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.
...to make everybody else stop using their 10%, thus giving you the edge you need to succeed in life.
Hmm, do they use these wondrous brain powers to make up stories? Is that how they do it?
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"
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."
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
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 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
What you have to understand is that nobody selects. I mean, an insect is really less evolved than a human, not to say an amoeba, and they are not marked for extintion per se.
Actually an insect is arguably more evolved than us, since it's generation time (and that of it's ancestors) is much smaller. An amoeba is incredibly more evolved, in the sense of total change since it's last common ancestor with mammals.
Selection is not an invisible hand striving for perfection, there's not a biologist on the planet worth his weight in salt who'll say that. Selection is a instantaneous direction, a random walk through the fitness landscape. At every given moment, the selection pressure is for what would most benifit a population (not individual) right now, with no consideration for the future or perfection. There's no appeal to a nature-god, no inferior or superior (let alone perfection), just a constant changing of directions for the immediate survival.
In my own experience I remember a migraine I had come on at work and it transformed me into a savant (of sorts) by giving me a mini Tourette's episode. I couldn't actually tell my colleagues in so many words why I was being a bit odd (apparently muttering "motherfucker" every third word is normal for me when I'm working on something tricky - who knew?) but I developed an amazing ability to communicate my predicament by pointing at my head, grimacing, and saying "shit motherfucker gnnn!"
Who knew that talent lay latent within me, just waiting for its release through the method of blinding and nauseating pain?
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato