Unlock Your Inner Rain Man by Electrically Zapping Your Brain | Hacker News Reader

Unlock Your Inner Rain Man by Electrically Zapping Your Brain

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64 pointsraleec29 comments

> Finally, as Young put it, “If everyone could play music brilliantly or be brilliant artists, it would minimize diversity.”

I don't get that. Just what specific contribution do non-musical/non-artistic people bring society? If someone's gifts are in area X, I have a hard time seeing how such gifts aren't enhanced or left unaffected by musical or artistic ability.

Indeed. Everyone being brilliant would of course foster diversity, as well as overall cultural capital. I might be wrong, but it seems obvious to me.

To me the original quote seems to spring from an elitist mindset and akin to saying there's no diversity in painting anymore because everyone uses rectangular canvases. It's not the brilliance that makes you diverse, but rather what springs from it.

No matter how brilliant someone is, they still only have limited time. Increased capabilities increases the options someone has within their available time. There is incredible diversity in the goals and the specific capabilities people bring to whatever they are doing, increasing the capabilities could only increase the diversity.

I just solved that 9 dot problem in a minute with paper and pen. Maybe it was the chocolate I ate?

Just knowing that it's a hard problem can make you "think outside the box" (literally in this case). No electrocution needed. Could the results be a reflex of the participants' state of mind, not a direct effect of brain stimulation?

I nearly punched out my monitor when I saw the "solution".

By that metric I count my first solution of "Cut the image up into a straight line and connect the dots." as valid.

EDIT: I agree about state of mind, the reason I would say nobody could "solve" that problem was their mental model of the parameters of the problem wildly diverged from the authors.

The solution doesn't violate or bend the guidelines given (using four straight lines). Assuming that some strict rules exist seems to be a cultural behavior - probably ingrained from school, where doing things creatively can get you in trouble. </sociologist>

On the other hand, if you have seen these kind of problem before, you already have a hint that the solution involves something unusual.

> The solution doesn't violate or bend the guidelines given (using four straight lines).

Yeah; which is partially my frustration. The other part is that I actually went pretty in depth compared to how much time I would expect most people to go at it. (About an hour with a pencil and paper journal. Figuring out what couldn't be the solution with "You're starting from one of the dots" as an implicit axiom.) I was actually about to write a script to brute force the solution after I ran out of ideas, until I decided to save myself the time and peek at the solution.

I think you can imagine how that turned out.

Actually it's quite easy to bruteforce by hand if you mention that point set has multiple symmetries. For example, you only need to start drawing lines from (0,0), (0,1) and (1,1). Any other combinations are derived by rotation and mirroring. After several minutes you can prove that solution in impossible under implicit presumption that every line must terminate at a dot. And after that puzzle is really easy.

I've seen worse. Here it is in 3 lines :) http://www.jimloy.com/puzz/9dots1.gif

Yeah, that was my solution. Only when told they were points, not dots did I find the four line one.

There's a variant of this riddle where the solution is using a big brush and painting over the dots in one stroke.

I think all of these solutions are interesting and creative.

You can also do it in one, if you imagine the line to lie on the surface of the earth and to wrap around the entire earth three times.

My problem with the 9-dot problem is that it is culturally biased. If you grew up playing "connect the dots" as a kid, where you were trained over and over not to draw any lines that either strayed outside the figure or didn't connect to dots at both ends, you will probably find that puzzle very hard. If you didn't, you may not find it that difficult.

So if the transcranial stimulation experiment proved anything, it may have shown that the subjects didn't become more intelligent per se, but simply better at looking past their preconceptions.

Seems that no one can reproduce the study in question, so it's a moot point IMHO. Just snake oil, and/or typical psych researchers who made a 'C' in statistics.

There is a solution that requires you to use a semicircle line to join two of the straight lines. You could argue it meets the rule 'just four straight lines', and you would be all the more 'creative' for proposing it. However it is unlikely to be suggested because the convention is to draw lines that directly connect dots.

If you make the lines long enough, and take it literally as connecting dots as opposed to points, you can do it with three: Connect the three top (or whichever side) and extend that line out far enough that you can then draw a diagonal line that slopes slowly enough to be able to connect the dots in the next row, and repeat for the last row.

But I spent far longer than I "should" have, because I wrongfully just assumed no crossing lines - another common convention that was never stated but that just was too hard to ignore. I did try various diagonals trying to get to something similar to the linked solution before the "three long lines" approach, but didn't get there because of getting stuck on that.

I think a lot of the time the bigger problem than getting "creative" is to clear your head of all the unstated assumptions that are very easy to cling to without even realizing. A useful method can be to try solve a problem with fewer restrictions, and then add restrictions back in and see what solutions can be adapted - that makes it harder to get stuck considering rules that don't actually exist.

"Thinking outside the box" has become such a trite phrase, I was surprised to see it as a puzzle here. Has the phrase become disconnected from its origin?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box

This fits with the thunderbolt theory of the brain: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265665

The thing is: the side effects of such efforts are unknown.

From one of the mailing lists that talks about tDCS, here's a snippet of a recent email that caused me to take pause:

-----

I have never been able to directly correlate anything i've done, or taken, to the severe decline in my sleep quality (both falling, staying asleep). Being diagnosted with sleep apnea has helped, as the machine has been a bit of a help, but not as much as I would have hoped. I'm wondering if any of the tDCS I had done on myself (and i did do a pretty significant amount I guess about 12-18 months ago) might have caused persistent sleep disturbance?

-----

If indeed this person is correct, then it is possible that long term heavy use of tDCS can cause sleep issues. I'd much rather sleep well than play the piano. :-)

Really? I find no fascination with going comatose and hallucinating vividly for hours over more time living.

It's not so much the lack of time as much as the side effects of that lack of time.

Sleep disturbances are common. Of the hundreds or thousands of hobbyists who have used tDCS, how many would you expect to - years later - have some sort of sleep problem? I'm guessing more than 1...

juicing your brain was all the rage a few months ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3557074

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3525744

---------------

I'm partial to eating blueberries and playing clarinet and piano,

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-w...

I saw the same article with the same professor 6 years ago, claiming that the helmet would be ready in 3 years.

I so hope that this doesn't become a kickstarter

Snyder was one of the co-founders of Emotive [1], so he already has a corporate vehicle for any "thinking cap".

[1] http://www.emotiv.com/

> Imagine a creativity cap.

For the first time I feel I need to say this minor rant...

I had to stop right here and double take on this choice of words. I had to read twice because I was worried that there was a suggestion of artificially limiting creativity with a device.

It's so sad because I can imagine such a limitation being brought upon a populace in my life. At the same time I always imagined that such things as Gibson's or Bank's neural interfaces might provide more than just a collar.

The optimist in me has a hard time looking forward with this.

LSD does wonders in helping you to unlock your inner creative mind. Unfortunately, the flashbacks are a bitch!

As someone who has never taken LSD and is curious about the experience I have a question:

Have you personally ever taken LSD and actually suffered flashbacks? If yes, how bad were they?

This is a very personal question, so of course feel free to ignore it.

I think few people will answer this publicly on such a forum, but you can probably find the information you seek on http://erowid.org ...

> Have you personally ever taken LSD and actually suffered flashbacks? If yes, how bad were they?

No, of course not. I am a law-abiding citizen who believes in the rule of law, and I would never consider breaking it. I did, however, have some ruffian, rebellious, criminal friends--albeit, the type of criminal who goes to MIT or who goes on to get a PhD in Math--in college, and they told me what it was like.

Re flashbacks, they told me that no that didn't happen. They did, however, perceive textures on real objects (e.g., the kind in carpets or detailed wallpaper) continue to "breathe" and undulate a bit for the next year or two. (My guess is that such textures are always undulating a bit, perceptually, only you train yourself not to notice it.)

It was the actual experience, I am told, that could be very grueling. I.e., imagine watching "The Exorcist" alone in a big haunted house, only you can't turn it off, and you can't stop watching it, because if you close your eyes, it's now being projected in 3D onto the insides of your eyelids. Only multiply this by 1,000X. I imagine that this kind of stress could have lingering effects for those who already have difficulty dealing with it.

Despite the scariness of the experience, the friends who experienced it this way said the experience was still very worthwhile, and they wouldn't change anything. They just wouldn't necessarily do it again anytime soon.

Some friends didn't find it scary; they just found it fun.

One acquaintance went crazy shortly thereafter, but he was probably teetering on the edge to begin with. Friends who did it dozens of times, were invariably a bit strange ever thereafter, so I wouldn't recommend becoming too much of a rebel.

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