When a Blow to the Head Creates a Sudden Genius | Hacker News Reader

When a Blow to the Head Creates a Sudden Genius

theatlantic.com

84 pointsJ3L240439 comments

> "Some savants are very disabled," said Treffert, "yet they know the rules of math, they know the rules of music, they know the rules of art. But they've never been taught that. Well, how can that get there? The only way it can get there is genetically."

Really? This is the only explanation that he can think of? Genetics? Not, say, that people have been exposed to this stuff for years, but haven't been able to do anything with that knowledge until something traumatic happened to their brain that allowed them to connect it together?

I'm not musical genius. I can barely hold a tune, and while I try noodling around with instruments every once in a while, I'm not that great. But there's a large body of music that I know through exposure. I've just never been able to do much with it. That's not genetic; that's learned through experience. Why would he think that the traumatic injury would be unlocking something genetic, rather than just allowing people to connect things they've learned through experience in more creative ways?

That piano player in the video is hardly what I'd call a savant, more like he hit his head and woke up as a douchebag but music is one of those things that gets stored way back in your brain somewhere, I think. I have songs stuck in my head all the time and I'll sleep for 12 hours and the damn thing will still be there. Maybe after a head injury some people can recall tunes they've heard throughout their lives more clearly which would make them easier to play.

Ummm.... I can 'recall' music in incredible detail - piano, guitar, horns, the works, and I've been playing a variety of instruments for 30 years. 'recall' doesn't make the stuff any easier to play at all. To go from no musical ability to what that guy was able to do in a day, assuming it's true, is pretty amazing.

You can 'recall' tunes hours after sleeping - does that make it easier to play them fluently on instruments you'd never had training on?

As a once-professional musician who later learned a different instrument from the one I grew up learning, I can say that his learning to play the piano, with all it's fine motor control, is nothing short of miraculous.

"This is the only explanation that he can think of? Genetics?"

It sounds like he may be (unknowingly) espousing the views of Jerry Fodor, who argued in the 70s and 80s that the brain has native modules for things like language, music, math, etc. It was an extension of Noam Chomsky's similar views on language learning in the 60s. Both views have been pretty much shown to be wrong.

Jesse Prinz Is the mind really modular? http://subcortex.com/PrinzModularity.pdf

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lakoff-philosophy.html

George Lakoff & Rafael Nunez Where Mathematics Comes From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From

Anthony Chemero Radical Embodied Cognitive Science starts so: "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher. I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything." http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue15_BookReview_ZipoliCaian...

The Chomsky view in linguistics hasn't been shown as wrong - see for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12963265 where they talk about a specific grammatical construct which they claim (backed by some data) that can't have been learnt by babies using statistical inference due to them not having enough data.

Personally, I would prefer the statistical, generic computation viewpoint to be correct but it's unclear whether the data supports that viewpoint.

The problem with the Chomsky nonsense about how the syntax of a language can't be learned from input (so much, so fast, with such bad data!), so it must be innate, is that they are not proving that the input is insufficient. They're just claiming it. They just say that they don't see how we could learn so much from so little, so it can't be done, so it isn't learned, it's inborn.

That's just the creationist argument: I can't see any way that something as complex as a human could emerge randomly, so it must have been assembled deliberately by a super-human creator. There's no other way.

Well, no. The thing you're missing here is that there might be algorithms that can do more than you realize.

If the Chomskians proved that the information to be learned simply didn't exist in the input--not that they didn't see it, but using information theoretic methods proved that it could not be there, then the learning algorithm wouldn't matter. It would not be possible for any algorithm.

But unless linguists prove the needed info isn't there (which is probably not possible using our limited knowledge of information theory), the ockham's razor hypothesis for how kids end up speaking the exact dialect they're surrounded with is that they possess algorithms capable of extracting the information from their surroundings.

Declaring such learning impossible because it doesn't look possible is like declaring human evolution impossible for the same reason. We're just beginning to discover that there are spectacularly powerful algorithms capable of doing things we never imagined.

Look, what you say is roughly my point of view, and I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but you didn't actually respond to the article, but rather to some straw-man representation of "the Chomsky nonsense", to use your words. I'll try to elaborate the claims in the article a bit (and I'm probably overly simplifying it):

when you have a sentence like "I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one", one can ask whether "one" refers to "ball" or "red ball". The sentence doesn't give you information as to which option is true. But, say there are two kids, Chris, playing with a red ball and Max, playing with a blue ball, and someone says "Chris has a red ball but Max doesn’t have one." In that case, they can learn that 'one' refers to 'red ball' and not 'ball'. Their argument is that for a language learner (read: baby) to learn correct grammar, he has to encounter such situations, and yet, such situations are rarer than the rate of grammatical errors in similar uses of the word 'one' is higher than the rate of occurrence of scenarios where you could learn the distinction (this is not an assertion, it's backed by analysis of corpora of parents talking to their babies). And yet, their experiments show in a somewhat roundabout manner that the babies treat 'one' as referring the 'red ball' and not 'ball'. Their conclusion is that this means that out of the space of possible grammars, babies didn't consider the ones where 'one' refers to 'ball' and not 'red ball' - there's an innate preference towards those.

While I can poke some holes in the argument (mostly because of the implied assumption that the mental representation of grammar is in a generative grammar), your response read too much like http://xkcd.com/793/

http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

Well, that was an hour spent. Thanks!

Or it could be that babies learn to chunk noun phrases as units from hearing other types of speech. The corpora you mention only disprove one mechanism of acquiring antecedent skills, not prove that it is innate. Conflating the two is, in fact, typical Chomsky nonsense.

Yeah, my first thought was that since the "rules" of art are merely the discovery of what we as humans find pleasing, and since mathematics is the discovery of fundamental logical conclusions, there's no reason to assume it has anything to do with genetics (well, aside from the fact that we must somehow be 'genetically' predisposed to liking golden ratios, etc).

> the fact that we must somehow be 'genetically' predisposed to liking golden ratios, etc

This is not a fact. There is absolutely no research evidence that people tend to prefer the golden ratio of 1.618.. over other ratios. Especially it's very doubtful people would have a preference compared to the nearby simple ratios of small numbers 1.5 and 1.666.

Fibonacci-like sequences pop up in a few specific growth models in nature, which often converge to the golden ratio (if the growth is perfect and unhampered by external factors). Mostly in plants. Particularly not in nautilus shell spirals (that's a legend, based on cherry-picking and sloppy measurements) and also not in spiral galaxies, or fiddlehead ferns.

It's still fascinating stuff, but it's even more fascinating if you ask to see proof of all these outlandish claims, and learning about the underlying principles behind the actual phenomenon.

  > Thanks to a piece of equipment called the Medtronic Mag Pro...

The title should be changed to "When a PR Piece Creates a Sudden Article".

    > Is there any risk of brain damage? 
    > Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss.

From the comments section: "Precisely how Doctor Emmett Brown created the Flux Capacitor, had he not bumped his head on the edge of the sink we would've never had time travel via DeLorean."

Reminds me of Terry Pratchett's concept of retro-phrenology...

You can go into a shop in Ankh-Morpork and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection. What you actually get is hit on the head with a large hammer, but it keeps the money in circulation and gives people something to do.

Is this why people sometimes will say they are "banging their head against the wall" trying to come up with a solution?

I rememember reading about Treffert and his "thinking cap" over ten years ago. I think it may have actually been in Wired.

This article was too short. I was hoping for a more "NewYorker-length" piece.

This reminds me of the movie Limitless, in which a drug is invented that gives people who take it access to the 80% of their brain that they don't normally use.

Only the "we only use 10%, 20% of our brain" thing is false, basically an urban legend.

There are people who use 100% of their brains, they're generally flopping around on the floor.

That's not true, for reasonable definition of "use".

There is grain of truth on the "we only use 10 % of our brains" saying, that we don't usually use our whole brain at once. It is possible, but not very comfortable, the closest you can get would be something like solving differential equations in you head and driving a car at the same time, while singing and thinking about you wife.

Nor is the original. The whole fallacy stems from a misunderstanding of "use". Only 10% of brain regions are active at any given time, so they're "unused". Of course, activating ("using?") them all at once is something medically known as a seizure.

The same is true of circuits. If you're a pipeline stage in a multiplier inside an ALU, you're only "used" when a multiply instruction passes by. If only 10% of instructions in a given program are multiplies, you're 90% idle. That doesn't mean that the multiplier is a useless circuit.

I always tell people "its like saying you only use 20% of the boat to float".

Limitless was also a work of fiction, so it's OK.

Sorry, I should've been clear that I don't actually believe the myth. Only that the movie Limitless is about it.

Scientists claim that we only use 10% of our brains ... but I think that we only use 10% of our hearts.

Scientists do not make that claim.

Dr. Wedding Crasher once said that.

> Scientists claim that we only use 10% of our brains ...

I've never seen a scientist make that actual claim. New-agers yes, eastern philosophers yes, comic books yes, scientists? Can't say I can remember any such instance.

> but I think that we only use 10% of our hearts.

The only way to only use 10% of your heart is to suffer from massive ischaemia, and that leads to death on pretty damn short order.

(It's a quote from Wedding Crashers)

(Which is why it's being downvoted.)

Sigh, yep, I figured (1) that would happen and (2) there would be a few lulz worth the karma.

> Scientists claim that we only use 10% of our brains ... but I think that we only use 10% of our hearts.

Very cute; I agree. Thank you :)

The only people who use 20% of their brain are people claiming we do. Humans use 100% of their brains. Evolution doesn't leave large buffers like that.

I agree with your claim, but attributing that to evolution as an efficient optimizer is a bit strange. If you are building a brain with trial and error, there is bound to be lots of bits and pieces of it that are not operating optimally for the current organism, but are there because of the evolutionary path that was taken.

What parts should that be?

The brain has evolved over time. It has an amazing amount of elasticity with and a bunch of hardwired features. But other than that it's not filled with secret potential.

The brain not 'using' all of it all the time is a measure of power conservation, not of what could be if you lit it up all at once.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com