probably linked
to physically enlarged specialist brain
regions. In most people the development of
such skills is held back because the
brain's resources are focused from an early
age on conceptual thinking and what is
known as "global processing"--pulling
together various thoughts and perceptions
and extracting meaning from the overall
picture rather than concentrating on the
concrete details of each perception.
Autistic people seem to be unable to
process things in this way. The result is a
detailed but incoherent cognitive style
described by autism experts Uta Frith from
the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at
University College London, and Francesca
Happé, senior scientist at the Institute of
Psychiatry, also in London, as "weak
central coherence". Their idea is different
from Snyder and Mitchell's because they
assume that savant processing never happens
in non-autistic people--consciously or
unconsciously. They believe the drive
towards central coherence is so strong that
it sweeps perceptions and thoughts into
meaningful concepts before every tiny
detail of them is registered, so we
wouldn't be able to access this
information.
Happé explains: "If you were able to look
inside the brain of an autistic savant I
think you would find that their talent
arises from very specific and circumscribed
brain areas which are neurologically
isolated from the areas which bind things
together to make concepts. This allows the
areas dedicated to savant abilities to
develop without interference from parts of
the brain which deal with concepts. As a
result they may turn into large specialised
brain areas like those that normal people
have for speech."
The idea that unusually enlarged brain
regions may create exceptional artistic,
mathematical or musical skills in the
people who possess them took an interesting
turn recently. An anatomical study of
Einstein's carefully preserved brain showed
the area associated with maths was bigger
than normal and not dissected by the usual
groove. Grooves often mark the boundaries
of functional brain areas, so it's
fascinating to toy with the notion that the
mathematical "module" in his brain had
annexed neurons from an area next door that
would normally do something else.
The trouble with the big brain hypothesis
is that anyone's brain will enlarge or get
denser in an area that is constantly
active, so it is hard to know if an
enlarged module is the cause or result of a
particular skill. Vilayanur Ramachandran,
Director of the Center for Brain and
Cognition at the University of California,
San Diego, has charted neuronal hijacking
in cases of "phantom limbs"--when amputees
continue to feel their lost body parts
because the brain regions that once
gathered sensory signals from the limb are
drawn into the regions monitoring
neighbouring body parts. He thinks
something similar might explain the
astounding quality of savant cognition.
"Maybe when the brain, or a bit of it,
reaches a critical mass new and unforeseen
properties emerge," he speculates. "So a
doubling of neurons wouldn't produce a
doubling of talent but a hundred-fold
increase."
A simpler explanation comes from Michael
Howe, a psychologist at Exeter University
who has studied both autistic and
non-autistic people with exceptional skills
and believes that constant practice is
generally enough to account for both types
of talent. "Savants seem to just 'see'
things effortlessly," he says, "but I think
if a non-autistic chess player who has been
immersed in the game for thirty or forty
years looks at a game in progress they just
'see' the position and the best moves in a
similar way." He adds: "The main difference
between experts and savants is that savants
do things which most of us couldn't be
bothered to get good at."
Not just practice
Howe admits, though, that mere practice
cannot account for the abilities shown by
very young savants, simply because they
have not had time to hone their skills. One
celebrated artistic savant, named Nadia,
drew stunningly animated pictures of
prancing horses in perfect proportion and
perspective from the age of three. She did
not seem to learn the skill. Unlike normal
children, who go through very specific
stages as they develop drawing ability,
such as putting huge heads on people and
showing limbs as sticks, Nadia was drawing
brilliantly from the moment she could grasp
a pencil. And there are children who can do
the amazing day of the week calculations,
who have not yet learnt to divide and have
developed the skill without adult help.
It may be that all very young children
perceive the world in a savant-like way.
One incredible skill shown by children is
language acquisition. Eight-month-old
babies seem to carry out fantastic
calculations in order to work out where
word boundaries fall in a stream of speech
(New Scientist, 21 August, p 36). They do
not consciously work it out. They simply
learn to "know" when a word begins and
ends, just as a mathematical savant may say
they just "know" the square root of a
six-figure number. Adults, by contrast,
have to labour over learning these patterns
in a new language; simply immersing
themselves in it is usually not enough.
Similarly some researchers believe that
perfect pitch--a skill common in musical
savants--is easily acquired by children but
rarely develops in adulthood. And eidetic
memory--the automatic perception, storage
and retrieval of visual images in
photographic detail--is far more common in
children than in adults.
Savant-like skills may be lost--or hidden,
according to Snyder and Mitchell's
theory--in non-autistic people as they grow
up because of a shift in the way we process
information. Imaging studies show that
brain activity in newborn babies is limited
to regions we are unconscious of in adults
but which register incoming sensory
information and respond to it by generating
urges, emotions and automatic behaviour.
The cerebral cortex--the area associated
with conscious thought and
perception--becomes active within a few
months, however, and as the child grows up
an increasing proportion of information
processing is done cortically. This shift
accelerates in non-autistic children around
the age of eighteen months, when they start
to babble, and language acquisition may
help to "kick-start" activity in the
frontal cortex where conceptual processing
is mainly carried out.
In autistic children this shift appears to
be slowed or incomplete and so their
savant-like processing style may be
preserved. Autistic savants who do seem to
make the change, albeit belatedly, may thus
lose their abilities. Nadia, for example,
lost much of her prodigious talent when she
finally mastered language around the age of
12.
Language development also seems to bring
about the dominance of one hemisphere of
the brain. In right-handers this is nearly
always the left hemisphere, where the main
language regions develop, but in
left-handers language may occupy the right
brain. Many researchers argue that savant
skills tend to be those which are
associated more with the right hemisphere:
music, identifying mathematical patterns
and art, for example, rather than skills
that are predominantly associated with the
left-hemisphere. Even the rare savants who
have amazing word power, like Christopher,
tend to be less interested in reading or
the meaning of words, and more interested
in skills like translation. Because of
this, many have suggested that savant
skills are produced by a dominant right
hemisphere which has flourished in the
absence of effective communication with or
inhibition by the left.
Held back
"Autistic people often show both structural
and functional dysfunction in the left
hemisphere," says Wisconsin psychiatrist
Darold Treffert, author of a book called
Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant
Syndrome, back in 1989. "Most cases are
probably due to some prenatal interference
with brain development which prevents
normal development of the cortex and left
hemisphere," he says. "Testosterone, for
example, is known to inhibit
left-hemisphere development and in male
fetuses temporary slowing of the left
hemisphere may be a normal developmental
stage. In autism that slowing may be
protracted beyond normal, resulting in an
overdeveloped right hemisphere and stunted
growth on the left. This could explain why
autism, and savant skills, are about six
times more common in males that in
females."
His theory seems to be supported by a
number of extraordinary cases in which
normal people have suddenly developed
savant-like abilities after left-sided
brain injuries. One 9-year-old boy, for
example, was transformed from an ordinary
school-kid to a genius mechanic after part
of his left hemisphere was destroyed by a
bullet.
And Bruce Miller and co-workers at the
University of California Los Angeles School
of Medicine recently reported five patients
who developed amazing drawing skills after
dementia destroyed part of the left side of
their brains (Neurology, vol 51, p 978).
"One of our patients had spent his life
changing car stereos and had never shown
any interest at all in art," says Miller.
"Then he developed dementia which destroyed
neurons in the left frontotemporal
cortex--an area which gives meaning to
things--and suddenly he started to produce
sensational images recalled from early
childhood. It was as though the destruction
of those brain cells took the brakes off
some innate ability that had been
suppressed all his life, and opened access
to an amazing personal memory store he
never knew he had."
As yet it isn't clear whose interpretation
of these cases is correct, if indeed
anyone's is, but Snyder thinks there might
be a way to test it. He is planning an
experiment in which, he hopes, the
unconscious savant will be unleashed at the
flick of a switch. Magnetic pulses can
interfere with normal brain activity. If
you time and position the surge just right,
it can temporarily turn off activity in a
particular region. Snyder's plan is to
"switch off" the conceptualising area. If
his theory is correct, and if he can find
the area, this should cause the normally
pre-conscious savant skills to burst into
consciousness.
"I'm thinking of trying it on myself
first," says Snyder. "If I start to get
crystal clear pictures of my childhood or a
sudden knowledge of prime numbers I'll
really know I'm onto something."
Rita Carter is author of Mapping the Mind,
published in paperback by Seven Dials,
price £14·99 James and Jennifer are not the
real names of the people described
Further reading:
* Extraordinary Minds by Howard Gardner,
(Phoenix, 1998)
* "Is integer arithmetic fundamental to
mental processing? The mind's secret
arithmetic" by Allan W. Snyder & D.
John Mitchell, Proceedings of the
Royal Society B, vol 266, p 587 (1999)
---------------------------------------
From New Scientist, 9 October 1999
Phil Sr.
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