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!
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 :-)
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.
Hmm, do they use these wondrous brain powers to make up stories? Is that how they do it?
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!
... 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.
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
I believe there's also a good quote:
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. -Theodore Roosevelt
A good education really needs to be earned, that way you (are more likely to?) get decent character traits like patience, dedication and sound morals instead of just facts.
=Smidge=
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."
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
"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
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.
Just because one can remember facts, draw cats, or perform fast calculations, does not mean that one can actually solve arbitrary problems. It certainly means that you can impress weak minded people at cocktail parties. It does not mean that you can figure out how to best repair a broken faucet or write a well structured memo.
It is the knowledge and ability do provide is confidence and perspective. And while some people take that perspective and confidence and turn it to gain personal power at any cost, a great many more people try to use it to help people. I believe the former is caused by a dedication to facts and unintegrated knowledge at the expense of wisdom and thought.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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'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)
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.
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
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
Everytime I see a posting here about a website I crash it with my mind.
Will power baby.
Works everytime!
... "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.
Who cares if the smart lose their advantage? Given the opportunity to make everyone smarter, would we deny the less-smart people this benefit just because the "naturally smart" people somehow deserve to be smart more than anyone else does?
Even if the elitism of that idea doesn't bother, you, consider that smart people often spend a large portion of their time and energy trying to convince dumb people that their good ideas are in fact good ideas, or trying to explain their ideas to dumb people so that the dumb people can use them effectively. Being surrounded by smart people would make you (as a smart person) much more effective than trying to get your work done with the help of dumb people.
If there was a really easy way of absorbing knowledge, where would the power and fun of knowledge be?
Knowledge's main use isn't to be fun or make you powerful, it's to help get things done. And in any case, I suspect most people find the skillful application of knowledge much more rewarding then the tedious and difficult process of gaining that knowledge.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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
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.