From: matus [matus@snet.net]
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2002 12:40 AM
To: matus@snet.net
Subject: MFD List - Finding the Savant in all of us

(All, some recent developments in nueroscience have led to a possible
explanation and understanding of the savant syndrome.  Savants are people
capabable of astonishing mental feats, children have drawn immaculate
pictures of horses and riders, learned songs instantly by ear and played
them almost perfectly, and can calculate complex mathematical problems.
Such feats and abilities reveal to us the computational basis for human
thought and the brain.  Just as modern silicon computers can store
information digitally and repeat it over and over again, humans brains are
also capable of such feats, more evidence supporting the parrallel between
human brains and computers.  But the ability to perform these feats in
humans comes at a price, savants typically have extreme difficulty partaking
in normal everyday human social affairs, which is why the term 'idiot' is
often attatched to it.  The following article relays some researches efforts
to unmask the mystery behind savant behavior, they theorize that the brain
consumes vast computational resources on recognizing patterns instead of
blindly mimicking behavior and stimuli, as computers and savants are readily
capable of doing.  In savants, a physiological change has freed the savants
minds pattern recognition resources to do other things, which is why they
are capable of such amazing feats, but since most human behavior is based on
recognizing and mimicking patterns, they often lack basic social skills.  A
normal child when asked to draw a thier mother will often draw a stick
figure with eyes and a mouth, and a very round head.  The exact pattern that
the child recognizes as a person.  A savant of equal age may draw a picture
perfect rendition of that individuals face, down to wrinkles and freckles.
They regurgitate the stimuli, but do not recognize the underlying patterns.
These researches found the portion of the brain responsible for these
effects and theorized that hitting it with a magnetic field may result in
the appropriate effects, the results amazed even the researches, temporarily
giving people savant like abilities.  First is an introduction to this
article I made on another mailing list, follows is the article, and then
following that is a BBC news announcement of a company that wants to
commercialize this technology.  I will be first in line... - Mike)

Disover magazine had an excellent article about a similiar effect recently,
which is probably what this 'cap' is based on.  The full article follows,
but the gist is here

"Savants, he believes, can tap into the human mind's remarkable processing
abilities. Even something as simple as seeing, he explains, requires
phenomenally complex information processing. When a person looks at an
object, for example, the brain immediately estimates an object's distance by
calculating the subtle differences between the two images on each retina
(computers programmed to do this require extreme memory and speed). During
the process of face recognition, the brain analyzes countless details, such
as the texture of skin and the shape of the eyes, jawbone, and lips. Most
people are not aware of these calculations. In savants, says Snyder, the top
layer of mental processing-conceptual thinking, making conclusions-is
somehow stripped away. Without it, savants can access a startling capacity
for recalling endless detail or for performing lightning-quick calculations.
Snyder's theory has a radical conclusion of its own: He believes it may be
possible someday to create technologies that will allow any nonautistic
person to exploit these abilities. "

Makes sense, the brain spends countless compuational time on recognizing
patterns, ask a child to draw their mom and you get a stick figure with a
round head and two eyes and a line for a mouth, because that is the pattern
that the brain recongizes as a person.  Ask an autistic individual to draw
the same, and out comes an totally accurate drawing of their mother.
Lacking is the ability to recognize the necessary patterns all throughout
the world, since the processing abilities of the brain are not devoted to
this important task.

The article mentions that autistics frequently narrowly focus their
attention on things that others would perceive as mundane, such as ripping
paper, rocking in a chair, or clothes tumbling in a dryer.  But if the major
pattern seeking part of the brain is not focused toward seeking patterns,
perhaps every moment of these seemingly mundane tasks remains fascinating
and awe inspiring since the brain never recongizes the repetitiveness of it.

Regards,

Michael

The Inner Savant

http://www.discover.com/feb_02/featsavant.html

Are you capable of multiplying 147,631,789 by 23,674 in your head,
instantly?
Physicist Allan Snyder says you probably can, based on his new theory about
the origin of the extraordinary skills of autistic savants
By Douglas S. Fox
Photography by James Smolka

Nadia appeared healthy at birth, but by the time she was 2, her parents knew
something was amiss. She avoided eye contact and didn't respond when her
mother smiled or cooed. She didn't even seem to recognize her mother. At 6
months she still had not spoken a word. She was unusually clumsy and spent
hours in repetitive play, such as tearing paper into strips.

Allan Snyder, director of the Center for the Mind in Sydney, Australia,
thinks temporarily inhibiting neural activity through a technique called
transcranial magnetic stimulation could lead to creative breakthroughs.

But at 31/2, she picked up a pen and began to draw-not scribble, draw.
Without any training, she created from memory sketches of galloping horses
that only a trained adult could equal. Unlike the way most people might draw
a horse, beginning with its outline, Nadia began with random details. First
a hoof, then the horse's mane, then its harness. Only later did she lay down
firm lines connecting these floating features. And when she did connect
them, they were always in the correct position relative to one another. ¦
Nadia is an autistic savant, a rare condition marked by severe mental and
social deficits but also by a mysterious talent that appears
spontaneously-usually before age 6.

Sometimes the ability of a savant is so striking, it eventually makes news.
The most famous savant was a man called Joseph, the individual Dustin
Hoffman drew upon for his character in the 1988 movie Rain Man. Joseph could
immediately answer this question: "What number times what number gives
1,234,567,890?" His answer was "Nine times 137,174,210." Another savant
could double 8,388,628 up to 24 times within several seconds, yielding the
sum 140,737,488,355,328. A 6-year-old savant named Trevor listened to his
older brother play the piano one day, then climbed onto the piano stool
himself and played it better. A savant named Eric could find what he called
the "sweet spot" in a room full of speakers playing music, the spot where
sound waves from the different sources hit his ears at exactly the same
time.

Most researchers have offered a simple explanation for these extraordinary
gifts: compulsive learning. But Allan Snyder, a vision researcher and
award-winning physicist who is director of the Center for the Mind at the
University of Sydney and the Australian National University, has advanced a
new explanation of such talents. "Each of us has the innate capacity for
savantlike skills," says Snyder, "but that mental machinery is unconscious
in most people."

Savants, he believes, can tap into the human mind's remarkable processing
abilities. Even something as simple as seeing, he explains, requires
phenomenally complex information processing. When a person looks at an
object, for example, the brain immediately estimates an object's distance by
calculating the subtle differences between the two images on each retina
(computers programmed to do this require extreme memory and speed). During
the process of face recognition, the brain analyzes countless details, such
as the texture of skin and the shape of the eyes, jawbone, and lips. Most
people are not aware of these calculations. In savants, says Snyder, the top
layer of mental processing-conceptual thinking, making conclusions-is
somehow stripped away. Without it, savants can access a startling capacity
for recalling endless detail or for performing lightning-quick calculations.
Snyder's theory has a radical conclusion of its own: He believes it may be
possible someday to create technologies that will allow any nonautistic
person to exploit these abilities.

The origins of autism are thought to lie in early brain development. During
the first three years of life, the brain grows at a tremendous rate. In
autistic children, neurons seem to connect haphazardly, causing widespread
abnormalities, especially in the cerebellum, which integrates thinking and
movement, and the limbic region, which integrates experience with specific
emotions. Abnormalities in these regions seem to stunt interest in the
environment and in social interaction. Autistic children have narrowed
fields of attention and a poor ability to recognize faces. They are more
likely to view a face, for example, 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.

That narrowed focus may explain the autistic child's ability to concentrate
endlessly on a single repetitive activity, such as rocking in a chair or
watching clothes tumble in a dryer. Only one out of 10 autistic children
show special skills.

In a 1999 paper, Snyder and his colleague John Mitchell challenged the
compulsive-practice explanation for savant abilities, arguing that the same
skills are biologically latent in all of us. "Everyone in the world was
skeptical," says Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain
and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego. "Snyder deserves
credit for making it clear that savant abilities might be extremely
important for understanding aspects of human nature and creativity."



Drawings by normal 4-year-olds
When 4-year-old children draw a horse, they typically choose to establish
its contour and familiar features such as head, eyes, legs, and tail. Allan
Snyder believes that these kids draw on a concept of the horse to re-create
it rather than recalling the precise physical details, as savants do.


A Drawing by a 3-year-old Savant
A 3-year-old child named Nadia became famous for her ability to sketch
spectacularly detailed horses and riders from memory. Savants like Nadia
show the ability to perform unusual feats of illustration or calculation
when they are younger than 6. Snyder wants to figure out how they do it.
Snyder's office at the University of Sydney is in a Gothic building,
complete with pointed towers and notched battlements. Inside, Nadia's
drawings of horses adorn the walls; artwork by other savants hangs in nearby
rooms.

Snyder's interest in autism evolved from his studies of light and vision.
Trained as a physicist, he spent several years studying fiber optics and how
light beams can guide their own path. At one time he was interested in
studying the natural fiber optics in insects' eyes. The question that
carried him from vision research to autism had to do with 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? Snyder was
fascinated by the processing power required to accomplish such a feat.

During a sabbatical to Cambridge in 1987, Snyder devoured Ramachandran's
careful studies of perception and optical illusions. One showed 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. "You're not aware how your mind comes to those
conclusions," says Snyder. "When you look at a ball, you don't know why you
see it as a ball and not a circle. The reason is your brain is extracting
the shape from the subtle shading around the ball's surface." Every brain
possesses that innate ability, yet only artists can do it backward, using
shading to portray volume.

"Then," says Snyder, speaking slowly for emphasis, "I asked the question
that put me on a 10-year quest"-how can we bypass the mind's conceptual
thinking and gain conscious access to the raw, uninterpreted information of
our basic perceptions? Can we shed the assumptions built into our visual
processing system?

A few years later, he read about Nadia and other savant artists in Oliver
Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. As
he sat in his Sydney apartment one afternoon with the book in hand, an idea
surfaced. Perhaps someone like Nadia who lacked the ability to organize
sensory input into concepts might provide a window into the fundamental
features of perception.

Snyder's theory began with art, but he came to believe that all savant
skills, whether in music, calculation, math, or spatial relationships,
derive from a lightning-fast processor in the brain that divides
things-time, space, or an object-into equal parts. Dividing time might allow
a savant child to know the exact time when he's awakened, and it might help
Eric find the sweet spot by allowing him to sense millisecond differences in
the sounds hitting his right and left ears. Dividing space might allow Nadia
to place a disembodied hoof and mane on a page precisely where they belong.
It might also allow two savant twins to instantaneously count matches
spilled on the floor (one said "111"; the other said "37, 37, 37").
Meanwhile, splitting numbers might allow math savants to factor 10-digit
numbers or easily identify large prime numbers-which are impossible to
split.

Compulsive practice might enhance these skills over time, but Snyder
contends that practice alone cannot explain the phenomenon. As evidence, he
cites rare cases of sudden-onset savantism. Orlando Serrell, for example,
was hit on the head by a baseball at the age of 10. A few months later, he
began recalling an endless barrage of license-plate numbers, song lyrics,
and weather reports.

If someone can become an instant savant, Snyder thought, doesn't that
suggest we all have the potential locked away in our brains? "Snyder's ideas
sound very New Age. This is why people are skeptical," says Ramachandran.
"But I have a more open mind than many of my colleagues simply because I've
seen [sudden-onset cases] happen."

Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California at San
Francisco, has seen similar transformations in patients with frontotemporal
dementia, a degenerative brain disease that strikes people in their fifties
and sixties. Some of these patients, he says, spontaneously develop both
interest and skill in art and music. Brain-imaging studies have shown that
most patients with frontotemporal dementia who develop skills have
abnormally low blood flow or low metabolic activity in their left temporal
lobe. Because language abilities are concentrated in the left side of the
brain, these people gradually lose the ability to speak, read, and write.
They also lose face recognition. Meanwhile, the right side of the brain,
which supports visual and spatial processing, is better preserved.

"They really do lose the linguistic meaning of things," says Miller, who
believes Snyder's ideas about latent abilities complement his own
observations about frontotemporal dementia. "There's a loss of higher-order
processing that goes on in the anterior temporal lobe." In particular,
frontotemporal dementia damages the ventral stream, a brain region that is
associated with naming objects. Patients with damage in this area can't name
what they're looking at, but they can often paint it beautifully. Miller has
also seen physiological similarities in the brains of autistic savants and
patients with frontotemporal dementia. When he performed brain-imaging
studies on an autistic savant artist who started drawing horses at 18
months, he saw abnormalities similar to those of artists with frontotemporal
dementia: decreased blood flow and slowed neuronal firing in the left
temporal lobe.

One blustery, rainy morning I drove to Mansfield, a small farm town 180
miles northeast of Melbourne. I was heading to a day clinic for autistic
adults, where I hoped to meet a savant. The three-hour drive pitched and
rolled through hills, occasionally cutting through dense eucalyptus forests
punctuated with yellow koala-crossing signs. From time to time, I saw large,
white-crested parrots; in one spot, a flock of a thousand or more in flight
wheeled about like a galaxy.

I finally spotted my destination: Acorn Outdoor Ornaments. Within this
one-story house, autistic adults learn how to live independently. They also
create inexpensive lawn decorations, like the cement dwarf I see on the
roof.

Joan Curtis, a physician who runs Acorn and a related follow-up program,
explained that while true savants are rare, many people with autism have
significant talents. Nurturing their gifts, she said, helps draw them into
social interaction. Guy was one of the participants I met at Acorn. Although
he was uncomfortable shaking my hand, all things electronic fascinated him,
and he questioned me intently about my tape recorder.

Every horizontal surface in Guy's room was covered with his creations. One
was an electric fan with a metal alligator mouth on the front that opened
and closed as it rotated from side to side. On another fan a metal fisherman
raised and lowered his pole with each revolution. And then I saw the sheep.
Viewed from the left, it was covered in wool. Viewed from the right, it was
a skeleton, which I learned Guy had assembled without any help. Guy didn't
say much about himself. He cannot read nor do arithmetic, but he has built
an electric dog that barks, pants, wags its tail, and urinates.

During my visit, another Acorn participant, Tim, blew into the room like a
surprise guest on The Tonight Show. He was in a hurry to leave again, but
asked me my birthday-July 15, 1970.

"Born on a Wednesday, eh?" he responded nonchalantly-and correctly.

"How did you do that?" I asked.

"I did it well," he replied.

"But how?" I asked.

"Very well," he replied, with obvious pleasure. Then he was out the door and
gone.

How do calendar savants do it? Several years ago Timothy Rickard, a
cognitive psychologist at the University of California at San Diego,
evaluated a 40-year-old man with a mental age of 5 who could assign a day of
the week to a date with 70 percent accuracy. Because the man was blind from
birth, he couldn't study calendars or even imagine calendars. He couldn't do
simple arithmetic either, so he couldn't use a mathematical algorithm. But
he could only do dates falling within his lifetime, which suggests that he
used memory.

He could, however, do some arithmetic, such as answer this question: If
today is Wednesday, what day is two days from now? Rickard suspects that
memorizing 2,000 dates and using such arithmetic would allow 70 percent
accuracy. "That doesn't reduce it to a trivial skill, but it's not
inconceivable that someone could acquire this performance with a lot of
effort," he says. It's especially plausible given the single-minded drive
with which autistics pursue interests.

Yet Tim, the savant at Acorn, can calculate dates as far back as 1900, as
well as into the future. And there are reports of twins who could calculate
dates 40,000 years in the past or future. Still, practice may be part of it.
Robyn Young, an autism researcher at Flinders University in Adelaide,
Australia, says some calendar savants study perpetual calendars several days
a week (there are only 14 different calendar configurations; perpetual
calendars cross-reference them to years).

But even if savants practice, they may still tap into that universal ability
Snyder has proposed. Here it helps to consider art savants. That Nadia began
drawings with minor features rather than overall outlines suggests that she
tended to perceive individual details more prominently than she did the
whole-or the concept-of what she was drawing. Other savant artists draw the
same way.

Autistic children differ from nonautistic children in another way. Normal
kids find it frustrating to copy a picture containing a visual illusion,
such as M. C. Escher's drawing in which water flows uphill. Autistic
children don't. That fits with Snyder's idea that they're recording what
they see without interpretation and reproducing it with ease in their own
drawings.

Even accomplished artists sometimes employ strategies to shake up their
preconceptions about what they're seeing. Guy Diehl is not a savant, but he
is known for his series of crystal-clear still lifes of stacked books,
drafting implements, and fruit. When Diehl finds that he's hit a sticking
point on a painting, for example, he may actually view it in a mirror or
upside down. "It reveals things you otherwise wouldn't see, because you're
seeing it differently," he says. "You're almost seeing it for the first time
again."

Diehl showed me how art students use this technique to learn to draw. He put
a pair of scissors on a table and told me to draw the negative space around
the scissors, not the scissors themselves. The result: I felt I was drawing
individual lines, not an object, and my drawing wasn't half bad, either.

Drawing exercises are one way of coaxing conceptual machinery to take five,
but Snyder is pursuing a more direct method. He has suggested that a
technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which uses magnetic
fields to disrupt neuronal firing, could knock out a normal person's
conceptual brain machinery, temporarily rendering him savantlike.

Young and her colleague Michael Ridding of the University of Adelaide tried
it. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation on 17 volunteers, they inhibited
neural activity in the frontotemporal area. This language and
concept-supporting brain region is affected in patients with frontotemporal
dementia and in the art savant whom Miller studied. In this altered state,
the volunteers performed savantlike tasks-horse drawing, calendar
calculating, and multiplying.

Five of the 17 volunteers improved-not to savant levels, but no one expected
that, because savants practice. Furthermore, transcranial magnetic
stimulation isn't a precise tool for targeting brain regions. But the five
volunteers who improved were those in whom separate neurological assessments
indicated that the frontotemporal area was successfully targeted. "Obviously
I don't think the idea is so outlandish anymore," says Young. "I think it is
a plausible hypothesis. It always was, but I didn't expect we'd actually
find the things we did."

Snyder himself is experimenting with grander ideas. "We want to enhance
conceptual abilities," he says, "and on the other hand remove them and
enhance objectivity." He imagines a combination of training and hardware
that might, for example, help an engineer get past a sticking point on a
design project by offering a fresh angle on the problem. One method would
involve learning to monitor one's own brain waves. By watching one's own
brain waves during drawing exercises, Snyder imagines it may be possible to
learn to control them in a way that shuts down their concept-making
machinery-even the left temporal lobe itself.

Even if further research never fully reveals why savants have extraordinary
skills, we may at least learn from their potential. Snyder is optimistic. "I
envisage the day," he says, "when the way to get out of a [mental rut] is
you pick up this thing-those of us with jobs that demand a certain type of
creativity-and you stimulate your brain. I'm very serious about this."

   -----------------------------------

Subject: Who wants to be Smart?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1932000/1932709.stm

The human mind has long fascinated psychologists

Helen Briggs
BBC News Online

Australian scientists say they have created a "thinking cap" that will
stimulate creative powers. The invention raises the possibility of being
able to unlock one's inner genius by reawakening dormant parts of the brain.

This shock finding will challenge many of our conventional views regarding
creativity

Steve Williams, Institute of Psychiatry  It is based on the idea that we all
have the sorts of extraordinary abilities usually associated with savants.

According to scientists at the Centre for the Mind in Sydney, these hiddent
alents can be stimulated using magnetism.

Professor Allan Snyder and colleague Elaine Mulcahy say tests on 17
volunteers show their device can improve drawing skills within 15 minutes.
They intend to submit their work for publication in a scientific journal.

The news, reported in Chemistry and Industry magazine, has been given a
cautious welcome by experts in the UK.

'Unconscious skills'

Professor Steve Williams of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, said
Professor Snyder was a highly respected international scientist and he was
looking forward to reading the scientific paper.

Many autistics are accomplished artists

He told BBC News Online: "This shock finding that everyone might possess
unconscious skills that can be 'switched on' with magnetic stimulation will
challenge many of our conventional views regarding creativity."

The inspiration for the device comes from savant syndrome, a condition
portrayed in the Hollywood film Rain Man.

Savants are extraordinarily gifted. They may have amazing memories or excel
at maths, music or art. But they also have developmental disorders such as
autism.

Mind state

One theory behind savant syndrome is that the right side of the brain
overcompensates for damage to the left hemisphere.

The skills most often seen in savants are those associated with the right
side.

Savant syndrome - Rare condition in which persons with various developmental
disorders have astonishing abilities or talents Savants also have a
prodigious memory Typical savant skills include music, art, and mathematical
skills About 10% of persons with autistic disorder have some savant skills
According to Professor Snyder, it might be possible to train someone to
access this state by controlling their brain waves.

David Potter of the National Autistic Society, a UK charity, said the
research was fascinating.

"Some scientists believe that the essence of creativity is not a state of
mind but an activity," he told BBC News Online.

"Whether Snyder and Mulcahy's research will enable the expression of savant
skills without accompanying impairments remains to be seen."

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