Sudden savant syndrome, in which exceptional abilities emerge after brain injury
bbc.com
bbc.com
There's not much mentioned of geniuses in the meaning of people who further scientific theories like Einstein or whatever example one might give. They only hint that such people might often have autism, and try to explain that with left/right brain development.
Which if I recall correctly has been highly disputed since the 1960 Nobel Prize. If nothing else the explanation of autism and savant autism in the article are gross oversimplifications.
>When you’re bashed on the head, the effects are similar to a dose of LSD
Again, this is a horrible article.
But I guess the target audience are members of the “i fucking love science” Facebook page.
> >When you’re bashed on the head, the effects are similar to a dose of LSD
Clearly this article was written to appeal to the microdosing crowd. The next status symbol will be a ball-peen hammer for administering microconcussions. You heard it here first.
This is terrible.
edit: Could the downvoter explain why? Thanks.
Yes there are some specialized loci that happen to (most often) be in the left or right hemisphere, but the original hypothesis that logic is in the left hemisphere for example is utterly wrong.
An example would be language, researchers started finding language loci in the brain (by showing that if a specific area was damaged, language was damaged) and so on. Based on such evidence the left right hypothesis was formed. What was not taken into account (in my somewhat accurate example) was that there are several other areas one could injure to get language-affecting brain damage.
The thing is, such broad things as language, or logic, or art, are not located anywhere in particular in the brain, it is the interaction or many different areas and not necessarily the same areas in every person. There are however several areas that are specialized but on a much lower level than "language" search for Wernicke's area for example.
Also note that Wernicke's area is statistically in different hemisphere more probably depending on which is your predominant hand.
So no, just no.
It's wrong like Newtonian mechanics, rather than like Flat Earth Theory?
What I'm against is referencing this idea in a context (the article) where it makes no sense, and rather lies to the reader by telling a great story based on old facts that have since been disproven.
Left right brain is wrong, not really in the same way Newtonian physics is wrong today, at least not in the form it was cited about logic being in one hemisphere. I would compare it to say, Greek anatomy. They had the idea of that things in you could be wrong. But they didn't really know what was wrong in different diseases, they came up with lots of ideas of different bodily fluids having too much or too little of one , connected to certain organs.
Now we know most of their explanations were bullshit where we can explain things a lot better. Regarding Newtonian physics my impression is that they still explain the same phenomena they explained from the beginning, but we have refined things, and realized it can not explain all things one might have thought it could explain.
Ouch, that hurt.
I used to work for a charity that ran a programme helping people back into work after getting a brain injury. Each person was affected differently, but as far as I know no-one got a superpower.
In general the injury took away any behavioural filters people usually had. So the filters that might stop you from smashing up a room when angry, or taking all your clothes off when stressed, or making everyone you meet sign an NDA in case they stole your ideas (real examples) were just gone.
This led to some entertaining stories, but without exception the results of a brain injury were devastating.
Don't get a brain injury if you can possibly help it.
"In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items."
Different aphasias like anomic aphasia(the inability or difficulty to retrieving particular verbs or nouns)[1] indicate that the systems used to store and retrieve different forms of memory differ depending on the type of information, or at very least that the concept of a thing is stored differently than its word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_st...
This is the same method as one of the research that's linked in the article has used to "Facilitate Insight by Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation": http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150505152140.h...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrus
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein%27s_brain#Newl...
A further boost might come from less distraction and inhibition since their brains might not be influenced as much by the presence and potential judgements of other people. Genius-level work tends to be out of norm and most adults are conditioned to avoid standing out too much. If a potential Einstein were highly sensitive to established scientific worldview at the time, they probably would be discouraged from persisting for 10 years to solve the mystery in their imagination, or at least miss the path that veers off too much from the standard theory.
From the article: “Muybridge was no exception. After the bet, he moved to Philadelphia and continued with his passion for capturing motion on film, photographing all kinds of activities such as walking up and down the stairs and, oddly, himself swinging a pickaxe in the nude. Between 1883 and 1886, he took more than 100,000 pictures.”
That assumes that all those hours result in skill impfovemeonts. They do not. Commuters don't become expert drivers just because they get stuck in traffic for hours a day.
Some of the other skills I learned were less admirable. Eg learning to use a touch screen phone while keeping an eye on the car in front (I'd only do this if traffic was stationary though). And learning how to accelerate quickly because I needed to steal a small gap at a busy junction.
It doesnt take much practice to become a marginally-skilled driver. But that doesn't mean there's little difference between marginal drivers and people who spend their entire day behind the steering wheel...
I once guesstimated that I spent maybe 7,500 hours (over 3.5 years) driving around in taxis. Towards the end of that period I started to notice things that the other cars on the road would likely do, and point this out to my passengers. "See that car? it's going to change lanes and that other guy is going to have to slam on his brakes..."
After I 'retired', I was driving with my mother. Our light turned green, but I saw that the car in the cross traffic couldn't see that his light had turned red (on account of the sunset). I waited, and watched as he slammed on his brakes.
There's something to putting in time on any activity. I think the relevant saying is not "practice makes perfect", but "perfect practice makes perfect". If you spend 10,000 hours practicing something wrong it won't be as helpful as 1,000 hours practicing it right.
Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
On the German Autobahn, the amount of observing and consideration is very high, and if people are new it can be very stressful. You basically have to keep in mind everyone around you, their respective speeds, potential moves and how a move from you will change their options and responses.
One common situation is when you come up behind a slow car on your lane, but the lane to the left (where you need to go to keep your current speed and overtake) has somebody coming up fast from the back. If you move there, you might force that person to brake. Now, they obviously see your situation and might slow down a little or speed up, so you can adjust your speed (speed up and pull into the left lane or lay off the gas and delay switching just long enough to let them pass). If there is another left lane they might move over to that too if possible. In this case, the communication is mostly in those small changes in speed that tell you their intention.
Now how should I read an automatic car? It's going to be very chaotic before we figure it out.
Hopefully it won't be as bad as you are thinking if all the car AI's make the same choices in every situation. That way you can get a much better feel for how those cars operate.
In reality I think your concern, shared by others will result in cars that act a lot more like buses. Almost always in the slow lane. Going a very safe speed. Leaving the faster/passing lanes to more dangerous humans.
The autonomous cars may soon be required to have visible markings so that they are easy to tell apart as well. Perhaps the color yellow could be reserved for them?
These changes will still be an adjustment, but hopefully one that doesn't result in a major number of accidents.
Of course a legacy non-robot car is a special case the robots have to think about carefully. The robots will give you similar signals to those given by human drivers now. These have been active areas of research for a while now.
"Practice makes perfect" is a bit weird as a motivational phrase, as no one who has practised ever got perfect. In your version, who can practice perfectly?
Bruce Lee was on point though I think.
Neither do you or anyone in general when working a 9-to-5 job.
Hours spent on a job do not represent skill increases. They only represent how much of your life you spent on something.
I'll also add that "5 years of experience vs 1 year of experience 5 times" is a known thing.
Jokes aside, the conditions are different. Most traffic in India is extremely slow moving, which makes those risks possible. Go to a country where the to Urban driving speed is over 50 kph (~30 mph), say 80-100 kph, Indian drivers will refuse to take those risks.
That explains a lot.
So if you wanted to improve your driving then you'd do 10,000h of driving in which you'd try to become better than the last hour in every one of those hours.
Similarly, runners don't just do "running for fun" when they try to improve their skill, or count walking as part of their 10,000 hours. They try to beat their previous scores when they train.
He (Cal) started playing around the same time as [professional guitarist] and claims to have likely played around the same number of hours. The difference was that he stuck to songs he was comfortable with. If he ever tried to learn a song that was out of his reach, he would give up and learn a different song. Contrast with the other guy, who would constantly push himself to not only play songs just outside of his comfort zone, but push himself to play them faster.
I believe he used a phrase that really stuck with me: the idea of "being comfortable with being uncomfortable".
But to your point specifically, in the podcast, I believe the guy was able to play the piano quite soon (I think days or weeks after his accident).
So to me, this points not to just an Adderall-like mental state, but an enhancement (though, sure, due to a compensation of one part of the brain for the damaged part).
To me, it feels like there are triggers or switches that perhaps optimize for certain tasks, or, it's the real default, and it's the majority of us who are off. But it's tough to guess what, if any, are the trade offs, other than potential brain damage, I guess. But it deeply intrigues me to think about what else we'll be unlocking in ourselves in the future.
But still, I wonder how much of it is enhancement, and how much of it is a reduction in some suppressive mechanism.
Example: It's well known that beginning artists struggle with perceiving the world as symbols rather than raw visual data. When I first started to work on art, I realized I was a much better artist when tired than when fully alert. This was because I was honestly just thinking less about my drawings because I lacked the mental energy to do so. On a similar note, the trick of drawing things upside-down works for so many people because it removes the clear symbolic representation of what they're trying to draw.
So now imagine an adult, who has never trained or dabbled as an artist, receives a brain injury that severely impairs their logical symbol recognition. Due to the same injury, they lose the inhibitions that would normally prevent them from doing nothing but drawing all day, and they create art for 8 hours a day for an entire week.
I can say without a doubt in my mind that the progress that person would show in that first week would be insane. It would seem nothing short of miraculous. Yet, no true enhancement has taken place beyond the training; only a reduction in a conflicting thought process.
When it comes to things like music, I wonder about similar suppressive mechanisms. I wonder if difficulty in learning these skills has less to do with a lack of ability and more to do with conflicting cognition.
But to your point, I think it's probably both, in that there is an enhancement due to a compensation and the enhancing of what one part of the brain is already good at.
But along with that are also reductions in inhibitions (some of which may be natural, as people tend to favor what they're good at, mixed with the novel curiosity of discovering a new talent), with probably a reduction in certain strengths that were competing with other strengths.
I know for me, some of my lack of artistic prowess comes from wanting to pursue too many fields of interest. So I could see that the reduction of interest in some things would enhance my ability.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's like asking which side of the scissors is doing the most cutting :)
1) Was their success due to their idea being weird and nobody else was brave/crazy enough to pursue it or was it because they put in an inordinate amount of effort (and luck)?
2) How many others tried the same idea and failed?
I imagine it was a little of both as well as a few other factors, but I find it unpalatable to basically boil it down to "being crazy enough to follow their dreams" (heavy paraphrasing, obviously).
Is there a way to induce temporary brain dysfunctionality in a region- for example by inserting minimal doses of botox. So if i had a small reservoir and a hairthin pipeline, i could experiment with partial temporary deactivation on myself- but why would i do that. I must have been mad.
Maybee if you associate diversion with negative stimuli very early.
That 10,000 hours thing is largely a Malcolm Gladwell invention, fwiw.
Through such an accident, you might lose some or all of your impulse control and logically end up in a completely new configuration, giving way to your (formerly suppressed) impulses and potential. It also means that you need to relearn other aspects of your impulse control too - which was sufficiently shown on Muybridge.
I do believe that social subsystems exist along more abstract ones, and it's true that depending on the person and context, social subsystem may very well grab the largest share of mind time. People with less potent or conflicted social areas may thus find pleasure in other ways, contemplating, understanding.
Often I see autists as people who grew the intellectual one faster and larger and try to use that to interact with people; which causes many issues since people and crowd are volatile, complex, stateful; unlike objects which can be reflected upon more easily. As if the social(affective) area are too crippled to yield useful emotions/ideas so they default on their stronger side, intellectual.
Reduced inhibition reveals formerly hidden skills. Extreme focus (even fanaticism) leads to its improvement.
I think that impulsivity and creativity are the deeper connection, with all the good and bad that that entails. There's like a sweet spot of impulsivity where you're mostly able to function, but also generate a lot of ideas and connections between disparate topics.
So it doesn't really seem that novel that brain damage -> decreased regulation -> increased impulsivity -> creativity. Personality changes like obsession or not caring what others think give the time to work on a problem and harness that increased creativity.
all your base are belong to us, take your time.
Maybe certain drugs and traumas can kick the neural network into another state and maybe that occasionally turns out to be an interesting one.
Of course sometimes the neural network lands somewhere less favorable too. Traumatic brain injuries rarely result in savant abilities, and some people "never come back" from too much LSD or other drugs.
You see a folded up rug in an alley-way, you think "Oh no, is that a person, am I being robbed?"
You never see a person and think, "Is that a folded up rug?"
The brain always jumps to the worst possibility. It calls Math.ceil() on risky situations.
Perhaps these traumatic injuries have changed their thresholds in terms of "what is a risky situation?"
Relative to trauma, perhaps things like creativity ( which is risky to your social status ), doesn't seem risky.
Risking social status is the mark of any success. Being willing to fail publicly(at least risking it) is required! After trauma, it's probably easier.
This is absurd.
I think that it's possible that accidents can give people interests and/or repetitive behaviors that allow them to develop skills, but probably don't give them the skills directly.
I am cautious about Treffert's claims in general. I have one of his books where he appears to attribute a few cases of savantism to psychic powers and reincarnation. If you want to see how unscientific some of the claims are, read the article below, including the sidebar.
https://www.khaleejtimes.com/business/mind-reading-sharjah-g...
I recommend being extremely skeptical of all acquired savant claims, and mostly skeptical about other savant claims in general. At least keep in mind that there isn't much real evidence for those claims.
Practice and technique can explain just about every case. Even well-known "experts" have many incorrect ideas. The popular media then amplify the incorrect ideas.
"The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."
A simpler explanation: people get hit on their heads, they develop new interests (sometimes due to cognitive changes), they practice their new interests a lot, and then they become skilled at them.
That and a bit of time off, perhaps.