Slashdot Mirror
Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers
I've never given much credence to the "only use 10% of our brains" urban legend, but this article,
Savant for a Day,
is making me reconsider. I'd like to see controlled, double-blind studies, but Snyder's machine already sounds very interesting -- hey, anyone can
learn to draw,
but I want to flip a switch to put my brain into calculator mode. EM-brain experimentation has taken off since
Michael Persinger's work and
other recent research.
I want to flip a switch and get 30 FPS in doom 3
Banaaaana!
...performs more like Austin Powers.
Brian May has amazing powers!
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
...to make everybody else stop using their 10%, thus giving you the edge you need to succeed in life.
Isn't that what Einstein said? Anyway, that link seems to be down, but I just saw a documentary yesterday night on the telly, where they trained people to modify their brainwave activity to move a player through a video game. I think this only scratches the surface - there's a lot of potential that we probably don't even know about... I would be glad to add a few more percent to mine, that's for sure - LOL :-)
Did we just DOS the paper of record?
My other sig is also a
On the "10% of your brain" legend, here is a pretty cool writeup. The best quote from the article:
In other words, the "humans only use 10% of their brains" canard would more correctly be phrased "humans only use 10% of their brains for walking around and smelling things"...
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
At first I just chalked up the down webserver to some poor schmed's server going belly-up under the weight of the slashdot effect. But no, that link is sitting on the New York Times server:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22S
But for some reason I can get to the NYT.com frontpage, albeit after some delay. Their search results do not show anything matching that article name ("Savant for a Day") and Google doesn't have anything either.
Ca bien. Will just have to wait for it to die off.
My
Limekiller
The Mentats are among us...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
this was yesterday's news.
Hmm, do they use these wondrous brain powers to make up stories? Is that how they do it?
.. about as much as really fit people want instant and fully working diet pills for everybody.
If everyone was smart, the smart would loose their advantage. The same goes for knowledge. If there was a really easy way og absorbing knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?
Besides, I don't generally buy the notion that education for everyone would lead to world peace. I know about lots of extremely smart and knowledgable people that are just as (if not even more so) greedy, corrupt and violent as average Joe.
Yeh right! Just like Michael Angelo. Leonardo Da Vinci could not only draw and sculpt, but was also a great mathematician and scientist.
Very very few tap into the brains potential. The few that have AND used it, are some of the most remembered people of all time!
10% brain use good.. only 2% needed post /.
There is no switch ... to flip.
... to put my brain in "counting cards" mode.
Now, off to watch Wapner. Six minutes till Wapner.
The USB forum has named the two kinds of brain power 'Full Brain Power' and 'High-speed Brain Power'. Both are now collectively known as Brain Power 2.0.
if your brain was in calculator mode you would find like 40000 variations of "BOOBLESS"
Since most of a modern CPU's transistor count is cache memory you'ill probably find that outside the control unit at any one time even less than 10% of the transistors are active. If you include the number of transistors present for main memory in the mix that percentage gets even lower.
What do you mean... may have amazing powers. I am a genious.
I looked at the 'before and after' section of the learn to draw site. It did seem that the variety of the 'before' pictures was squashed into the standard 'after' style. In particular I personally feel that the before in this picture shows more promise than the after.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Trailer Parks.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Nobody seems willing to ask "what methods are we using to extract info from detainees?"
Documents from the former Soviet Union make it clear that this tech has been secretly studied for many decades.
For some reason I had justified this by assuming that we used approximately 10% at any given time, but that overall just about every neuron was used in some capacity.
:-P
Luckily I discovered the truth of the matter...um...about 20 minutes ago
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Is this research in anyway sponsored by the Kmart?
By LAWRENCE OSBORNE
In a concrete basement at the University of Sydney, I sat in a chair waiting to have my brain altered by an electromagnetic pulse. My forehead was connected, by a series of electrodes, to a machine that looked something like an old-fashioned beauty-salon hair dryer and was sunnily described to me as a ''Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator.'' This was not just any old Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator, however; this was the Medtronic Mag Pro, and it was being operated by Allan Snyder, one of the world's most remarkable scientists of human cognition.
Nonetheless, the anticipation of electricity being beamed into my frontal lobes (and the consent form I had just signed) made me a bit nervous. Snyder found that amusing. ''Oh, relax now!'' he said in the thick local accent he has acquired since moving here from America. ''I've done it on myself a hundred times. This is Australia. Legally, it's far more difficult to damage people in Australia than it is in the United States.''
''Damage?'' I groaned.
''You're not going to be damaged,'' he said. ''You're going to be enhanced.''
The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people.
Snyder is an impish presence, the very opposite of a venerable professor, let alone an internationally acclaimed scientist. There is a whiff of Woody Allen about him. Did I really want him, I couldn't help thinking, rewiring my hard drive? ''We're not changing your brain physically,'' he assured me. ''You'll only experience differences in your thought processes while you're actually on the machine.'' His assistant made a few final adjustments to the electrodes, and then, as everyone stood back, Snyder flicked the switch.
A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''
I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect.
While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.''
Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.
I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feli
"they were of normal or above-normal intelligence ... their cerebral hemispheres had been compressed into a slab less than an inch thick"
If kids can lose large portions of their brains and still grow up bright and healthy, then I think that suggests pretty strongly that most of the brain is either functionally redundant or simply unused.
That's a great quote about the 10%, though.
What I want to know is why large animals need a larger brain to handle their bodies, and brain:body mass ratios are considered more important than absolute brain mass. It shouldn't require more data processing just to run a larger body, when most of its processes are regulated without the brain. Furthermore, it sounds like that wasn't the case for dinosaurs, some of which had little bird-sized brains in enormous bodies.
Ever stand in front of a door for twenty minutes because you thought it was locked, and it really wasn't, you just couldn't figure out how to turn a doorknob?
That's me. Aside from being totally inadept mechanically, I also can't draw, can't understand music to the point where I can't differentiate between different melodies, can't see color, can't reliably do arithmatic computation, can't speak foreign languages, and have no athletic ability.
I know my limitations. Just thinking "hmm, one day, I shall surpass my limitations and use all the latent abilities in my brain" is wishful thinking. The vast majority of people are stupid, uninsightful, self-absorbed, and pathetic. To assume that you, yourself, are not part of the majority is simply a lie put forward by your self-absorbed sense of self-esteem. Your mind lies to you, makes you think you're special, somehow different from the vast majority of peons on this earth, when you're really not. It's a very destructive lie - it prevents you from realizing that you don't even have the capacity to understand what's really going on 90% of the time.
Let us delight in our mediocrity - It's people like us that made the world the way it is today!
When I was in high school, this Book Drawing on the Right of the Brain was quite popular with the art teachers. It was said to be a new way to teach people to draw. From what I remember it worked quite nicely for me and did not require magnetic fields.
To use the technique, we were told to lay out our drawing pads, place our hands into the middle of the pad and never to look at our hands as we were drawing. We were supposed to focus on what we were drawing and then try to remember where we left our hands in space without actually seeing where they were. I was told that I could glance down at my hand from time to time, but that I should not look at my hands while actually drawing.
Whatever the technique did do my cognitive process seemed to work. My normal drawing style looked like figures 1 and 2. While I used the right side technique, my drawing looked like figure 3, with my lines conveying more movement and being more a stylized reproduction.
Maybe this guyâ(TM)s apparatus is simply forcing the participants not to look at their hands while drawing. Seems a lot more controls would be needed to say magnetic fields have anything to do with this phenomenon.
As I recall from college anthropology, human childbirth is painful (and sometimes even fatal) precisely because our craniums are so large, relative to other mammals and relative to the size of our frames. (Humans have the highest ratio of brain mass to body mass; whales come in second.) If so much of our brain mass were hypothetically unnecessary, then humans with smaller brains would be more likely to pass on their genes, as those childbirths would less frequently be fatal. Over time, humans would come to have much smaller craniums (90% smaller, if the urban myth were true), not the large craniums that we currently possess. The fact that evolution is willing to pay such a high penalty (increased childbirth fatalities) for large brains indicates that there must be an offsetting evolutionary advantage to having large brains. The notion that much of our brain is therefore "unused" doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
"There is no off position on the Genius Switch"
someday I'll be able to sit down, get hooked up to a machine, then say "I know Kung Fu". Then I'd say "Whoa" (and subsequently score with Carrie-Anne Moss) then I'd say "Whoa" again
- i over did it last night...
From the article:
"While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.''"
What I find seriously funny is the fact that while drug use is seriously shunned around most of the so-called "developed" world, there will be no such outcry over such mental manipulation utilizing this method. So it isn't the end we're concerned about, it's the vehicle.
Do you realize that roughly 6x as many people have died either outright or by drowning after inhaling fumes while behind a motorboat since 1991 than have while taking MDMA (ecstacy)? And that doesn't even include the people who drowned and nobody suspected the poisoning.
Do you realize that between cirrhosis of the liver (alcohol) and deaths resulting from drunk driving accidents there are 60,000 killed in the US every year? And ephedra, creatine and ecstacy are the problems?
Sorry for going off on a rant here. I welcome this sort of research. But it does point out that what Americans are against is not people doing things to their own bodies. What people fear is a boogeyman that has been fueled by a multi-billion dollar industry that they need to maintain. Ie, jobs.
w00t.
My
Limekiller
"Besides, I don't generally buy the notion that education for everyone would lead to world peace."
It might not give us world peace, but perhaps superstition (e.g. religion, astrology,...) will diminish.
Or so I am deluded.
In a concrete basement at the University of Sydney, I sat in a chair waiting to have my brain altered by an electromagnetic pulse. My forehead was connected, by a series of electrodes, to a machine that looked something like an old-fashioned beauty-salon hair dryer and was sunnily described to me as a ''Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator.'' This was not just any old Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator, however; this was the Medtronic Mag Pro, and it was being operated by Allan Snyder, one of the world's most remarkable scientists of human cognition.
Nonetheless, the anticipation of electricity being beamed into my frontal lobes (and the consent form I had just signed) made me a bit nervous. Snyder found that amusing. ''Oh, relax now!'' he said in the thick local accent he has acquired since moving here from America. ''I've done it on myself a hundred times. This is Australia. Legally, it's far more difficult to damage people in Australia than it is in the United States.''
''Damage?'' I groaned.
''You're not going to be damaged,'' he said. ''You're going to be enhanced.''
The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people.
Snyder is an impish presence, the very opposite of a venerable professor, let alone an internationally acclaimed scientist. There is a whiff of Woody Allen about him. Did I really want him, I couldn't help thinking, rewiring my hard drive? ''We're not changing your brain physically,'' he assured me. ''You'll only experience differences in your thought processes while you're actually on the machine.'' His assistant made a few final adjustments to the electrodes, and then, as everyone stood back, Snyder flicked the switch.
A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''
I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect.
While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.''
Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.
I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form.
Snyder look
Be afraid...
But walking around and smelling things takes a lot of brain power (at least as much as reasoning does). Think about it. When you walk around and smell things your brain is doing a lot of work. Your brian is processing your vision, smells, and balance. Your brain is also regulating your heartbeat, breathing, and other bodily functions. These things all require a lot of processing power. We don't have any computer system that could even come close to doing the things that the human brain does when you are "just walking around and smelling things."
...interesting if true.
"Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions. I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form."
I would think a more convincing experiment would be to start with the machine turned on for the full "10 minutes", the cat drawing made, then the machine turned off and another made. If this is correct then the second should actually be worse than the first.
The idea that the ability to draw better cats improves as you practice doesn't seem terribly startling.
My
Limekiller
No, I'll think you'll find it is yesterday's news.
--
Can you provide a link or, better yet, a reference to a journal? Because I know a Slashdot poster would never make something up about something he knows literally nothing about.
Anyone remeber Forbidden Planet?? This sounds like Dr. Morbius and his ancient Krel technology to me! The problem is when we boost the power so much that we begin to project our unconsciousness into material space. Freaky..
How much money did you take for the learn to draw link advertisment?
Searching for "Allan Snyder" found plenty of other links. Like this one. I had no problems accessing the NYT article, that link you posted seems chopped off.
Prof Snyder certainly doesn't seem to be a flake. I almost expected his "thinking cap" to be another $cientology E-meter or an Orgone box. Now, can we use it to create "Focused" individuals? (Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I took the article to overstate the practical significance to a certain degree, and to ignore the downide. If I read it correctly, the point is that we might be able to gain certain savant abilities by turning off parts of our brains that are responsible for other very valuable abilities. It might be really valuable to be abale to do this to yourself for a short period when you have to do certain kinds of tasks, but it is not like we would want to go through our lives wearing a headband that would keep us in this kind of state. We don't want to become autistic, just so we can be "idiot savants."
This post is dedicated to all of those
And FWIW, which often isn't much in the realm of science, it makes sense that it could be important from a survival standpoint to hide some hypothetical lower structures which, say, count 87 toothpicks, and just send to the upper level an exectutive summary, like 'lots of toothpicks'. Considering what kludges biological things are, it wouldn't surprise me if researchers found that's what was going on.
They were trying to say that 10% of people use their brain.
We would be a dull society if we used brain %100, people would quit watching TV, and jokes would not be funny anymore cause we know better.
:P
In otherwords, no more simpsons! And Real TV! And no more bombing people cause we know better! No more eating meat! Cause we all know Vegans are smart and know only primitive societies eat meat!
What fun would that be!
Why is it so common to refer to people who live in trailer parks as stupid and poor? How about if I said 'slums'? Why is it okay to pick on rural white poor as being stupid and inbred, but not inner city minorities?
Who said it wasn't okay to make fun of welfare-dependant, don't-know-who-the-daddy-is ghetto trash? In fact, i'd put in-bred rural white poor above ghetto trash, because in theory, they at least pay for their own housing, instead of living in a HUD project.
The lower rungs of any particular ethnic group, city, country, or whatever, are always fair game for mockery. If you think there's some kind of limits based on race, then you've been hanging out with far too many pansy-ass 'politically correct' types. Do us all a favor, and piss them off whenever possible.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
"I know about lots of extremely smart and knowledgable people that are just as (if not even more so) greedy, corrupt and violent as average Joe."
on your definition of "smart and knowledgable." Personally, I always attribute greed, corruption and violence to an individual's inability to internalize some important concept, such as post-modernization.
"I don't generally buy the notion that education for everyone would lead to world peace."
Probably not world peace, but you can point out places where a larger percentage of the population is educated, and observe a relatively high standard of living, across the board. Personally, I see education as merely a process of "networking" minds to mainstream society, so that a mutual relationship of benefiting and contributing can be established. Otherwise, people look elsewhere to get what they want, which is usually detrimental to main stream society.
Besides, democracy is only as strong as the masses are knowledgable and free to make decisions for themselves.
However, I believe that it is impossible to measure intelligence. Tests of intelligence will always be tainted by the tester's ego and self-delusion. I think we should treat minds like genes and encourage the widest "mind pool" we can, in case catastrophic events require some creative thinking. Yet, at the same time, we need to make main stream society as flexible as possible, so as many people as possible can get plugged in at the same time.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
and that means more nerves and more brain to handle all that extra input.
Infuriate left and right
So does that mean we are IN the Matrix or we ARE the Matrix. This is a very important disticntion I need to figure out before I unplug myself...
Repeat after me: the idea that you only use 10% of your brain is a myth. That's right, it's complete bullshit, utter crap. It makes me angry to hear it so often. It's odd really, this is not a case where there is a small group on the fringe claiming this is the fact, no one in the field (mine is computational/integrative neuroscience, which as you can see from just its name is full of buzz-words :P) has held this theory for as long as I've been in it (maye even ever but I don't know that). It's quite non-sensical really, 10% of what? Of the brain's potential? Do you really think we have a quantitative way of measuring that, or of "how much of it you're using even? Do you only count cognition or subconscious functions as well? Which method do you use to measure these and how do you differentiate between the cognitive and the non-cognitive? This pissed Stephen Gould (rest his soul) off enough that he penned an entire article about myths concerning evolution that opened by bitching about this stupid idea. Please, for the love of all that is scientific and good, STOP PROPAGATING THIS STUPID MYTH! At very least on slashdot, you're supposed to be a geek damn it, you ought to know better. *grumbles* 10%, I gotcher 10% right here bub.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Come on, guys. Every single one of us has seen brain scan images of people remembering or doodling. In those images, different parts of the brain do different tasks.
For example, I don't use my occipital lobe when I'm not looking at stuff. Once I start doing visual work, ol' occy goes to work.
The idea that we only use 10% of our brain is silly. We're not latent psychics or telekinetics, nor does the other 90% hold penguins. We just don't use all of our brain all of the time. Throughout the day, though, you'll use all of your brain, unless part has been removed via surgery, accident, or believing the US "President".
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I wonder if they have tried doing this to someone who already is a great artist. What effect would this have on them? Would they be able to get even better? Worse? No difference? I think it would be rather interesting.
Hmmm... reminds me of Flowers for Algernon...
I've met in my country people that tell that humans only use 10% of their brain ability. They usually want to use 100% of the money of their victims.
-- (but in fact only ÂAPT has Super Cow PowersÂ)
So what they're saying is 10% of our brains are for detecting farts while walking? Who knew!
The human use 10% of max brain power, 5% of muscle power, 5% of cut capasity or something. It is abnormal to use much of the capasity. If you use high fraction of the brain power, you are probably in status epilepticus which may be deadly. I think the used energy in the brain is very close to optimal.
give me a program for the HB2 helicopter - no, on second thought, one for drawing cats.
This guy memorized 100 decks of cards. (5200 cards for the 5% club. :^) I figure that every gambling place has his picture up on the wall under "Banned for Life!" (ObSimp.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
n a concrete basement at the University of Sydney, I sat in a chair waiting to have my brain altered by an electromagnetic pulse. My forehead was connected, by a series of electrodes, to a machine that looked something like an old-fashioned beauty-salon hair dryer and was sunnily described to me as a ''Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator.'' This was not just any old Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator, however; this was the Medtronic Mag Pro, and it was being operated by Allan Snyder, one of the world's most remarkable scientists of human cognition.
Nonetheless, the anticipation of electricity being beamed into my frontal lobes (and the consent form I had just signed) made me a bit nervous. Snyder found that amusing. ''Oh, relax now!'' he said in the thick local accent he has acquired since moving here from America. ''I've done it on myself a hundred times. This is Australia. Legally, it's far more difficult to damage people in Australia than it is in the United States.''
''Damage?'' I groaned.
''You're not going to be damaged,'' he said. ''You're going to be enhanced.''
The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people.
Snyder is an impish presence, the very opposite of a venerable professor, let alone an internationally acclaimed scientist. There is a whiff of Woody Allen about him. Did I really want him, I couldn't help thinking, rewiring my hard drive? ''We're not changing your brain physically,'' he assured me. ''You'll only experience differences in your thought processes while you're actually on the machine.'' His assistant made a few final adjustments to the electrodes, and then, as everyone stood back, Snyder flicked the switch.
A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''
I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect.
While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.''
Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.
I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very imp
I would rather get on my cell phone and say "Tank, I need a pilot program for a V-212 helicopter."
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
humans with superior autistic savant capabilities? Perhaps, she found that such individuals had personalities that are inherently unstable that creates bad survival probabilities for themselves and maybe those around them. Maybe our society has advanced to the level where we can artificially compensate for such geniuses' shortcomings or have we? What does it take to keep a genius happy, productive and non-destructive to society?
Give me a super crook and an idiotic one, i'll take the latter anytime.
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
I stumbled across this site a while back when this stuff was fairly new. I decided to check back up on it, and apparently it's in production of sorts, although it still seems fairly beta.
It's called Shakti-Lite, and it's a headset you wear that plugs into your soundcard, and with the software, it generates signals that cause magnets in the headset to do some crazy stuff. It even has instructions for making your own headset. It's intent is for exploring consciousness, but perhaps with modification some smart slashdotters can modify this to make us all genuises for cheap!
This is almost certainly garbage. I'm working in a transcranial magnetic stimulation lab right now, and I've never even heard of the guy doing this stuff. However, the people who criticize his work are basically the most respected people doing TMS right now. I get the sense that he's trying to infer a meaningful pattern from a small number of poorly designed tests.
The usual effect of TMS is just to slow you down by a couple seconds at whatever you're doing. For example, right now we're doing this experiment where we flash words on a screen and have the subject read them out loud. Then eventually we just put a * up on the screen, and they have to recall the last word they saw. By changing the device to send pulses into different parts of the brain, you can find out what is responsible for what. The subjects slow down a bit when you're hitting the right part of the brain.
I mean, this guy could be insanely revolutionary and in five years we'll all be using his machines on our heads to make us geniuses... but I don't think so.
btm
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
... a cluster of brains. Yeah, that's it, I'll rule the world ... no wait.
There's an assumption that mind is nothing but brain which has absolutely no empirical support, the belief is logically incoherent, and based on theories with theory biased observation that have known to be false for nearly three quarters of a century.
Neuroscience is still stuck in the Victorian sciences as is A.I. It's worst than correlation doesn't equal causation and more like believing in leprechauns and saying we only use 10 percent of them. Actually we don't use them at all! Repeat after me: "How many angles can dance on the head of a pin"
Well, not yours, but most anyone else's.
brain runs dual xeons ;)
--
Were you on a TMS machine, you would actually realize there *is* no spoon.
Additionally, the Discover article also talked about the various instances of sudden onset autism. One of the examples presented was the case of a 3 year old girl named Nadia, who was capable of drawing a picture of a horse and rider in such detail that it would've taken a experienced artist to do. The article shows one of Nadia's drawings, which IMHO is very beautifully rendered.
Now, if only to find that machine so I can calculate the Mayan calendar past 2012...
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
"Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form"
;)
What? The cats look more like dogs! Perhaps you should have yanked up the voltage a bit.
Everytime I see a posting here about a website I crash it with my mind.
Will power baby.
Works everytime!
I think people are missing the point... including, oddly enough, the researcher himself... (or perhaps he was joking).
Savant abilities just aren't useful, from an evolutionary point of view... the human brain might be amazingly powerful, but for your average human being what matters is social interaction and not walking into things. The abstractions, if they're there, are there for a reason...
It's a bit like giving computer users access to the raw machine code -- really cutting out the filters and exposing what the computer can do, but utterly useless for 99.99% of people.
What they're doing strikes me as a little risky, although the researcher sounds confident... hmm. What happens if you slow down or confuse the part of the brain that controls your heart, for example?
Hooking ourselves up to 1.21 gigawatt machines that shock our brains into seeing the world in a different way are more acceptable than a pill that does the same, simply because the machine doesn't make you euphoric in the process (and if by chance it did, that could easily be fixed with some mandatory (by law) spikes, sandpaper, etc. Does it make any sense? Of course not.
We managed to colonize america, defeat the british, expand all the way to california, go through the industrial revolution, and build what is now the world's sole superpower all with legalized drugs. Only in 1914 with the Harrison Act could you no longer waltz into the local grocery store and buy a pound of opium. I would argue that since then, it's all been downhill. Correlation doesn't equal causation, sure... but it shouldn't be ignored either.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
As long as there are people hunting for a free lunch, this wishful thinking will continue to propogate. Riddle me this though: What kind of evolution favors organisms operating at 10% efficiency?
Oh, which part don't you use?
In other news, exposure to electromagnetic radiation has been linked to brain cancer. There's some sort of diminshing returns argument to be made here, but I spent too long frying my brain with the Savant-o-Matic(TM), and now it just won't come to me.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Hear, here.
Funny, I got into computing via my interest in brainwaves. I (no doubt like many others who read SF in the 1960's) came up with the notion that, since our brains are the best pattern recognition engines around, that amplifying brainwaves and transmitting them to another person wearing a matching set of electrodes, then using a controlled series of basic experiential trials (start with things like "red light", "green light", etc., work up to basic emotional states), a person could be trained to recognize the patterns - voila, basic telepathy - if telepathy is electromagnetic that is.
:-)
I did have some circuit designs done but never actually got anything built due to poverty and procrastination, but early successful work at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in using an IBM 360 to recognize basic pre-vocalized words in brain waves spurred me to get involved in computers. It's funny how some addictions get started...
This is probably flamebait for someone, but it's not meant to be...
As for the neuroscience idea that the 'God experience' is mere electronic fu, it's not that easy. While some researchers see this as evidence of a mechanistic view of the Universe, others see this as evidence that we were given the ability to experience God. In other words, cause and effect may be the opposite. And there's no way to tell from the evidence.
The alternate model says that these kinds of experiences show we are created with the ability to experience God in whatever way. (by analogy, we see blue because we're created with that ability. Interestingly, our retinas are sensitive to IR but our corneas block it, IIRC - what does that mean?) In that case, the neuroscientist is just tickling the mechanism ('organ'). It's not unreasonable that such an 'organ' could be fooled, just as aspirin fools the pain receptors. From that point of view, the same facts are just confirmation of faith.
It's like that picture - is it a vase, or two faces? For every mechanistic view of the Universe, there is an equally powerful and reasonable view of the Universe that says it was created. And there is literally no way to prove either one in contradiction to the other. Either view requires faith in that view.
I emphatically believe that both views deserve respect, and understanding that the other may well be correct. Both views are probably correct and incorrect in different aspects. One example - in my grade school textbooks, "all reputable scientists believe Hoyle's view that the Universe has always existed and will always exist." - the fact that the Bible asserted a creation and an end was evidence that it was wrong, until 1962 when the microwave echo of the Big Bang was first 'heard'. Then, for the last 40 years, "the Universe is expanding but the expansion is slowing. We don't know if it will stop and end in a Big Crunch or continue expanding." Now it appears that the expansion (if that is what it is) is accelerating.
So it's important to keep an open mind and accept that others as smart as we are may get different conclusions from the same facts. I am quite comfortable with a created Universe, although I have different ideas from many others with similar beliefs. I'm also quite comfortable with the science, but I maintain an acute awareness that the interpretation and the evidence is continually changing, correcting and expanding. From what I've seen over a long period of time is that the areas where science and faith seem to disagree are those areas in which knowledge is least complete. But you may disagree!
In the Christian tradition, the Bereans are held up as the example of a 'more noble' way - they 'received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.' In other words, they made sure that Paul wasn't blowing smoke. From the earliest days of the church, rigorous inquiry into both the Word and the World
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
That 90% of our brain is obviously for pr0n appreciation. Why else would Internet usage for pr0n keep climbing? It's to feed the pr0n center of our brains!
But does it run NetBSD?
null sig
...is that in an older, more brutish time, think hundred-thousand-plus years ago we needed excess 'design capacity' so that we could survive long enough to become parents and grandparents, and still have 'adequate capacity' by then.
We talk today about many brain-sapping things, often nutritional problems that especially affect young children. One simple one is vitamin deficincies that today we solve simply with long-distance transportation. No such solution then but to get the diverse diet in the warm half of the year, and do the best you can in the cold half.
As for grandparents, one theory I heard was that parents who survived to be grandparents then helped with the grandchildren, giving the next generation a competitive advantage over those without grandparents in the household. (either more kids, or more prosperous to enhance competitive advantage of existing kids) As older people would be more in declining years, a higher start at birth leaves them more functional later.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Smells are also deeply linked into memory. Apparently smells can trip much deeper memories than sight or sound.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Over the past few years, I've pieced together bits of knowledge from Comp Sci AI classes, various child experts, my own experiences and now from watching my son who at the age of 6 has an IQ of over 140 and been described by his teacher's, etc. as difficult and by a psychologist as extremely creative.
How hard is it to make a computer understand human speach, hand writing, pictures, etc? - Very. Why?
Because a computer is extremly litteral. When I say 'Hello', it's one word. When my wife says 'Hello' - to a computer it's a completely different word. Until you teach a computer how to 'dumb down' and see the general pattern and not the specific pattern.
Kids are born with perfect pitch. However, their brains quickly loose that ability because it makes understanding language extremely difficult.
Our brains start out like computers - seeing, hearing, processing exact details. But quickly learn that those details are not important and start generalizing. This to me is brain damage. We creating paths in our brain that cause us to loose certain abilities in order to gain others.
I think this scientist is on to something that most researchers have probably known for years, but have never clued into. Maybe because they have not been literal enough. However, I think he's got things backwards. I think that by applying electrical impulses, getting hit on the head, etc. people's brains are actually being short circuited back to the way they were when they were born. Back to a clean slate as it were.
Now all we need to do is take his research to the next level and find out how to damage the brains (help them 'dumb down' the world as it were) of autistic, etc. people so they can get past the details and become more integrated into society.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
I normally can't draw worth sh!t, but I do remember a couple of times, when I just stopped being critical of myself and just tried drawing what I saw, I was able to get a pretty realistic likeness of a human face (good enough that my classmates were impressed). I'd let go of my inner inhibitions about drawing, and simply managed to let myself draw what I saw.
After that, I could recreate the drawing that I'd made, but I had a very hard time doing anybody else's face -- my own feelings about what I was drawing kept getting in the way. I think that this even makes sense of why some artists seem fussy and pendantic about things. They know that they can best produce stuff when they're in a state that allows them to just 'create' -- but getting into that state is still something of a black art.
If the TMS is doing what it seems to be doing in Snyder's lab, then my guess is that it is artificially putting people into that non-critical state that is so conducive to brilliance. I'm guessing that, currently, it's also crude enough that it probably has side effects -- hopefully (and apparently) any unpleasant side-effects are temporary.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
While most of the workplace that I'm aware of would never *require* their employees to don some sort of brain-boost helmet to do their jobs, their is something more insidious at work.
Some of the 'most successful' workers are those who focus their lives on the job, with less regard to families or a life outside work. The company didn't tell them, "have no life!" but they simply get more work done than those who do, and benefit accrodingly.
So even if the company doesn't tell its workers that, "It's time to don your coding caps," *some* workers will don them, anyway. Some workers on the borderline will don them because they feel they must, and others will refuse. Then when the next business downturn comes, see who's still around.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
There is no way that humans, or any other species, could evolve such a huge mass of their brain (90%) that would be unused. Evolution is quite specific about immediate feedback. If a group of hominids used 100% of their brain (was 10% the size of ours) and had no mental advantage over another group who utilized the same amount of brain mass while possessing 2% of extra unused brain mass while competing for the same resources would have no intellectual advantage.
Without there being an advantage that leads one to compete in a superior manner they would have an equal chance of survival in the same region. One could suggest that a small group of hominids with the kind of genetic drift that allowed for there to be simply more meaty mass in the brain cavity could have survived as a result of a regional difference, however the amount of coincidences that allowed more and more unused brain mass to develop in a manner that could in some way be utilized by rare individuals is so contrary to evolutionary science one might as well suggest that a great deity has created mankind and that the Earth is a mere 10,000 years old. We really are at the height of our evolutionary history, as our races bread more and more 'mutts' our immune systems advance much in the same way that purebread animals have recurring health problems. The largest problem we run into is the fact that it's so easy to survive in comparison to previous times. You don't have to be a physical competitor, nor even a mental competitor as even the least intellectually developed members of our society are provided for by federal help plans etc to help them survive despite the curse of their genes. Human physical evolution is by no means finished, as worldwide modern medical help is far from a reality, however the capitalist free-world is responsible for developing humanity for ourselves. We can no longer deny that we are simply machines developed through trial and error, survival and death. If we don't take a sober look at ourselves and look at advancing our own species we have run a very real risk remaining in evolutionary limbo as a result of our ideas that humanity is the best possible thing we can be. If Australopithecus Afarensis decided that they wanted to stop all evolution as a result of their religious or other moral beliefs we could not exist. Luckily they had no such choice. I fear humans run more risk of dying out than doing too much more advancement as a result of Darwin's Wall. Being something other than human is really not so bad, as long as we're better than human.
The article isn't talking about letting you use more than the 10% of you brain. The process actually limits much of your brain use giving a greater degree of focus.
People tend to think that if we only use 10% of our brain, if we could use that other 90% then we'd be much smarter or have some magnificent insight. I think that the other 90% is probably just about as smart as the 10% we use. With all that brain power working at once there would be no way to concentrate.
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal -- Jello Biafra
This is something I've always wanted to do but since I'm not a brain specialist. I doubt I'd get a government grant to do it but maybe someone with the resources will read this and go with it.
Since the speed of light is considered the 'speed barrier', what is the speed of thought? And for that matter how is a thought formed? Is it chemical and if it is, what ones? Is there a common chemical for different 'flavours' of thought such as remembering something versus learning something versus (and this one would probably be the hardest to observe/record) formulating and idea or invention? Since speed and energy are related, is there a difference in power?
If this has already been done, my apologies and could you point me in the direction I should go.
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
It's easy to forget that far more people were behind motorboats and drinking alcohol than were taking ecstasy. Statistics like these are mentioned frequently but generally the proportion of those who partake in the activity over those who die from the activity isn't mentioned.
I'm not contending that ecstasy has a high death rate at all merely that the relevant proportions and per capita statistics should be mentioned, not the net number of deaths. Otherwise when you hear that approximately 2.4 million people died in the US last year compared with about 132 thousand in hungary, you might infer that living in hungary is much safer and living in the US quite dangerous -- but the death rate of hungary is nearly twice that of the US.
I should point out that I'm not saying that the US is a safe place to live, either.
I really do believe in it, that only a very small part of our brain is used.
I performed hypnotism, as a hobby, and with hypnotism, I had so many opportunity to witness that, it is really amazing. People in normal time do use only a small fraction of their brain, and even of their physical capabilities.
I hypnotize people for a lot of reason, and it is unbelievable sometime what you can achieve.
I performed it on my mother, she plays bridge for fun, she is 55yo, and I started on her a year ago. She said bridge is a game that requires a LOT of concentration and memory, which she did not have.
It took me 14times before being able to hypnotized her the first time, but after that, it worked like a clock. I made her a CD, suggestions that I adapted all the times for the game, for her concentration and memory. And it worked, after 6 months of that, she has changed. When she plays, she is extremely focused, and she DOES remember pretty much anything she wants during the game, at a point she was just awarded the first price in her league, and people were amazed of her change.
I did the same thing on my girlfriend when she was a student, studying for her bar exam, she was able to take a book, study it, under hypnotism influence, you could do ANY noise, ANY distraction around her, she would not notice you and was still studying. After that she was able to remember everything very easely. During the exam, I hypnotized her right before so we could remember and see in her mind all the pages of the book she needed to remember, and it worked she said.
Sometime, when she needs to remember sometime, hypnotism is the key. Like once, someone gave her a paper with a phone number, she actually just saw the paper before putting it in her pocket, and lost it. 2 Days afer, under hypnotism, she was able to draw what was on this paper and have the correct phone number.
I have countless stories, for also physical 'enhancement', and I am passionned about the brain, and its under-utilization by most people, it is amazing to see how under-used it is by most people.
You may be a pussy magnet.
Microsoft may produce reliable and stable software.
You may become the king of the world just because you can code a little.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
... "I must stop reading Slashdot!"
;o)
I'm afraid you have little chance of stopping. Slashdot uses Variable Ratio/Interval Positive Reinforcement to keep you here. Can't remember the difference right now, but it's a most effective behavior modification tool.
Better just post again. Your next post might get modded all the way up to 5! Check back often to see if you have a new high score. Come on, you know you want to.
I actually have heard that from some neuroloists I know. I don't think that should be modded troll.
During alchol prohabition some (wont mention names) politicians learned that all the MOB violence had an interesting side effect of allowing the general populus to put up with taxes that never would have been dreamed of otherwise (in the name of protecting the public, of course). With this money, many funded sweetheart deals that made them very personally wealthy.
Unfortunately, that tradition contunues today. It was especially bad during the 80's - whenever rich people started to get fed up with the high taxes and move their assets offshore, all of a sudden a bunch of "token niggers" (sorry - not ment to disrespect anyone) would get murdered in high profile drug wars/or busts, and all the papers would start running articles about offshore money laundering for drugs. Funny how it had the miraculous side effect of keeping taxpayers at home.
Anyhow, now we have a much more powerfull excuse: the war on terror. If that isn't a motivation to keep people from moving their money to offshore accounts, than what is? Don't get me wrong, there are alot of evil people out there who would love to ruin freedoms in America - who just need to be dealt with once and for all. But, I can do things to protect my family from terror - but from a corrupt and cold blooded government, how do I protect my family from that?
I caught a TV show on this recently.. There was no mention of control groups. Without good controls and review this stuff means nothing.
I have little doubt that a non-artist asked to draw a dog at regular intervals, while sitting quietly for hours, will show significant improvement.
I recall in a biological anthropology class that, as far as intelligence is concerned, there's no relation in the size of the brain but there seems to be a significant relation with shape. Animals that we consider to be intelligent just happen to have a similar brain shape to our own while sizes vary significantly.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Wait a moment, we've already got Bill Gates.
He's probably up in his throne room right now pulsing his brain or something. That's probably how he got where he is. Of course, Steve Jobs and him will probably get in a competition and start sucking Washington and California's power dry by using this all day to enhance thier brains. Actually, haven't there been a lot of brownouts in California latley... hmmm. makes you think, dosen't it.
schizophrenia
Makes intuitive sense, too, with respect to how that disease operates. The idea floated in the piece was that the TMS machine supresses certain lines of thought.
Careful readers will recall a quote by John Nash regarding his approach to managing his disease without the aid of drugs, paraphrased: it's like a diet; you filter out bad thoughts or unproductive thoughts or otherwise "out-there" thoughts just as one trying to lose weight would avoid fatty foods -- would have avoided fatty foods pre-Atkins-revival... and vindication...
I only wonder *how* the effects could be sustained (in order to use the TMS for this purpose) when its effects were not said to have lasted beyond the writer's session. Also wonder what, if any, parallels there are b/n TMS & electro-shock therapy which, of course, used to really be used to treat a variety of mental illnesses and is still used occasionally as I understand.
Those who give up their power willingly deserve none.
The usual effect of TMS is just to slow you down by a couple seconds at whatever you're doing.
That's definitely one effect, and one that's very reproducable. No disrespect to your own research, but you're oversimplifying TMS research in general. There are plenty of cases (dozens? a hundred even?) to show non-slowdown effects of TMS. Mood-change studies are still common, along the lines of the old (Dr. Mark George?) study (ie, left prefrontal cortex -> sad, right prefrontal cortex -> happy). And there was an article in Wired last year, sorry can't remember the month, about TMS inducing the 'god' effect in people. So while slowing down functions to map the brain with is an excellent utilitarian TMS application, it's definitely not the most interesting TMS research in town. Even this town (Vancouver).
...she's not teaching people to draw any 'style' at all. The concept is drawing *what you see*. Straight from life. Imagination and creativity really unnecessary.
Life drawing is one of those things that is, in fact, relatively necessary to get *good* at other kinds of drawing. It gives you the fundamentals. That is not, however, to say that it's really innovative or anything. It's not supposed to be. It's a foundation, and foundations are rarely flashy.
I'd be willing to bet that the 'after' picture, whatever you think of it, actually bears much more resemblance to the subject.
If you were smart, smart people would hang out with you. But you're not (you're English.)
Try going to a better school, or a better company, where smarter people can be found (step 1 is to move.)
We determine what is needed in the way of items to remember, and go on not "recording" what has past, unless it has some required significance. In the workplace, there may be no need to "remember" everything, especially if there is a written record (or digital record) that can be referred to in the unlikely event that the item needs to be brought back up.
I have heard that savants cannot do that, they remember everything. It is as if we have RAM, and what we are working with is in that, and anything of value, any value at all, is written to the HDD. A savant has everything written to the HDD. Is this a fair presentation of how so called "normal" people function? Of course, the requirements can change. In a threating workplace environment, A LOT gets "remembered" because "one will need to know ALL the details" to fend off "supervisors" inquiries, or to counter false accusations concerning the events in question. You can get blamed for something you did not do, or were not involved in, so you "need" to have plenty of facts recalled to defend yourself. If you do not work in an environment like this, then you are luckier than the Queen of England, who occasionally has to defend herself against "false accusations. If you have it "made" where you work, then perhaps your mind will not get the "training" it will need to protect you one day when things "change".
Finally someone got it right! Something I learned in a Pyscology 101 Class.
It's called a grand mal seizure. Well, even that is likely less than 100% ;)
I had always thought the origin of the 10% myth was a misquote on 10% "at a time" - thanks for some more of the origins regarding it.
It's pretty unlikely that there's masses of unused neurons hanging around. Neurons are kept alive by having connections - past their initial growing stages, they die by apoptosis voluntarily. This is not a bad thing - one condition, synaesthesia, arises from neurons connecting auditory and visual parts of the brain not dying off.
Most of the 'information' in neurons comes from the connections; on the order of 10,000 in and 10,000 out - the stained cell micrographs you see in textbooks do the real picture no justice. Thoughts are akin to a travelling contour amplitude modulation map (sorry, everyone, your brain operate in AM, not FM :) - the 'contour map' can suffer some degradation of detail from dying neurons or forgetfulness before losing meaning.
Walter J Freeman's book "How The Brain Makes Up Its Mind" is full of interesting information. Someone should help him make a next edition in English (instead of merely using purportedly English words as "limit cycles" and "zero-point attractors") to widen the audience for the fascinating discoveries in the book.
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
And use "optimized" drivers to increase your performance.
http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=942
From the article:
"Legally, it's far more difficult to damage people in Australia than it is in the United States."
what about some dual brains? or brain clustering ;)
I've been using BWGen (http://www.bwgen.com) for several months now. It generated binaural beats to modify your brainwave pattern.
For example, your ears can't hear a 4hz tone, so to simulate it in your brain, you play 350hz in one ear, and 354hz in the other. The brain then cancels them out and interprets it as the difference, 4hz
Using this, you can cause your brain to enter different patterns such as alpha, beta, gamma.
I use it to fall asleep and get a good rest, get rid of headaches, LEAVE MY BODY AND FLY AROUND.
Yes, I've left my body and entered the astroworld several times now using OBE (out of body experience) brainwave presets for BWGen.
It starts with vibrations, ie your body feels like its going numb sorta, its hard to explain but at a point your whole body is "vibrating". Basically your body is asleep, but your brain is wide awake, this is more commonly know as night tremors or sleep paralysis (something i had before using bwgen but was always scared of it, now i use it)
Once your body is asleep but your mind is awake, you can do stuff with your brain, such as float out of your body.
Ive floated around my house, went out of my window once. Crazy stuff.
Although I havent been able to do it yet, I heard the more experiences OBEers are able to all float to a location in the "astroworld" and talk with eachother. One OBEer runs a bar in this OBE world, and people meet and talk, yet they all live in different locations around the world. Crazy!
Another cool thing Ive been using brainwaves for is lucid dreaming.. You can make a preset that starts off at a more active brainwave pattern, then slowly lowers you down to alpha so you start to fall asleep, then it starts going back up and down so that while you're sleeping, your brainwave patterns change causing you to realize you're sleeping and then you can lucid dream (know you're dreaming so you can control what you do in the dream)
Brainwaves are really cool, theres an open source bw generator i believe its called bgen? I used it before I found BWGen, but I like BWGen better (although its shareware, but worth it!)
i ride the short bus, in parallel w/ the other bits. we stride the north truss, skirting where the mother sits. ain't she pretty that hot momma chip a screamin'? wish my address would let me dip into the dreamin'... drat, we got some wait states now. the grammar's fucked no one knows how. could it be a wayward interrupt? or (gasp) a broken pin pulled up? protocol's misparsed due to spelling errur. transactor's arsed, wee bits feel the terror. so yeah, communication happens but it ain't no whizzy breeze; even minor cognitive dissonance occurs when you sneeze. you want to be smart? get your bits in alignment. write the right stuff and properly hone your refinement.
All that is needed to complete this picture is for the Doc to sigh out:
My God! Do you know what this tells me? It tells me
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
[and never post w/o previewing -- d'oh!]
i ride the short bus, in parallel w/ the other bits.
we stride the north truss, skirting where the mother sits.
ain't she pretty that hot momma chip a screamin'?
wish my address would let me dip into the dreamin'...
drat, we got some wait states now.
the grammar's fucked no one knows how.
could it be a wayward interrupt?
or (gasp) a broken pin pulled up?
protocol's misparsed due to spelling errur.
transactor's arsed, wee bits feel the terror.
so yeah, communication happens but it ain't no whizzy breeze;
even minor cognitive dissonance occurs when you sneeze.
you want to be smart? get your bits in alignment.
write the right stuff and properly hone your refinement.
I think the arguments have been that the US drug policy was born out of the prevailent racism and paranoia at the begining of the last century.
But you can't consider this lightly or you'll never really understand American drug policy. The scary thing about the moral police is that they are trying to do what they honestly believe is right and that makes them fairly complicated.
Besides, drugs are not benign and their effects on society (and more importantly your family and friends) can be disastrous.
I mean there is still addication, amphetamine induced psychosis, neurotoxicity and long term personallity changes we have to deal with. And anyone who thinks this couldn't happen to them or someone they care about is just holding their head in the sand.
Quack, quack.
There are several parameters regarding your brains functioning that ought to be tuned differently for different situations, for example: Plasticity (a parameter used in Artificial Neural Networks) - How impressionable are we to new information vs. How much do we trust what we already know. Creativity (a parameter sometimes modified by drugs) - When solving a problem do we search depth-first or breadth-first, how "strange" do we allow our reasoning to become. Heuristics - Do we observe general patterns or detailed data, as the example in the article about the autistics who couldn't find their way because the shadows were different, they remembered the details but not the general pattern.
I am sure that there are many more examples, I'm no expert. The point is that we already know that these parameters can be changed, either genetically or by accidents or drugs. Is it really so far-fetched that this guy has found a way to modify these traits by strong electromagnetic fields, which are apparently already used to treat various psychological disorders?
If the slashdotters brains are not plastic enough to see that as a possibility, I think they might need some serious tuning.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Your Brain may have Amazing Powers.
Oh, wait, you're a slashdot reader. Nevermind...
That's what hobbies are for. I work with people all day, but computers are my hobby. I know several programmers who play guitar or something. It's things like that that allow you to think outside of what your particular field is.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
you can use more than 10%, it just might hurt search google for positronic stimulation or maybe just search your mind...
~8^]
I thought of this because of the question raised in the article about identity: "It probably would change people's ideas of themselves, to say nothing of their ideas of artistic talent."
Another interesting angle is to look into the way the brain may rely on quantum processes... Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell has done some interesting, if nigh-kooky, summaries of work on this.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I was reading a neurophysiology textbook a while back and it said that the 10% fraction is the number of neurons in the brain, the rest are astrocytes and glial cells etc. These are 'support' cells that are not part of the 'thinking' process.
It's like saying your computer is only 10% transistors, the rest is wires, power supplies, capacitors etc. You can't use the wires and capacitors in your computer to compute with, but they must be there to allow the transistors to work.
From the "other recent research" link...
It is the job of science, not pseudoscience, to solve those puzzles with natural, rather than supernatural, explanations.
I recall hearing about another experiment they started a few years ago. They put little notes up on the ceiling of an OR. Only legible if you were right up close to them.
The eventual goal was to meet up with people who have NDEs and float out of body to see if they had read the notes.
I have no idea of the outcome of that but if someone thought to study it, there must be some validity to it.
Fanatics both in the form of skeptic self appointed scientists hell bent on disproving the supernatural and the extreme New Age Hippies who hungrily and readily believe anything really make my head spin.
But, I guess extremes of everything balances each other out and makes the world go 'round.... (figuratively speaking, that is...)
The story I heard was that 90% of the brain was support cells and 10% neurons, hence "we use 10% of our brain". After that, it got reinterpreted. Not sure if that's a fact...
I read the article and I must say I am not an art critic,but I was wondering... After all that shocks, the drawings still damn ugly.
----
I stole this sig from Picasso
In my opinion:
Normally, people with invisible friends are segregated from society to protect the sane ones, not placed in charge of making the laws that all the sane people must follow.
On the other side of the coin, isn't it fortunate for us and the world of science today that all those who initially believed in "invisible to the naked eye" viruses and other microscopic oddities weren't segregated from society to protect the "sane ones" who didn't believe in invisible (or microscopic) things they couldn't see that were causing these visible diseases?
The invisible (to the naked eye) realities we know today as viruses and bacteria point to the visible reality of disease. The invisible reality people have faith in (God), points to the visible reality we see (the Earth and all it contains). While it is a matter of faith and the ignorant wish to mock the fact, I believe (and modern science tells us) that there is more that is invisible (to the naked eye) that exists than we know, and much of what we see now is based on what our bodies allow us to see. So if you would've existed back before people discovered these viruses and other organisms that we as humans cannot see without help from a device, you probably would've been one of the ones laughing and mocking the intelligent ones who knew better and discovered these invisible realities. So the joke is on YOU and YOUR "Gee I think I'm really enlightened" but are really clueless kind. Wake up.
We have not discovered everything. All that we will ever learn about invisible realities tomorrow and yesterday does not all exist today in our current understanding.
...now I'll finally be able to solve the Rubik's cube I got for Christmas in 1983.
Read this and this.
And when you consider telling me to get my tinfoil hat, have a look at what is underneath your own hat.
That's right, your pinneal gland is a great filter for the flouride you consume. I don't think flouridation is some grand conspiracy, I would just like to have a choice in whether or not I take this controversial medication.
I don't think you have any idea how much brain power reasoning requires.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I saw the "the the" when I read it the first time. Guess I'm already "slowed down" without the need for a TMS.
It got twisted around, it actually said that we use only 10% of our COLON at a time.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
What if after repeated uses you end up with a permanent change to that region of the brain? You'd spend the rest of your life doing great pictures of cats and not much else.
The more likely result would be a growing tolerance to the effect until it stopped working.
One last thing, I shouldn't have been surprised to see that the government immediately looked for a military use for it. Do our armed forces really need any more help?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
This reminded me of two things. First, Larry Niven came up with the idea of a tasp, a device which can remotely stimulate the pleasure center of someone's brain. He also came up with the idea of people running wires directly to the pleasure centers of their brains and thus achieving perpetual electric happiness (like a drug addiction). This might be around the corner.
Second, I am reminded of the "focused" people in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky. They were basically slaves, but their masters made them into savants by using machines to permanently disable parts of their brains. That, too, might be around the corner.
Cool in a scary sort of way; science fiction still has predictive power.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
of course we only use 10% of our brain
in 2012 when the mayan calendar ends hyper treading will be enabeled on all human brains
enabeling even men to multitask
better invest in some intel stock i think royalties will be hell
just by reading some books by harry lorayne
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
Of course that's EASY for a Mentat to say... :P
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
Although i greatly enjoy Vernor Vinge's work (I would strongly recoment reading A Fire Upon the Deep first, although it's not neccessary) this book did have one quirk that really pissed me off. When a cure was discovered, all the slaves were freed, and the technology was then treated as anathema. They believed that the technology was so evil that they should just get rid of it.
Say what?
I agree, turning people into mental slaves is a horrible thing, and taking a week(?) or more to induce or cure the state made it not super practical for anything else. But saying that since one use for it is bad, the entire technology should be outlawed? That seems an odd view for someone who supports science to take.
If this technology existed and research was continued, the up and down time might be reduced significantly. Even if not, i could probably sign a contract with a company that i would spend a week undergoing the treatment, work for them for a month, spend a week being returned to normal, and then spend several months off, yet get paid as if i was working the whole time. I'd be perfectly happy with such an arangement, and i bet a lot of other people would too.
Obviously this technology in this article seems to be the exact opposite. Warm up time seems to be measured in minutes. If it is further developed, it would be quite feasible to put this thing on when you got into work, work for five or six hours, then take it off and go home again, yet have gotten in several days worth of work compared to normal conditions.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
If you are under two years of age anyway... Thats where the legend came from. Wumpus
I've heard that the reason many people are bad at art is that they try to draw their preconception of the object- the ideas and shapes, but not what they actually see. For example, when you draw a person, you think to draw a head, body, arms, legs, etc. A good artist instead takes the image of what they actually see, and copies those curves onto the paper, without thinking of what they represent.
So what this guy is doing is turning off those symbolic parts of the brain, that tell us that a person must consist of a head and body. He kind of explains this, but he seems to say it a cryptic way.
I wouldn't say these are "genius skills". In art, being able to think visually and not conceptually is an advantage, but math may be the opposite. It might be nice to notice the mistake in that sentence, but we would not be able to function without our minds' ability to fill in and generalize information. So, it's interesting that we can turn off those parts of the brain, but it's not making you better. I wouldn't opt to be autistic just so I could be an amazing artist. Our conceptual abilities are supposed to be balanced.
Translation: it's insane and there's no way to avoid it.
Crap doesn't just float anymore, it has wings and a jet pack.
Maybe we can use this to grow Bush a brain, assuming of course that this isnt how rummy controls W now.
Now I'm just talking to myself.
Whilst such parameters are arbitrary measures of processing, if you can learn to control them, you can start to condition yourself to shift parameters appropriately for each situation. Here are a few more:
- Emotional vs Reasoned Intelligence.
- Internal vs External Focus of Attention.
- Action vs Planning.
Basically, your mind is unique. There are gross similarities but eg your Broca's could be 4cm further over than mine. Even if it wasn't, how are you going to wire in new patterns? It has to fit into your existing neurology (displacing something else?) as well as being wired in such a way that you can use it.
we do use only 10% of our brain at any ONE point in time...however that does not mean 90% of our brain is not used at all. In other words store visual images uses one part of the brain while listening to music uses another...but no where has anyone ever stated that we DON't use 90% of our brain at all...ever.
Saying we only use 10% of our brains at once is like saying we only use 33% of our traffic lights at once. Possibly.
qntm.org
comprehensive (although not updated for 2003)
links page to articles in the media on
Professor Alan Snyder and the Centre for the Mind here
This gadget is playing a pattern of magnetic signals, apparently through an 8bit DAC for each emitter. So by all appearances the patterns are copyrightable 'works' and copyright is eternal. (for all intents and purposes unless we kill Eisner/Disney) So assuming this guy isn't a quack for a minute, soon he will have an entensive library of all the patterns to enhance various mental abilities and perhaps even cure some mental diseases. But unlike the current medical companies which only get a patent for 10-19 years for a new drug or device, this guy could have an eternal monopoly on the 'content' to be played on this new machine. So while the machines themselves would eventually be dirt cheap, being knocked off in China, one person/company would have almost unlimited pricing power in making use of the new tech.
Where have we seen this pattern before? Talk about an oportunity for a vulture capitalist!
Democrat delenda est
The Straight Dope on brain usage...
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Anyone see the similarity between this an the savants in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky"?
Scary.
Cool...Tank...Load the jump program! Let's test this theory out!
In other news, SCO has claimed that 10% of the human brain contains unlicensed code owned by SCO. In a breif press confrence, a PR representative from SCO hinted at plants to sue God, and possibly revoke his license.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Whoever labelled the previous post as flamebait really should check that site. It sucks some serious hairy goat balls...
Some have postulated recently that larger brains (larger cranium) was not an evolutionary advantage so much as a mating feature, a competitive attribute much like the feathers of a peacock. Those feathers do not help the peacock survive, far from it, but act as a display to outdo other peacocks for female attention. Larger brains could have evolved in such a way. Think of it as a prehistoric inverse of the current mating systems in place today, favoring the geeks over the studs..
...nor does the other 90% hold penguins.
Speak for yourself.
Anyway, that link seems to be down
/. regularly, you gotta make sure your system can handle the load.
Obviously their advertising works... Stupid banner ads. Guess it explains the large numebr of NYT articles though.
Seriously, if you want to be on
Maybe the male brain kicks in at a higher capacity during the courting process. They're nicer, more vocal, more considerate, spend all kinds of time with one thought going through their minds: "How am I going to get into her pants?" Of course, during normal tests (math, grammar, IQ, MRI), they're not thinking of much at all, more like: "Why do the tiles over here have all those little holes and the ones over there don't?" Therefore, the larger brain does improve the odds of that male getting a mate (or mates), which leads to the chance of having more offspring to pass on their large heads. It would also explain all the women saying, "He was so nice when we were dating", and the guy saying, "Quiet, football."
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
If you want to do ecstacy, go ahead. And if you want to shower your brain with electromagnetic stimulation, go bonkers.
Homer: "No TV and no beer make Homer something something..."
Marge (reading the walls): "Go crazy?"
Homer: "Don't mind if I do..." (Makes crazy sounds)
Ah, a classic.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
"New Study: Men and Women Are Different!"
"War Dims Hope for Peace"
"Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures"
"Something Went Wrong in Plane Crash"
"Your Brain May Have Amazing Powers!"
Well, of course! Who would dispute that? (I refer only to the headline; not the article's content or claims.) Even accounting for the relative meaning of "amazing," it ought to be obvious that the brain is a very, very powerful thing. "We're at the same stage in brain research that biology was in the 19th century. We know almost nothing about the mind," a professor in the article said.
The task of memorizing text is a tedious task, but in truth, it is completely effortless. It's just the recalling of memories that is difficult, as the article says. I sometimes read scores of comments after a Slashdot article, come back to the comments after 300 more have been posted, and I know which ones I read before and which are new. I can watch a movie I haven't seen in years, and recall very specific facial expressions and words. I can replay several thousands of songs in my mind if I get the right memory cue for each.
When I realized that I remembered everything I read, I decided that I didn't really need to use bookmarks anymore. I flip close to where I stopped reading and within a minute find the exact sentence I last ended. I usually have to read bits here and there before I get to my place, but that helps me to bring what I last read to the forefront of my mind and improves the mental continuity from reading session to reading session by recalling my mental state at the time I stopped reading before. This function is nearly identically analagous to the Lock/Unlock feature in Windows 2000 (as opposed to logging off).
Everything you have ever seen, heard, felt, and experienced is stored in your brain! To me, that is an incomprehensible truth! (Yes, that goatse.cx image will be stored in your brain cells forever! You cannot delete it... without severe side effects.) I heard this claim long ago, but I see more and more validation of the claim all the time as I learn how to look for it.
Infinite information in a finite space -- a finite number of neurons. That means that the brain is really not comparable to a hard drive or computer. If that were the case then 640k really would have been enough memory. And the brain doesn't store only the raw information of observation, but much more data in the processed results of observation: patterns recognized, associations determined, mental creations, emotions, ideas, visions, and dreams. Can anyone explain the "mind's eye"?
There are many deep, dark, miraculous secrets in that gray mass above our shoulders. Its abilities in even the common person or mentally handicapped person are absolutely awe-inspiring. If you don't think the brain has amazing powers, either you don't know much about the brain or you just haven't sat down and contemplated its astonishing capabilities.
"Legally, it's far more difficult to damage people in Australia than it is in the United States."
Now I understand.
If this is in fact true, what are the effects of cellular phones... Studies have been done to see if they cause cancer and such.. What about them making you smarter or dumber????
Kary Mullis (whom developed Polymerase Chain Reaction Technology - PCR) wrote an excellent book (Dancing Naked in the Mind Field) several years ago. While the primary focus of the book was biographical he made some intresting claims about the power of the human mind. In one experiment he claimed to have been able to turn on a neighbors table lamp from across the street. While Mullis is considered fringe in some circles (especially since he cops to LSD usage in times past) he is still considered a brilliant scientist.
Not all selection is for survival advantage. A trait that is merely associated, either directly or accidentally, with some other advantageous trait, may end up selected merely because it doesn't cause a relative disadvantage prior to reproduction. Examples: the human bowel appendix, the need for sleep, the tailbone, and the lower part of the earlobe. If any of these have some survival advantage, it is not really immediately obvious to the casual observer. Some traits (such as the need for sleep) are the subject of substantial scientific controversy. Others appear to be things that once had some useful function, and just haven't been selected out (yet?). Likewise with many other traits which may or may not have had some advantage at one time.
On the other end of the spectrum are seriously negative traits that haven't (yet?) caused our entire genome to be selected out. Example: Inability to synthesize ascorbic acid (and some other vitamins), certain amino acids, and certain fatty acids.
So a particular trait can (appear to) be a negative, and still not be selected out, or maybe we just don't understand what the survival value is (yet?). So a larger-than-needed brain might have been only accidentally associated with some other trait that did enhance survival.
Plus, it is not totally obvious whether a particular trait is advantageous -- our mental capacity could possibly be the ultimate cause of our demise.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
This article seems to disconver that placebo may help you do things you wouldn't normally believe you could do. If you relax, by stimulating the brain, it is clearly possible that you may be able to draw. But the fact is by relaxing in other ways you can do it too. I learned to draw by watching stuff upside down.
Well um maybe he was at a hair salon and just didn't know
Major newspapers and tabloids have a several month lag time from the science journals, even the mainstream ones like Discover. So, rather than point to the digested version in the NYT, Weekly World News, MSNBC, Slate, and others, look up the original article in the Lancet, Nature, Science, Discover, Scientific American. If that's too hard, then fire up BIOSIS at your University and use that to find the online journal...
Just vote for them in the next election. For some reason those little checkmarks seem to leech off brainpower by the time the candidate makes it in...
You know, the ones using the earth as a gigantic supercomputer in order to find out the question for the universal answer.
I'd write more about it, but I have to go stop somebody from bulldozing my house is about to be bulldozed and a friend of mine is trying to drag me off the bar for some reason...
Semi-random comment: The U.S. murder rate rose by ~50% during both the prohibition and the current war on drugs. Some of it's associated with the business of organised crime which takes over supplying the market, but what about the rest?
"They say we only use 10% of the power of our brains. Imagine what we could accomplish if we could harness the other 60%..."
Exit, pursued by a bear.
I'm not familiar with what is necessary for safe use of heroine. Most likely, a trained anaesthesiologist.
I've found that TV is an excellent delivery method for heroine, though heroine addiction has been occasionaly reported. Treatment is often unsuccessful, and there are those who prey on the unfortunate addict.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Bah, I've already posted in all the topics I bookmarked to mod. :/