Subject: The the Beaming of Intelligence  (NYTimes on TMS)
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New York Times article on transcranial magnetic stimulation; (Requires
registration) See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html 



June 22, 2003

Savant for a Day

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 feline form. 

Snyder looked over my shoulder. "Well, how about that? Leonardo would
be envious." Or turning in his grave, I thought. 


As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of
Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has
used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect
on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult
mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked
up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited
extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to
induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment
is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may
lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own
intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general. 

Snyder's work began with a curiosity about autism. Though there is
little consensus about what causes this baffling -- and increasingly
common -- disorder, it seems safe to say that autistic people share
certain qualities: they tend to be rigid, mechanical and emotionally
dissociated. They manifest what autism's great "discoverer," Leo
Kanner, called "an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of
sameness." And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral
way, using "a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve
interpersonal communication." 

For example, Snyder says, when autistic test subjects came to see him
at the university, they would often get lost in the main quad. They
might have been there 10 times before, but each time the shadows were
in slightly different positions, and the difference overwhelmed their
sense of place. "They can't grasp a general concept equivalent to the
word 'quad,'" he explains. "If it changes appearance even slightly,
then they have to start all over again." 

Despite these limitations, a small subset of autistics, known as
savants, can also perform superspecialized mental feats. Perhaps the
most famous savant was Dustin Hoffman's character in "Rain Man," who
could count hundreds of matchsticks at a glance. But the truth has
often been even stranger: one celebrated savant in turn-of-the-century
Vienna could calculate the day of the week for every date since the
birth of Christ. Other savants can speak dozens of languages without
formally studying any of them or can reproduce music at the piano
after only a single hearing. A savant studied by the English doctor J.
Langdon Down in 1887 had memorized every page of Gibbon's "Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire." At the beginning of the 19th century, the
splendidly named Gottfried Mind became famous all over Europe for the
amazing pictures he drew of cats. 

The conventional wisdom has long been that autistics' hyperliteral
thought processes were completely separate from the more contextual,
nuanced, social way that most adults think, a different mental
function altogether. And so, by extension, the extraordinary skills of
autistic savants have been regarded as flukes, almost inhuman feats
that average minds could never achieve. 

Snyder argues that all those assumptions -- about everything from the
way autistic savants behave down to the basic brain functions that
cause them to do so -- are mistaken. Autistic thought isn't wholly
incompatible with ordinary thought, he says; it's just a variation on
it, a more extreme example. 

He first got the idea after reading "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for
a Hat," in which Oliver Sacks explores the link between autism and a
very specific kind of brain damage. If neurological impairment is the
cause of the autistic's disabilities, Snyder wondered, could it be the
cause of their geniuslike abilities, too? By shutting down certain
mental functions -- the capacity to think conceptually, categorically,
contextually -- did this impairment allow other mental functions to
flourish? Could brain damage, in short, actually make you brilliant? 

In a 1999 paper called "Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental
Processing? The Mind's Secret Arithmetic," Snyder and D. John Mitchell
considered the example of an autistic infant, whose mind "is not
concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level
details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals."
These children, they wrote, seem "to be aware of information in some
raw or interim state prior to it being formed into the 'ultimate
picture.'" Most astonishing, they went on, "the mental machinery for
performing lightning fast integer arithmetic calculations could be
within us all." 

And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, "to enhance
the brain by shutting off certain parts of it." 

"In a way, savants are the great enigma of today's neurology," says
Prof. Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional M.R.I. Research Center at
Columbia University. "They exist in all cultures and are a distinct
type. Why? How? We don't know. Yet understanding the savant will help
provide insight into the whole neurophysiological underpinning of
human behavior. That's why Snyder's ideas are so exciting -- he's
asking a really fundamental question, which no one has yet answered." 

If Snyder's suspicions are correct, in fact, and savants have not more
brainpower than the rest of us, but less, then it's even possible that
everybody starts out life as a savant. Look, for example, at the ease
with which children master complex languages -- a mysterious skill
that seems to shut off automatically around the age of 12. "What we're
doing is counterintuitive," Snyder tells me. "We're saying that all
these genius skills are easy, they're natural. Our brain does them
naturally. Like walking. Do you know how difficult walking is? It's
much more difficult than drawing!" 

To prove his point, he hooks me up to the Medtronic Mag Pro again and
asks me to read the following lines: 

A bird in the hand 
is worth two in the 
the bush 

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," I say. 

"Again," Snyder says, and smiles. 

So once more: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." He makes
me repeat it five or six times, slowing me down until he has me
reading each word with aching slowness. 

Then he switches on the machine. He is trying to suppress those parts
of my brain responsible for thinking contextually, for making
connections. Without them, I will be able to see things more as an
autistic might. 

After five minutes of electric pulses, I read the card again. Only
then do I see -- instantly -- that the card contains an extra "the."

On my own, I had been looking for patterns, trying to coax the words
on the page into a coherent, familiar whole. But "on the machine," he
says, "you start seeing what's actually there, not what you think is
there." 

Snyder's theories are bolstered by the documented cases in which
sudden brain damage has produced savant abilities almost overnight. He
cites the case of Orlando Serrell, a 10-year-old street kid who was
hit on the head and immediately began doing calendrical calculations
of baffling complexity. Snyder argues that we all have Serrell's
powers. "We remember virtually everything, but we recall very little,"
Snyder explains. "Now isn't that strange? Everything is in there" --
he taps the side of his head. "Buried deep in all our brains are
phenomenal abilities, which we lose for some reason as we develop into
'normal' conceptual creatures. But what if we could reawaken them?" 


Not all of Snyder's colleagues agree with his theories. Michael Howe,
an eminent psychologist at the University of Exeter in Britain who
died last year, argued that savantism (and genius itself) was largely
a result of incessant practice and specialization. "The main
difference between experts and savants," he once told New Scientist
magazine, "is that savants do things which most of us couldn't be
bothered to get good at." 

Robert Hendren, executive director of the M.I.N.D. Institute at the
University of California at Davis, brought that concept down to my
level: "If you drew 20 cats one after the other, they'd probably get
better anyway." Like most neuroscientists, he doubts that an
electromagnetic pulse can stimulate the brain into creativity: "I'm
not sure I see how TMS can actually alter the way your brain works.
There's a chance that Snyder is right. But it's still very
experimental." 

Tomas Paus, an associate professor of neuroscience at McGill
University, who has done extensive TMS research, is even more dubious.
"I don't believe TMS can ever elicit complex behavior," he says. 

But even skeptics like Hendren and Paus concede that by intensifying
the neural activity of one part of the brain while slowing or shutting
down others, TMS can have remarkable effects. One of its most
successful applications has been in the realm of psychiatry, where it
is now used to dispel the "inner voices" of schizophrenics, or to
combat clinical depression without the damaging side effects of
electroshock therapy. (NeuroNetics, an Atlanta company, is developing
a TMS machine designed for just this purpose, which will probably be
released in 2006, pending F.D.A. approval.) 

Meanwhile, researchers at the National Institute of Neurological
Disorders and Stroke found that TMS applied to the prefrontal cortex
enabled subjects to solve geometric puzzles much more rapidly. Alvaro
Pascual-Leone, associate professor of neurology at the Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center in Boston (who, through his work at the
Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation, has been one of the
American visionaries of TMS), has even suggested that TMS could be
used to "prep" students' minds before lessons. 

None of this has gone unnoticed by canny entrepreneurs and visionary
scientists. Last year, the Brain Stimulation Laboratory at the Medical
University of South Carolina received a $2 million government grant to
develop a smaller TMS device that sleep-deprived soldiers could wear
to keep them alert. "It's not 'Star Trek' at all," says Ziad Nahas,
the laboratory's medical director. "We've done a lot of the science on
reversing cognitive deficiencies in people with insomnia and sleep
deficiencies. It works." If so, it could be a small leap to the day it
boosts soldiers' cognitive functioning under normal circumstances. 

And from there, how long before Americans are walking around with
humming antidepression helmets and math-enhancing "hair dryers" on
their heads? Will commercially available TMS machines be used to turn
prosaic bank managers into amateur Rembrandts? Snyder has even
contemplated video games that harness specialized parts of the brain
that are otherwise inaccessible. 

"Anything is possible," says Prof. Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of
the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at
San Diego and the noted author of "Phantoms in the Brain." Snyder's
theories have not been proved, he allows, but they are brilliantly
suggestive: "We're at the same stage in brain research that biology
was in the 19th century. We know almost nothing about the mind.
Snyder's theories may sound like 'The X-Files,' but what he's saying
is completely plausible. Up to a point the brain is open, malleable
and constantly changing. We might well be able to make it run in new
ways." Of those who dismiss Snyder's theories out of hand, he shrugs:
"People are often blind to new ideas. Especially scientists." 


Bruce L. Miller, the A.W. and Mary Margaret Claussen distinguished
professor in neurology at the University of California at San
Francisco, is intrigued by Snyder's experiments and his attempts to
understand the physiological basis of cognition. But he points out
that certain profound questions about artificially altered
intelligence have not yet been answered. "Do we really want these
abilities?" he asks. "Wouldn't it change my idea of myself if I could
suddenly paint amazing pictures?" 

It probably would change people's ideas of themselves, to say nothing
of their ideas of artistic talent. And though that prospect might
discomfort Miller, there are no doubt others whom it would thrill. But
could anyone really guess, in advance, how their lives might be
affected by instant creativity, instant intelligence, instant
happiness? Or by their disappearance, just as instantly, once the TMS
is switched off? 

As he walked me out of the university -- a place so Gothic that it
could be Oxford, but for the intensely flowering jacaranda in one
corner and the strange Southern Hemisphere birds flitting about -- and
toward the freeway back to downtown Sydney, Snyder for his part
radiated the most convincingly ebullient optimism. "Remember that old
saw which says that we only use a small part our brain? Well, it might
just be true. Except that now we can actually prove it physically and
experimentally. That has to be significant. I mean, it has to be,
doesn't it?" 

We stopped for a moment by the side of the roaring traffic and looked
up at a haze in the sky. Snyder's eyes contracted inquisitively as he
pieced together the unfamiliar facts (brown smoke, just outside
Sydney) and eased them into a familiar narrative framework (the forest
fires that had been raging all week). It was an effortless little bit
of deductive, nonliteral thinking -- the sort of thing that human
beings, unaided by TMS, do a thousand times a day. Then, in an
instant, he switched back to our conversation and picked up his train
of thought. "More important than that, we can change our own
intelligence in unexpected ways. Why would we not want to explore
that?" 

Lawrence Osborne is a frequent contributor to the magazine.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
 


-- 
The lock upon my garden gate's a snail, that's what it is.

-Donovan's prescient response to homeland security.