2:00 a.m. April 18, 2002 PDT

It sounds like an April Fool's joke but it's more like Ripley's Believe it or Not! Two Australian scientists claim they've turned a metaphor into a new device - they believe they've invented a "thinking cap."

Professor Allan Snyder and Dr. Elaine Mulcahy say they have completed experiments that proved they could increase the creative function of the brain using magnetism.

The device works by using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to temporarily shut down the left hemisphere of the brain, where speech and short-term memory are supported.

Snyder's experiment was based on research into the remarkable abilities of autistic savants, like Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man.

Prodigious autistic savants, the most skilful ones, display various impressive abilities, like instantly calculating huge sums (1,203,567,391 x 4,102,832,320, anybody?), or painting lifelike pictures from a young age, without any training.

Snyder believes autistic savants have access to very fast, early brain processing, the unconscious skills that calculate, say, the trajectory of a softball without the batter being aware. These early processing functions are at the heart of hand-to-eye coordination and visual skills, like differentiating a ball from a disc.

Anyone can access this early processing using TMS, which inhibits the electrical signals in left brain neurons, mimicking temporarily the brain pattern of autistic savants, Snyder believes.

It's hard to believe, but the "thinking cap" cannot be dismissed as vaporware.

Snyder is a highly respected scientist. In December he was awarded the Marconi Foundation's International Prize for his research into fiber optics. He has an eclectic approach to science: He used research into how flies' eyes work to develop the mathematics for sending light down optical cable.

Serious skepticism remains, however, both on the use of TMS and Snyder's theory about autistic savants.

"I wrote a comment two or three years ago in Nature, on his theory on autism and early information processing. I never commented on his TMS stuff and the reason is I'm a little bit skeptical. And there's no data so far available supporting his claims," said Professor Niels Birbaumer, of the University of Tubingen, Germany.

Birbaumer is one of the world's leading neuroscientists with over 400 academic papers to this credit. His team was famously responsible for allowing locked-in, or totally paralyzed, patients to communicate with a cursor that was powered by brainwaves alone. He believes Snyder is right about early processing, but wrong to associate it only with the right brain.

"The idea's not a bad idea, it's straightforward and there is some potential for this," Birbaumer said, adding, "I think some of his theories are seen in the neuroscience community as the ideas of a genius, but a little too far away from serious laboratory work. I personally take his theories quite seriously. I think they are good theories that you can even test, but some colleagues think that this is more of an outsider's perspective."

Dr. Darrold Treffert, a psychiatrist in St. Agnes Hospital at Fond-du-lac, Wisconsin, literally wrote the book on autistic savants, Extraordinary People. He was the first to propose the theory that we all possess savant skills, but he doubts Snyder has found the means to gain access to them.

"I think TMS is too inaccurate a technology to achieve this effect," he says. "Certainly there is a phenomenal untapped memory in what Snyder calls the 'non-conscious' brain, (but I believe) the circuits to access it are deeper and smaller than he allows."

Snyder believes that autistic savants can achieve their phenomenal skills because the executive function is damaged, and so inhibiting executive function will allow non-autistic people to access savant skills. Treffert believes that autistic savants simply use their right brain more, because the left brain is damaged. It's something we could all theoretically do, according to Treffert, but we're out of practice.

"We live in a left-brain society and the left brain serves us well, so we tend to neglect the more primitive functions of the right brain," Treffert said. He believes that with training non-autistic people could access some of the right-brain skills of savants, though not at the same level.

Dr. Tony Ro, assistant professor in the department of psychology at Rice University, also doubts the thinking cap's potential. "It is very unlikely that these investigators will be able to shut down conscious parts of the brain so that unconscious areas can problem-solve on arithmetic equations. It is presently unclear which areas of the brain are even involved with conscious problem-solving."

The theory is supported, however, by a similar experiment that took place two years ago, with positive results. Dr. Robin Young of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and Dr. Michael Ridding at Adelaide University tested Snyder's hypothesis and noted improved artistic ability among subjects following the application of TMS. Dr. Young said she was initially skeptical.

"I thought it was a load of crap," said Dr. Young, who completed her PhD thesis on autistic savants 10 years ago. "In fact, I wasn't excited when we were successful because it disproved my theory that autistic savant skills are based on memory."

Her experiment attempted to inhibit the fronto-temporal region of the left brain, where short-term memory and language skills are supported, in 17 volunteers. There was a notable improvement in the five volunteers whose fronto-temporal lobes were most successfully inhibited by TMS.

"In fact, in a recent simulation of the study for a journalist, we stimulated a participant several times and his drawings were better on all occasions during stimulation and not so good when stimulation was removed," she said.

She now believes there is a basis for the theory but adds that more work needs to be done. "I think (a thinking cap) would be years off. Also I think (the technique) would have to be done with professional guidance." Not something you could buy at Radio Shack, then.

"We had a breakthrough," Snyder told the Adelaide Advertiser earlier this month. "We were aware that certain types of brain-damaged people have extraordinary skills in art, music, mathematics (and) memory, and I wanted to know if we could give rise to those extraordinary skills (in people without brain damage)."

"Most of the 'eureka' moments come from the non-conscious parts of the brain," Snyder said. "It's like you're an executive and you only see one paragraph of a report, while others see the whole 50 pages. We're bypassing the bit that sees the paragraph and looking at the whole 50 pages. That's the best analogy.

"We've definitely shown that (we) can bypass the executive brain and do things we cannot normally do."

Dr. Snyder declined other interview requests until May; a spokesman said he is too busy.

Has he discovered a thinking cap or should he be wearing a dunce's hat? Answers, hopefully, in a month -- but in the meantime: Believe it or don't!

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