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.
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
"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.
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
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
Along these lines, my brother-in-law gets autism headaches where he hears a guitar riff and can copy it instantly, and can look at a row of lockers and say how many there are without counting. Was I ever shocked to be talking with him one day, he pauses, says "48", says he has a headache, and goes home. It turns out there were 48 chairs in that room.
If that kind of autism can be turned on with a "switch", why not other aspects?
Inconceivable!
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.
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.
Hmmm... reminds me of Flowers for Algernon...
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
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
during his headaches, most of those apply.
Inconceivable!
"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.
I've done both LSD and psilocybin in quite large doses (ok, warning: I worked up to those doses. Doing psychedelic drugs is a dangerous and unpredictable thing to do. Don't do it, you have been warned.) LSD was interesting and produces interesting hallucinations... but it was geometric and straight lined.
On the other hand, psilocybin, to me, is an organic fractal entity unto itself. The immediate difference from LSD for me was the process of 'coming down'. Coming down was never a 'downer', and I eventually came to call that faze 'lightening thought'. It is some what hard to describe, but it was like my thought process became parallel... multiple threads of thoughts interacting, finding relations and parallels between conflicting and simultaneous concepts and ideas. I would have a thought, which would create a question, which would be analyzed, broken down, used to generate other questions (which would be place on a stack for later use), and then processed to conclusion which would be used in later thought.
All this was effortless. The 'id' part of my consciousness more or less just sat back and 'watched' all this take place. It was as if the individual talents (math, memory, speech, socail interactions, movement, physics,etc) were each working and had a 'voice' independent of each other and of my id.
I found the effect would happen best when I was basically in a sensory depravation state. Dark, cool room, low level of white noise.
It never lasted long enough, and it was something I can never reproduce sober, even with long meditations, even when I have broken through and had non-standard-reality results with those meditations.
On interesting thing I did once during this state... it was in college, and my roommate was working on a high-level CSC problem, and was getting an odd runtime error. I sat down at his code (I think he was using dos-based borland c++, all his code in one file) and started scrolling from the top of his file. My mind aborbed and analyzed the code as fast as it ran down the screen. I went through the code as fast as the editor could scrool it, until a line popped out at me. I pointed it the line to him and got up. He spent a few minutes changing things, and then declared that I was right, the error was in that line... and he didn't understand what had just happened =).
Another disclamer. I don't do drugs any more. I ultimately decided that drugs take more from you than they give. It is not a fair trade. While the experience I have gathered are amazing, there are much better ways to collect great experience in your life... do something physical, push your body in healthy ways...