A Thinking Cap That Can Turn On Our Inner Savants

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A Thinking Cap That Can Turn On Our Inner
Savants?
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What is a Savant?

• One with exceptional skill or brilliance in some
  specialized field
• Savant skills are typically confined to five
  areas art, music, calendar calculating,
  mathematics and spatial skills, and these skills
  are accompanied by an exceptional ability to
  recall detail
• Mostly observed in people with autism (1 out of
  10 with autism has savant abilities)

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Drawings by normal 4-year-olds
Drawing by a 3-year-old savant
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Allan Snyder

• Director of the Centre for the Mind at the
  University of Sydney, Australia
• Studied the natural fiber optics in insects' eyes
• He began wondering what happens after light hits
  the human retina How are the incoming signals
  transformed into data that is ultimately
  processed as images in the brain?

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Ramachandran's Studies of Perception and Optical
Illusions

• How the brain derives an object's
  three-dimensional shape Falling light creates a
  shadow pattern on the object, and by interpreting
  the shading, the brain grasps the object's shape.
• Were not consciously aware of how our minds
  comes to these conclusions. We see a ball, not a
  circle. The reason is your brain is extracting
  the shape from the subtle shading around the
  ball's surface.

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• Face Recognition the brain analyzes countless
  details. Most people are not aware of these
  calculations.
• Those with autism see a face as individual
  components rather than as a whole.
• Imaging studies have shown that when autistic
  children see a familiar face, their pattern of
  brain activation is different from that of normal
  children.

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Allan Snyders Theory

• Autistic savants lack the ability to organize
  sensory input into concepts.
• The top layer of mental processing - conceptual
  thinking, making conclusions - is somehow
  stripped away.
• Autistic savants have access to the less
  processed information, before it is packaged into
  concepts and labels. They see a more literal,
  less filtered view of the world.

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Allan Snyders Theory

• We are all capable of the extraordinary savant
  skills displayed by people with autism, but it is
  our inbuilt expectations of the world that stop
  us from using them.
• We have to shed the assumptions built into our
  visual processing system.
• We can bypass the mind's conceptual thinking and
  gain conscious access to the raw, uninterpreted
  information of our basic perceptions.

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What Makes Him Think We Can?

• The autistic brain is morphologically different.
• But there have been cases of sudden-onset
  savantism after brain damage.
• Brain-imaging studies on autistic savant artists
  and patients with frontotemporal dementia show
  the same abnormalities decreased blood flow and
  slowed neuronal firing in the left temporal lobe.

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The Left Frontotemporal Area Is Key

• Idea If we can disrupt neuronal firing in
  the left frontotemporal area, we can knock out
  ones conceptual brain machinery, temporarily
  rendering them savant- like.

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Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
1 Magnetic Pulse per Second for 10-15 Minutes
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The Thinking Cap

• When briefly shown 100-150 dots on a screen, 8
  out of 12 people could accurately estimate the
  number of dots after TMS.
• 5 out of 17 performed savant-like tasks horse
  drawing, calendar calculating, and multiplying.

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How Will We Use It?

• Unleash creativity when needed
• Stimulate the brain out of a mental rut
• Help an engineer get past a sticking point on a
  design project by offering a fresh angle on the
  problem
• Good for those with jobs that demand a certain
  type of creativity

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Summary

• Because the left side of our brain sees the big
  picture it may suppress our awareness of the
  parts that make up the whole.
• If many savants have abnormalities in the left
  frontotemporal lobe, then the lack of function in
  that area may be the key to their extraordinary
  abilities.
• With TMS we may be able to let our minds
  experience raw sensory information, untainted by
  preconception, unleashing our inner genius.