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Tune in, turn off
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JAMES CAN TELL YOU the precise time--to the second--without looking at a
clock. Jennifer can measure anything to within a fraction of an inch just by
glancing at it. And Christopher can speak 24 languages--including a couple
of his own devising. Amazing? Definitely. But unusual? Not necessarily.
According to a controversial new theory you too can do these things. Or at
least you could--if only you could just stop being so clever for a moment.
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The idea comes from psychologists Allan Snyder and D. John Mitchell from the
Centre for the Mind at The Australian National University in Canberra.
Essentially they think that savant skills are the manifestation of brain
processes that happen within us all, all the time, but are usually speedily
swamped by more sophisticated conceptual cognition. While this high-level
stuff fills our consciousness, the savant-style information-crunching that
the researchers suggest precedes it is relegated to the unconscious back
rooms of the brain.
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If Snyder and Mitchell are correct in supposing that savant cognition is
happening in us all, is it possible that we could learn to shift our
consciousness back a gear and become aware of it? Niels Birbaumer of the
Institute of Behavioural Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen, in
Germany, an enthusiastic supporter of Snyder and Mitchell's theory, believes
we could. Birbaumer recently led a team that fitted paralysed patients with
scalp electrodes that picked up signals from the brain and translated them
into movement of a computer cursor. The patients first had to learn to
control brain activity that was normally unconscious (New Scientist, 16
January, p 4). Birbaumer thinks it would be possible to access pre-conscious
savant cognitive processes in much the same way--and that some people have
already learnt to do so, without even realising what they were doing
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http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19991009/tuneinturn.html
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John
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