6 ms·
I Became a Savant For a Day
- notrealname 18y agoWhy not do it in reverse order? First drawing with the machine and then without.
- wyday 18y agoOr better yet, have a control test. Tell a person their mental faculties will be enhanced, but don't actually run the test. See if just that knowledge increases their ability.
- jwesley 18y agoI'm sure the scientists behind this are on top of that. Just does not make sense for someone writing an article to be part of the control group.
- wyday 18y agoFair enough, but the article doesn't mention control tests at all. The "transcranial magnetic stimulator" is touted as voodoo magic. I feel like I just read a 3a.m. infomercial.
- rsheridan6 18y agoIt's the New York Times. That's what they do.
- MaysonL 18y agoThey check for placebo: see the pdf http://www.centreforthemind.com/images/savantskills.pdf http://www.centreforthemind.com/images/savantskills.pdf
- diN0bot 18y agowhat do you mean? he draws first without, then with the machine on, then again afterwards with it off.
- scott_s 18y agoAs another psychologist points out, you still need control subjects who just draw subsequent images of cats. We expect improvement with practice. A simple experiment would be a large sample of people do the drawings, all are hooked up to the machine, but it's only turned on for half. Of course, the subjects and the experimenters themselves don't know which ones get the machine actually turned on.
- ieatpaste 18y agoApparently, a Medtronic MagPro Compact's street price is around $1000* . I might try to find me one. * https://www.medwow.com/item.php?search_results=&sale_id=525012022&xlang= https://www.medwow.com/item.php?search_results=&sale_id=...
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoWho wants to start a business? A legal "high" for $25. I know I would pay $25 to try this thing out and I bet hundreds of people in any given town would too. Only takes 40 people to recoup the cost of the machine.
- ryanwaggoner 18y agoHire a damn good attorney.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- electromagnetic 18y agoAgreed, it suppresses electrical activity in the brain, a sufficiently powerful pulse from a device like this can potentially stop all electrical activity in the brain, including the areas that control the lungs and heart. In theory any sufficiently powerful EM field could kill a person. However it's fortunate that magnetic fields diminish significantly with distance, so the primitive parts of our brain that control bodily functions are relatively protected so I wouldn't be surprised if they start researching ways to use this as a stun weapon.
- katz 18y agoOr just take an ordinary attorney and TMS him...
- eru 18y agoBut you'll have to do that recursively..
- wallflower 18y ago"But 'on the machine,' he says, 'you start seeing what's actually there, not what you think is there.'" In the world outside the machine and his experiments, I like how this statement ties in with Zen/meditation/Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of Flow. I think we can all think of times when we've just been totally aware and immersed. But those are few compared to the too-many times when I've been thinking too much, worrying, and not being aware.
- prospero 18y agoBut our brains don't just hide outliers, they help disparate things make sense with respect to each other. I have to figure the world would seem really disjointed if you were just walking around, rather than sitting in some controlled environment reading off a piece of paper.
- dasil003 18y agoThis also reminds me of the fact that the reason most people can't draw is because they don't really see their visual field, instead they translate it into a series of symbols representing physical information. It makes sense since that is the higher survival purpose of vision (ie. it makes more sense to know how big something actually is than how big it appears in your field of vision). That also explains why it took until the Renaissance for art to achieve any kind of realistic perspective. Most people's relative lack of drawing ability is really just a lack of understanding how to see. Fortunately there are numerous exercises which you can use to break through that barrier and eventually learn to see as an artist, one good one is drawing the negative space around a still life. Of course you still need your 10,000 hours to actually master drawing, but I don't think talent has much to do with the initial learning curve. It's unfortunate that most people give up drawing at a young age when the fundamental difficulty of "seeing" properly is conflated with manual dexterity issues.
- wallflower 18y agoWhat do you think of this book? "The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. Has glowing testimonials like: "I have a degree in commercial art and learned more about drawing from this book than I did in four years of undergraduate instruction. If you practice everyday what Ms. Edwards teaches you will be drawing as good as any professional artist in six months. This really is the best book on drawing ever published!" http://www.amazon.com/New-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/0874774241 http://www.amazon.com/New-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/087477... http://www.drawright.com/ http://www.drawright.com/
- martythemaniak 18y agoFor those curious about mescaline (mentioned in the article) and how it supposedly removes mental filters to allow you to see the world "as it is", I recommend Aldus Huxley's Doors of Perception. http://mescaline.com/huxley.htm http://mescaline.com/huxley.htm
- c3o 18y agoThis article is from 2003... would be cool to get an update. Here's the news page of the "Centre for the mind" (but it's mostly about media coverage): http://www.centreforthemind.com/newsmedia/WHATSHOT/index.cfm http://www.centreforthemind.com/newsmedia/WHATSHOT/index.cfm And Wikipedia on the technology (with no mention of temporary savantism): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulati...
- tallanvor 18y agoThanks for pointing that out, I was reading the article on the tram this morning and didn't notice the age of the article. It would be very interesting to see if there have been additional research done, or if other teams have been performing research to help verify the early results Snyder found.
- sofal 18y ago"You're not going to be damaged," he said. "You're going to be enhanced." That sounds just like a pre-supervillain scenario in just about every superhero movie I've seen.
- c00p3r 18y ago"You're not going to be damaged," he said. "You're going to be enhanced." Is that about whiskey, isn't it? =)
- tokenadult 18y agoThis badly needs to go through the research checklist "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" by Peter Norvig (director of research at Google). http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
- jerf 18y agoThis is not and was not intended to be about "research". This is something that has already been so well researched that it can be casually demonstrated on demand to a journalist with no significant concern that it will fail to impress. This was "mere engineering". The research has already been done; I've been reading about this for a couple of years now. It's not fringe science. Cutting-edge, maybe, but not fringe.
- JabavuAdams 18y agoAmazing! I've often wondered whether it would be possible to temporarily re-engineer myself into a tool for solving a specific hard problem. I'm just re-reading On Lisp, and I'm struck by the similarity to the bottom-up programming paradigm. You build the language up to your problem, as well as breaking the problem down to your language. This reminds me of the Focused in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. In that case, they were no better than slaves, but one could imagine voluntary focusing. Like the book's protagonist, I was at once horrified by the conditions of the subjects, but thrilled by the prospect of human automation.
- erik 18y agoIt's generally a bad idea to give away major plot points of a story without first providing a spoiler warning.
- JabavuAdams 18y agoThis so-called spoiler is on the back cover. The book is full of surprises, of which that's one of the least. Oh, did I say too much? In any case, I'd be more interested in discussions of my main points.
- misuba 18y agoYes! The article makes me wonder why Google isn't funding research into this, frankly.
- ars 18y agoSince a computer based singularity is not arriving, I wonder if a human one might - can you imagine if this got good enough that large numbers of people were using it routinely? *I am aware that that would not meet the typical definition of singularity. I'm referring more to a leap in technology, then technology inventing itself.
- c00p3r 18y agoThe simple idea that less is more (in terms of so-called brainpower) is as old as the world itself. The cows are holy animals in India because people belive that they are wise. Buddha told that you should cease all your mental activities to gain ability to see the things as they are. It is why Buddhas eyes is half-shut. And every one know that 100% idle is better (allows faster responce) than 100% load. =) Just think that computer is a weak and primitive model of our neourology.
- c00p3r 18y agoBy shutting down certain mental functions -- the capacity to think conceptually, categorically, contextually -- did this impairment allow other mental functions to flourish? Could brain damage, in short, actually make you brilliant? isn't cannabis works the same way?! =)
- Calamitous 18y agoApparently not :\
- c00p3r 18y ago..and your sources are..? =)
- herval 18y agono, cannabis doesn't do any of that... It adds ANOTHER layer on your brain (the drug) - which is the exact opposite of what this experiment seems to achieve...
- 10ren 18y agoI often have instantaneous insights that take minutes (or months) to understand conceptually. Maybe it's a temporary connection to the raw data?
- michaelkeenan 18y agoI'm reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, which is about how the human brain thinks (with the angle of replicating this as artificial intelligence). In brief, the neocortex has layers. Inputs from senses arrive at the lowest layer, and the data is propagated upwards through the layers to the top, where inputs from different senses are combined and - simplifying my already simple understanding massively - decisions are made. At the lowest layer of the hierarchy, if it is a visual input, it could be a fragment of a line. This could be combined with neighboring inputs to be an eye, and with more inputs, even further up the hierarchy, to be the face you're looking at. Importantly, data runs down the hierarchy too. This is your brain making predictions of what to see, hear, feel, etc. Suppose someone says "my hands are cold so I'll put on my dloves" (not a typo). Say this to an English speaker and they will hear "gloves"; their mind has predicted the word "gloves" from context and experience (some Eastern European speakers won't be fooled, since their languages do have the "dl" sound). Or if you're listening to a song, your mind is primed to hear the next note at the right time. If I understand it correctly, cortical columns in some regions basically transmit the signal "song going as expected" - just passing up a summary, not the details. If you hear a wrong note, the prediction fails, and the details get passed up to the next layers instead. It occurs to me that some of the abilities described might be the result of impairing the prediction mechanism. Qualities of autistic people/savants/TMS-enhanced people were mentioned in the article: -Being unable to recognize the same area when subtle details like shadows were altered. -Being able to draw accurately -Being able to count hundreds of matchsticks. As mentioned in other comments, accurate drawing requires us to not use the mental categorization we're so used to. Without the prediction mechanism, maybe the details of the inputs propagate higher in the hierarchy, closer to what we might consider consciousness. Similarly, counting matchsticks might require us not to group a heap of matchsticks into "a heap of matchsticks" but instead still see each individual matchstick. But I Am Not A Neurologist.
- kragen 18y agoAs I discovered as a child, English speakers tend to hear "dl" as "gl" even absent any semantic-level clues; words like "dleebs" and "dlabs" get interpreted as "gleebs" and "glabs". Even the single level above the raw phonemes, containing the phonology of English, is enough. ...and really that's unavoidable. Absent aspiration, the difference between the /k/ of "sick" and the /t/ of "sit" is not contained in the /k/ or /t/ itself (almost no sound is being emitted during that time) but rather in the offglide of the vowel.
- herval 18y ago"A bird in the hand is worth two in the the bush" I could find the double 'the' at first sight - am I a savant or what?
- misuba 18y agoI could too, but I think I've just been exposed to this trick too often.
- tectonic 18y agoDon't try this at home. http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/tiki-index.php http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/tiki-index.php
- Ardit20 18y agoSome of it sounds wishfull thinking and widely exagerated. "I'm not sure I see how TMS can actually alter the way your brain works" Thats a renown scientist apparantly. Has he not read about the experiments that the main scientist has been doing. WHy can he not see how TMS can alter the way our brain works. How can these renowned scientists not believe the work that the times is reporting, whats wrong with it, why is the times not saying anything about the seemingly contradictory reporting of the views of these scientists?
- josefresco 18y agoWhy didn't he draw 4 different common animals instead of the same one 4 times?