Savants are extremely rare individuals who, although often
severely brain impaired - frequently by autism, stroke or dementia
- can display islands of astonishing excellence in specific areas,
including drawing, memory, music, calendar calculations, and arithmetic.
Their skills are literal, non-symbolic, and apparently not derived
from practice. They often emerge 'spontaneously' and do not improve
qualitatively with time, even though their skill might be better
articulated. Savants typically have no idea how they do what they
do.
The astonishing skills of savants have been suggested to exist
in everyone, but are not normally accessible without some form
of brain impairment. We attempt to simulate such brain impairment
in healthy people by directing low-frequency magnetic pulses into
the left front-temporal lobe, a site implicated in the savant
condition.
In our papers (below), we show that by applying transcranial
magnetic stimulation to the left fronto-temporal lobe, skills
such as drawing, proof-reading and numerosity significantly improve.
Savant-like
skills exposed in normal people by supressing the left fronto-temporal
lobe
Savant-like
numerosity skills revealed in normal people by magnetic pulses
Concept
formation: 'object' attributes dynamically inhibited from conscious
awareness
Absolute
pitch accessible to everyone by turning off part of the brain?
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