The
research of a test in which a research subject was asked to draw a
picture of a dog four times, at different stages of his exposure to
transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Hooked up to the Medtronic Mag Pro, a test subject
begins the series of tests to show the effect of transcranial magnetic
stimulation.
By LAWRENCE OSBORNE
n
a concrete basement at the University of Sydney, I sat in a chair
waiting to have my brain altered by an electromagnetic pulse. My
forehead was connected, by a series of electrodes, to a machine that
looked something like an old-fashioned beauty-salon hair dryer and was
sunnily described to me as a ''Danish-made transcranial magnetic
stimulator.'' This was not just any old Danish-made transcranial
magnetic stimulator, however; this was the Medtronic Mag Pro, and it was being operated by Allan Snyder, one of the world's most remarkable scientists of human cognition.
Nonetheless, the anticipation of electricity being beamed into my
frontal lobes (and the consent form I had just signed) made me a bit
nervous. Snyder found that amusing. ''Oh, relax now!'' he said in the
thick local accent he has acquired since moving here from America.
''I've done it on myself a hundred times. This is Australia. Legally,
it's far more difficult to damage people in Australia than it is in the
United States.''
''Damage?'' I groaned.
''You're not going to be damaged,'' he said. ''You're going to be enhanced.''
The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by
stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed
doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also
produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients'
mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak,
another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic
errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the
possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people
undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly
exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike
mental ability that most often appear in autistic people.
Snyder is an impish presence, the very opposite of a venerable
professor, let alone an internationally acclaimed scientist. There is a
whiff of Woody Allen about him. Did I really want him, I couldn't help
thinking, rewiring my hard drive? ''We're not changing your brain
physically,'' he assured me. ''You'll only experience differences in
your thought processes while you're actually on the machine.'' His
assistant made a few final adjustments to the electrodes, and then, as
everyone stood back, Snyder flicked the switch.
A series of
electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I
felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you
like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats
it is.''
I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close
my eyes, I have no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really
look like, and how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but
came up with some sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect.
While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a
creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of
mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the
raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the
unconscious mind of all of us.''
Two minutes after I started
the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two
minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the
experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at
my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But
after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic
stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their
faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear
clever expressions.
I could hardly recognize them as my own
drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its
loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with
no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to
a very impressive artist of the feline form.
Snyder looked over my shoulder. ''Well, how about that? Leonardo would be envious.'' Or turning in his grave, I thought.
As
remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of
Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has
used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect
on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult
mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked
up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary,
and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these
remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than
just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a
revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence
-- and the functioning of the human brain in general.
Snyder's
work began with a curiosity about autism. Though there is little
consensus about what causes this baffling -- and increasingly common --
disorder, it seems safe to say that autistic people share certain
qualities: they tend to be rigid, mechanical and emotionally
dissociated. They manifest what autism's great ''discoverer,'' Leo
Kanner, called ''an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of
sameness.'' And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral
way, using ''a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve
interpersonal communication.''
For example, Snyder says, when
autistic test subjects came to see him at the university, they would
often get lost in the main quad. They might have been there 10 times
before, but each time the shadows were in slightly different positions,
and the difference overwhelmed their sense of place. ''They can't grasp
a general concept equivalent to the word 'quad,''' he explains. ''If it
changes appearance even slightly, then they have to start all over
again.''
Despite these limitations, a small subset of
autistics, known as savants, can also perform superspecialized mental
feats. Perhaps the most famous savant was Dustin Hoffman's character in
''Rain Man,'' who could count hundreds of matchsticks at a glance. But
the truth has often been even stranger: one celebrated savant in
turn-of-the-century Vienna could calculate the day of the week for
every date since the birth of Christ. Other savants can speak dozens of
languages without formally studying any of them or can reproduce music
at the piano after only a single hearing. A savant studied by the
English doctor J. Langdon Down in 1887 had memorized every page of
Gibbon's ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'' At the beginning of
the 19th century, the splendidly named Gottfried Mind became famous all
over Europe for the amazing pictures he drew of cats.
The
conventional wisdom has long been that autistics' hyperliteral thought
processes were completely separate from the more contextual, nuanced,
social way that most adults think, a different mental function
altogether. And so, by extension, the extraordinary skills of autistic
savants have been regarded as flukes, almost inhuman feats that average
minds could never achieve.
Snyder argues that all those
assumptions -- about everything from the way autistic savants behave
down to the basic brain functions that cause them to do so -- are
mistaken. Autistic thought isn't wholly incompatible with ordinary
thought, he says; it's just a variation on it, a more extreme example.
He first got the idea after reading ''The Man Who Mistook His Wife for
a Hat,'' in which Oliver Sacks explores the link between autism and a
very specific kind of brain damage. If neurological impairment is the
cause of the autistic's disabilities, Snyder wondered, could it be the
cause of their geniuslike abilities, too? By shutting down certain
mental functions -- the capacity to think conceptually, categorically,
contextually -- did this impairment allow other mental functions to
flourish? Could brain damage, in short, actually make you brilliant?
In a 1999 paper called ''Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental
Processing? The Mind's Secret Arithmetic,'' Snyder and D. John Mitchell
considered the example of an autistic infant, whose mind ''is not
concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level
details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals.''
These children, they wrote, seem ''to be aware of information in some
raw or interim state prior to it being formed into the 'ultimate
picture.''' Most astonishing, they went on, ''the mental machinery for
performing lightning fast integer arithmetic calculations could be
within us all.''
And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, ''to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.''
''In a way, savants are the great enigma of today's neurology,'' says
Prof. Joy Hirsch, director of the Functional M.R.I. Research Center at
Columbia University. ''They exist in all cultures and are a distinct
type. Why? How? We don't know. Yet understanding the savant will help
provide insight into the whole neurophysiological underpinning of human
behavior. That's why Snyder's ideas are so exciting -- he's asking a
really fundamental question, which no one has yet answered.''
If Snyder's suspicions are correct, in fact, and savants have not more
brainpower than the rest of us, but less, then it's even possible that
everybody starts out life as a savant. Look, for example, at the ease
with which children master complex languages -- a mysterious skill that
seems to shut off automatically around the age of 12. ''What we're
doing is counterintuitive,'' Snyder tells me. ''We're saying that all
these genius skills are easy, they're natural. Our brain does them
naturally. Like walking. Do you know how difficult walking is? It's
much more difficult than drawing!''
To prove his point, he hooks me up to the Medtronic Mag Pro again and asks me to read the following lines:
A bird in the hand is worth two in the the bush
''A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,'' I say.
''Again,'' Snyder says, and smiles.
So once more: ''A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.'' He makes
me repeat it five or six times, slowing me down until he has me reading
each word with aching slowness.
Then he switches on the
machine. He is trying to suppress those parts of my brain responsible
for thinking contextually, for making connections. Without them, I will
be able to see things more as an autistic might.
After five
minutes of electric pulses, I read the card again. Only then do I see
-- instantly -- that the card contains an extra ''the.''
On my
own, I had been looking for patterns, trying to coax the words on the
page into a coherent, familiar whole. But ''on the machine,'' he says,
''you start seeing what's actually there, not what you think is
there.''
Snyder's theories are bolstered by the documented
cases in which sudden brain damage has produced savant abilities almost
overnight. He cites the case of Orlando Serrell, a 10-year-old street
kid who was hit on the head and immediately began doing calendrical
calculations of baffling complexity. Snyder argues that we all have
Serrell's powers. ''We remember virtually everything, but we recall
very little,'' Snyder explains. ''Now isn't that strange? Everything is
in there'' -- he taps the side of his head. ''Buried deep in all our
brains are phenomenal abilities, which we lose for some reason as we
develop into 'normal' conceptual creatures. But what if we could
reawaken them?''
Not all of Snyder's colleagues agree with
his theories. Michael Howe, an eminent psychologist at the University
of Exeter in Britain who died last year, argued that savantism (and
genius itself) was largely a result of incessant practice and
specialization. ''The main difference between experts and savants,'' he
once told New Scientist magazine, ''is that savants do things which
most of us couldn't be bothered to get good at.''
Robert
Hendren, executive director of the M.I.N.D. Institute at the University
of California at Davis, brought that concept down to my level: ''If you
drew 20 cats one after the other, they'd probably get better anyway.''
Like most neuroscientists, he doubts that an electromagnetic pulse can
stimulate the brain into creativity: ''I'm not sure I see how TMS can
actually alter the way your brain works. There's a chance that Snyder
is right. But it's still very experimental.''
Tomas Paus, an
associate professor of neuroscience at McGill University, who has done
extensive TMS research, is even more dubious. ''I don't believe TMS can
ever elicit complex behavior,'' he says.
But even skeptics
like Hendren and Paus concede that by intensifying the neural activity
of one part of the brain while slowing or shutting down others, TMS can
have remarkable effects. One of its most successful applications has
been in the realm of psychiatry, where it is now used to dispel the
''inner voices'' of schizophrenics, or to combat clinical depression
without the damaging side effects of electroshock therapy.
(NeuroNetics, an Atlanta company, is developing a TMS machine designed
for just this purpose, which will probably be released in 2006, pending
F.D.A. approval.)
Meanwhile, researchers at the National
Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke found that TMS applied
to the prefrontal cortex enabled subjects to solve geometric puzzles
much more rapidly. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, associate professor of
neurology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston (who,
through his work at the Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation, has
been one of the American visionaries of TMS), has even suggested that
TMS could be used to ''prep'' students' minds before lessons.
None of this has gone unnoticed by canny entrepreneurs and visionary
scientists. Last year, the Brain Stimulation Laboratory at the Medical
University of South Carolina received a $2 million government grant to
develop a smaller TMS device that sleep-deprived soldiers could wear to
keep them alert. ''It's not 'Star Trek' at all,'' says Ziad Nahas, the
laboratory's medical director. ''We've done a lot of the science on
reversing cognitive deficiencies in people with insomnia and sleep
deficiencies. It works.'' If so, it could be a small leap to the day it
boosts soldiers' cognitive functioning under normal circumstances.
And from there, how long before Americans are walking around with
humming antidepression helmets and math-enhancing ''hair dryers'' on
their heads? Will commercially available TMS machines be used to turn
prosaic bank managers into amateur Rembrandts? Snyder has even
contemplated video games that harness specialized parts of the brain
that are otherwise inaccessible.
''Anything is possible,''
says Prof. Vilayanur Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and
Cognition at the University of California at San Diego and the noted
author of ''Phantoms in the Brain.'' Snyder's theories have not been
proved, he allows, but they are brilliantly suggestive: ''We're at the
same stage in brain research that biology was in the 19th century. We
know almost nothing about the mind. Snyder's theories may sound like
'The X-Files,' but what he's saying is completely plausible. Up to a
point the brain is open, malleable and constantly changing. We might
well be able to make it run in new ways.'' Of those who dismiss
Snyder's theories out of hand, he shrugs: ''People are often blind to
new ideas. Especially scientists.''
Bruce L. Miller, the
A.W. and Mary Margaret Claussen distinguished professor in neurology at
the University of California at San Francisco, is intrigued by Snyder's
experiments and his attempts to understand the physiological basis of
cognition. But he points out that certain profound questions about
artificially altered intelligence have not yet been answered. ''Do we
really want these abilities?'' he asks. ''Wouldn't it change my idea of
myself if I could suddenly paint amazing pictures?''
It
probably would change people's ideas of themselves, to say nothing of
their ideas of artistic talent. And though that prospect might
discomfort Miller, there are no doubt others whom it would thrill. But
could anyone really guess, in advance, how their lives might be
affected by instant creativity, instant intelligence, instant
happiness? Or by their disappearance, just as instantly, once the TMS
is switched off?
As he walked me out of the university -- a
place so Gothic that it could be Oxford, but for the intensely
flowering jacaranda in one corner and the strange Southern Hemisphere
birds flitting about -- and toward the freeway back to downtown Sydney,
Snyder for his part radiated the most convincingly ebullient optimism.
''Remember that old saw which says that we only use a small part our
brain? Well, it might just be true. Except that now we can actually
prove it physically and experimentally. That has to be significant. I
mean, it has to be, doesn't it?''
We stopped for a moment by
the side of the roaring traffic and looked up at a haze in the sky.
Snyder's eyes contracted inquisitively as he pieced together the
unfamiliar facts (brown smoke, just outside Sydney) and eased them into
a familiar narrative framework (the forest fires that had been raging
all week). It was an effortless little bit of deductive, nonliteral
thinking -- the sort of thing that human beings, unaided by TMS, do a
thousand times a day. Then, in an instant, he switched back to our
conversation and picked up his train of thought. ''More important than
that, we can change our own intelligence in unexpected ways. Why would
we not want to explore that?''
Lawrence Osborne is a frequent contributor to the magazine.
It's easy to follow the top stories with home delivery of The New York Times newspaper.