Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question,
Speaker 1: could you have a savant hidden inside your brain? Savants
Speaker 1: have amazing skills. You may have seen them on the
Speaker 1: news or in some kind of documentary. For example, they
Speaker 1: might have the ability to draw or sculpt an incredible detail.
Speaker 1: Or they might have photographic memories that allow them to
Speaker 1: recall things just after one exposure to a book or
Speaker 1: something like that. Or there's a guy who can recite
Speaker 1: pi to twenty two thousand digits for a memory. Any
Speaker 1: kind of thing like that seems amazing to normal human
Speaker 1: beings because we can't even approach that sort of capability.
Speaker 1: But is it possible that we all have some of
Speaker 1: these capabilities embedded inside our brains and they're simply lying dormant,
Speaker 1: or they're being overshadowed by other parts of our brains.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite books of all time is called
Speaker 1: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards,
Speaker 1: and she gets it this from an interesting angle. Her
Speaker 1: book's goal is to teach ordinary people how to draw,
Speaker 1: and the way she does it is by teaching the
Speaker 1: reader how to turn off the left side of the brain.
Speaker 1: So she has this set of exercises in the book
Speaker 1: that are designed to get the left side of the brain,
Speaker 1: the verbal side of the brain, to shut up so
Speaker 1: that the right side of the brain, which can do
Speaker 1: the drawing part, can actually do its thing without interruption
Speaker 1: from the left side. So, for example, one of her
Speaker 1: exercises is to take a line drawing and just turn
Speaker 1: it upside down and start sketching the upside down version.
Speaker 1: And the idea is that when it's right side up,
Speaker 1: the left side of the brain is chunking every thing
Speaker 1: symbolically and saying, well, this is an eye and this
Speaker 1: is a nose, and then the right side of the
Speaker 1: brain can't really see what's going on and gets overshadowed
Speaker 1: by this chunking. When you turn off the left side
Speaker 1: of the brain by turning the picture upside down so
Speaker 1: it can't recognize anything, what you're left with is the
Speaker 1: right side of the brain being able to see the
Speaker 1: actual line segments they are sitting there on the paper
Speaker 1: and being able to copy them, and suddenly you can draw.
Speaker 1: You can actually trace that picture, drawing it without actually
Speaker 1: tracing it, You're you're seeing what's really there and drawing
Speaker 1: what's really there without interruption from the left side of
Speaker 1: the brain. It turns out that there's now a more
Speaker 1: recent technique that's turning off the left side of the
Speaker 1: brain using something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. What that translates
Speaker 1: into is high intensity magnetic pulses directed into the left
Speaker 1: hemisphere that essentially this able it for a period of
Speaker 1: time a few minutes. And when they do that, it
Speaker 1: appears that we all do have savant capabilities that are
Speaker 1: being overshadowed by the left side of the brain that
Speaker 1: go beyond drawing. So, for example, they stimulate someone's brain
Speaker 1: with magnetic pulses and this person can now suddenly count
Speaker 1: things in the way that an autistic person might be
Speaker 1: able to. You might have seen the movie rain Man,
Speaker 1: where a box of matches drops on the floor or
Speaker 1: something like that, and an autistic person, some with savant capabilities,
Speaker 1: can look at it and immediately count how many matches
Speaker 1: are there, a hundred or a hundred, fifty whatever. They
Speaker 1: see the actual image of what's there and can count it.
Speaker 1: So with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a normal person can start
Speaker 1: to do something very similar to that in the same
Speaker 1: way a normal person can go from memory and draw
Speaker 1: a much more accurate picture of a horse, say, then
Speaker 1: could be possible with the left side of the brain active.
Speaker 1: If you think about it, this is really exciting research
Speaker 1: because it means that the idea of a savant is
Speaker 1: not unusual. Apparently we all have that stuff sitting inside
Speaker 1: our brains, but it's being overshadowed by the symbolic processing
Speaker 1: capabilities of the left hemisphere. If scientists can figure out
Speaker 1: how to disable the left hemisphere for periods of time,
Speaker 1: for example, transcarential magnetic stimulation, does that as just very
Speaker 1: short acting. If they could come up with a pill
Speaker 1: or a therapy of some kind that could turn off
Speaker 1: the left side of the brain and allow you to
Speaker 1: turn it back on later on, obviously, then it could
Speaker 1: be that we could all tap into these savant capabilities
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