TURNING off parts of the brain with a magnetic field can unleash unusual
mathematical and artistic abilities in ordinary people, say researchers in
Australia. Some claim the finding shows that everyone is a potential
genius—it’s just a question of tapping into the relevant brain
processes.
A few rare individuals, or savants, are geniuses at maths, art or music
despite severe neurological disabilities such as autism. Allan Snyder and John
Mitchell of the Centre for the Mind at the Australian National University in
Canberra have suggested that such skills are in fact universal, but are normally
swamped by higher-level conceptual thinking
(91av, 9 October 1999, p 30).
It’s a controversial idea, but supported by the finding that
elderly patients with dementia occasionally develop savant skills.
Now Robyn Young at Flinders University in Adelaide and Michael Ridding of the
Royal Adelaide Hospital have used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation
to temporarily shut down the part of the brain’s cortex that seems to be damaged
in savants. The researchers then tested how well 17 volunteers could perform
typical savant skills with and without TMS.
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During TMS, five of the volunteers were faster at calculating the day of the
week a particular date falls on. Some were better at copying a picture of a
horse from memory, while a few found it easier to remember postal addresses. The
results are not yet published.
“If this can be confirmed, [Young] has done something extraordinary. She’s
shown that savant skills aren’t due to obsessive learning as most people think,
but that they are innate to all of us,” says Snyder. But the researchers are
being cautious. Only a few volunteers showed enhanced skills, and Ridding says
these were nowhere near as spectacular as real savants. “Maybe to develop the
skills a lot you have to have [damage] there for a long time,” he says.
Michael Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Western Australia in
Perth, says it’s easy to imagine that artistic ability is an innate skill that
can be swamped by other brain functions, but calendrical calculations do need
some rote learning. “No one can seriously believe that we are born with a
knowledge of the calendar that can be switched on by zapping the brain,” he
says.