Could a 'thinking cap' make me a genius?

It is. It's very cool. It's very cool, Chuck. You want to know something cooler? Yes, Okay, So actually I don't know if cools your right word. Maybe horrific is a better word. Okay. Uh. There's a study conducted here in the States. And of course you know that the United States, like most other countries, have a long history of you know, um, well meaning but really misplaced medical experiments or psychological experiments by giving LSD to unsuspecting a

mayor ends, which we've talked about right exactly. This one was a little different, um. This one involved separating twins who were up for adoption at birth in the state of New York. And uh, there were I think thirteen sets of twins in one set of triplets, and they were all separated through this one adoption agency as part of a study of nature versus nurture. So like, the only thing the adopting parents knew was that their kid

was part of an ongoing um child psychology study. And so these researchers were allowed access to these kids over their their lifetimes. And then it went from the sixties to I think night and um, the guy who was running the show, his name was Peter Newbauer, right, he was a child psychologist. He um apparently realized that if

he were to publish this study. Uh, basically he'd beat lynched right right that by the time rolled around, people didn't think too highly of separating twins, Like the the ethics of experimentation had changed enough, not based on the results, just space on the fact that he did this to because he under yeah right, so Um, basically what he did was take all of the research. He had the study it was ready to be published, and he sealed it and um it cannot be open until twenty six

and it's sitting in the archives at Yale university. I imagine twenty six. He imagined he'd be long dead by then, Right, so in six we're gonna find out a lot about nature versus nurture. I will be long dead, but you might. I'm supposed to make it, as you know. That's what your death clock. Death clock says. So I don't think so I'll be. I've got my vagas. Odds are against that. Yeah, so um okay, So Chuck, that's a that's an example of a really terrible experiment. Yeah. Right, have you heard

of savants, autistic savants? I have, Indeed you have. Okay, they actually provide a much less horrible, uh natural experiment, perfect natural experiment to study the brain. Right, Okay, you want to talk about savants for a second, because I'm going to explain later how they make this perfect experiment. Sure, Josh, you know, autistic savants are people who are mentally deficient in some areas but excel and others, like a lot

of times and others. That kid that plays the piano, you've seen him in the jazz trio, I have not. He's fifteen or so now, and when he first started playing, he was really young and very advanced musically. So and he's autistic savant. So that's one good example. Yeah, music comes out a lot in savants. Um. Um. There's a

guy named Blind Tom. He was this African American guy at the turn of the last century, not hippie rob or not Blind Tom, and he was severely um autistic, and he he could play pretty much any piece of music that he heard once on the piano. Um. Interesting, Well, it's autistic. Savant is different than autism though, aren't those two? Sure? Not every buddy who is a savant is autistic and not everybody who's autistic is a savant, so there is like, yes,

that's a good point there. There is a very I guess a subgroup called autistic savants, and perhaps the most famous savant um is a guy named Kim Peak Rainman. Yeah, yeah, he's the real Rainman, is what they call him. I thought they just made that up. No, now you were dead on, Chuck. You have an amazing intuition savant. Yeah maybe I don't think so, but maybe I'm terrible at math.

So yeah, that comes into play too as well. Um. But Kim Peak is this guy who the guy who wrote Rainman, Barrymorrow met uh in four and in Night the movie came out. So he was very much based on Kim Peak. Yeah, the guy can if you tell him your birthday, your birthdate, I'll tell you what day of the week you were born on. Um. He apparently Um has read twelve thousand books around that, around that he started reading and memorizing things at fourteen months. Wow. Um.

But he has severe brain damage, developmental brain damage. So he can't like, button his own shirt. He can't care for himself. Luckily, he's got a really good dad who cares for him. Sure. But the cool thing about this story is after Barrymorrow won an oscar, he gave it to Kim Peake, did he write the screenplay? And so Kim Peak carries it around everywhere he goes. Yeah, and

that cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Alright. So the reason why savants and there have been some really spectacular ones throughout the ages, UH provides such a great natural experiment for us to investigate the brain is because they, most of them, they almost exclusively have left UH damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. And you know, just the very fact that they can excel in math but can't button

their own shirts. It provides this kind of um, certain framework to compare the rest of our brains to right. You know, it's it's a it's an excellent comparison, right right, And the left side is more about detail, correct, and the right side is more about the big picture. Do you love the lateralization of brain functions? Do? Well? I like the brain period because it's still so mysterious. You know, it's amazing how little we know still about the brain. Yeah,

it's amazing and disconcerting. Yes, at the same time, I predict the next fifty years are going to see tremendous advances in our understanding of the brain, in part because of the study of savants, right right. So yeah, you were talking about the lateralization of brain function. Yeah, you're right. Left is the detail oriented side and right sees the big picture. Right. Um. And so there's some people who

are studying savants, um. And you know, like I said, one of the reasons why they are interesting is because almost all of them have damage in one form or another to the left side of the brain. Uh. And even more suspicious is is you can you can, um, maybe get in a car wreck or have a stroke, and if if you the left side is impaired people have been known to basically come out of a savant

and sometimes autistic savant. Interesting, right, Um. So one of the people that I'd like to talk about today who's studying savants is Dr Allen Snyder, yes Schneider, as I like to call him. He is an ex pad American who runs the Center for the Mind that's the British spelling of Center in Sydney, Australia. And he is he's a very eccentric person. It sounds like it, he really is. But he's been studying savants for years and um he has come up with a theory about mindsets and it's

based on the lateralization of brain function. I love that. Um, yeah, the mindset. Basically, his theory is that mindsets are created their personal um basically definitions on your experience. Right. So if you see, uh, you know, a bear in the woods, well let's a little let's come. Let's say a dog in your driveway. You'll note things about the dog, that he's furry, that he has a tail, he walks on four legs, that kind of thing, and your brain kind

of store us that away. So next time you don't see a dog, you think Oh my gosh, what's that. I've never seen one of those. Yeah, he calls the mindsets, right, so chuck. Uh, when we when we're basically assaulted with stimuli all times, all the time, raw data basically UM from like the humming of a fluorescent light, UM to you know, UM, conversations that we overhear in restaurants, that kind of thing, colors, actions, taste, smells. Yeah, We're we're

constantly assaulted with the reinput. Right. We have this thing called latent inhibition, which is a brain process. They're still again trying to get a handle on, UM, but latent inhibition is basically the process by which we filter out stuff we already know, so if we can identify, So we're not constantly focused on the buzzing of a fluorescent lights exactly, we're hearing all the voices in a restaurant.

Obviously that'd be maddening, right And actually, as a side note, UM, schizophrenics uh have very low latent inhibition indeed, so they're constantly assault to with all of this stuff. But they also have the added, UM horrible side effect of UM

attaching meaning to to these snippets of conversation. Right, So saying specifically, you're hearing voices, um, and you're not able to externalize or internalize, meaning you can't tell the voices are coming from your head and you're attaching meaning to them. That's schizophrenia, right, That's horrible. So it's Snyder's belief and I'm pretty sure the medical establishment at large is that, Um,

we're we're getting all of this raw data. It's being accepted into our right hemisphere, right, which sees the big picture, and uh, it sends it over to the left hemisphere, which processes it into details which we hang on to. This this interplay between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere creates those mindsets you were talking about, right, which, like you said, is how we can see a dog and come to understand what a dog is, and then later on when we see another agus just say, oh,

that's a dog. Like we kind of categorize things in packets, right. Sure. So, UM, we say all that to say this, if supposedly we have damage to the left side of the brain, the detail oriented brain, all we're doing is getting raw data and we're not able to create these mindsets. There's this wonderful article by a guy named Lawrence Osburne UM, And it was in the New York Times in two thousand three called Savant for a Day and he spent the day with Alan Snyder, and the whole article is very long,

but it's definitely worth reading. Um. He chronicles, you know, his day with Alan Snyder. And one of the things that Snyder mentions is that some of the savants that he studies when they come to see him at the Center for the Mind, they may have been there dozens of times, but they can get lost every single time just because of the change of shadows. It looks different.

They're getting different input, so they'll get lost because it doesn't look the same way it did that last time, and they can't form mindsets saying this is the direction I'm going right. Right, So since people with left left hemisphere brain damage uh tend to be savants, right or people who are savants have that condition. Um. Snyder has actually come up with a a theory that all of us are savants. If you get struck on the head and your left hemisphere is damaged, you you could become

a savant. So we're all potential savants, right, And basically the left side that that helps create these mindsets that pays attention to these details and hangs onto him are keeping us from being savants. Right, So how do you investigate something like this? Well, he uses a process called transcranial magnetic stimulation. We're gonna call it TMS. Yes, much easier for our purposes. Uh. TMS was originally designed Josh

to examine brain functions during cranial surgery. And what it does is it focuses magnetic pulses to either suppress or enhance the electrical functions of the brain. Yeah, it's depends on the frequency of the pulses, right, absolutely. And we were talking, you know, privately, and I thought it sounded very relaxing as your brain was being massaged and disappointed. I was disappointed because you said that you don't feel anything. You're not supposed to feel anything. It sounds very nice

to me. It does kind of, but I think that you could probably get something like what you're describing it, like Brookstone maybe, So don't don't fear. Yeah, that's where you're just sure sharper image. Perhaps they're under are they anyway?

Alan Snyder started using t MS because he found this curious little side effect of people that were getting tested with tms UM had some cognitive malthfunctions, so like speech impediments exactly while while this thing was trained on their brain, right, right, But it also had some uh if you did, if you put this on an average person at some pretty cool results. Yeah, this is what Snyder has been doing.

This is his new experiment, right, and it's very cool. Um. Of the people, the normal folks, let's call him, that he exposed to t M s UM, they displayed artistic and quantitative abilities that they didn't seem to have before. So right on the money, it seems like it's actually tapping into a part of our brain that we have

and we don't use, which sort of backs up his theory. Right, and some of the some of the things he puts people through, well, uh, he he uses TMS on them, which apparently we're kind of It looks a lot like a shower cap has a bundle of magnetic wires in it, a thinking cap, if you will, Yeah, which is kind of an inaccurate moniker, but an unfortunate one. The press is kind of put on it, right. They had to label it, right, you got to you gotta get people to read, right, which is why we used it in

the title of the arti um. So depending on where you put it on the skull, um, it's going to affect that that very localized region of the brain. So of course Snyder is interested in training this on the left hemisphere of the brain. Sure um. And he's actually using a low freak and see, so he's depressing the left brains function and reportedly, like you said, people are showing results. One of the things he likes to get

people to do is draw animals. And apparently with those who show a reaction to t MS, they they their drawings tend to get better or more realistic, more lifelike. And Snyder's theory is that this, this drawing from memory is not based on the preconceived notions that you already have that would come from the left hemisphere of the brain. Curiously, he also has found that people can, um, you know, ordinary people were talking about can identify prime numbers from sight.

I love that field and words, I believe proof reading, grammatical errors all of a sudden out of nowhere. So over the course of this TMS therapy or whatever, um, they're getting progressively better at these tasks. Right, but only last about an hour though, correct, Yes, and it may not happen at all. There's an argue went out there that like, if you draw fourteen cats in a row, they're going to get better. That that may or may not be true, but it is pretty interesting data that

he's coming up with. And I don't think arguments like that are are really putting the kai bosh on his investigations using t MS, right, I don't think so. Now, which, by the way, also I understand you said has has just been approved by the FDA for use in treating depression, so g Yeah, Josh. They studied uh, three hundred people that had clinical depression in Philadelphia, and they found out that people that underwent the t MS therapy were twice

as likely to go into remissions. And they're also now this is just as of last week, I think, are studying asking for stroke victims to volunteer for studies with teams. Yeah. Apparently with with depression. UM, if you train it on the frontal lobe, I believe, uh, they and you put it on a high frequency, they've actually shown that it restructures the brain like your neurons are are structured. UM.

And of course in the frontal lobe. That's where your your ability to regulate mood is, right, So that's just weird, but very hopeful it is. It makes you wonder if this thing could be the key to making people smarter, curing brain disease. Yeah. Interesting, so I guess. I guess the takeaway from this one is the next time you meet a savant of any kind and uh, here she tries to impress you with their you know, mathematical or musical skills, you can think to yourself, I could do

that too if I had, let's break damage. Sure, you're not so special exactly, so Chuck, that would be uh, what's the thinking cap? And couldn't make me a genius? The answer is no, not really, But that's what you would type in if you wanted to go to how stuff works dot com? Righted um, and I think you had something you wanted to say to everybody? Well, yeah, Josh, is pretty exciting. Before we get to a listener mail,

we are launching a blog. Not just you and I, but I believe six or seven blogs on the website, a whole mess of them, whole mess of them, and they gave you and I, as you know, our own little blog called stuff you Should Know, although the whole entire blog section is called stuff you Should Know. Don't get confused. Yes it is. I hadn't noticed that they named it after. So we would like our listeners to get active. This is a call out to our listeners

to get on the blogs. We're going to be discussing all kinds of cool stuff that isn't long enough to make into a full episode, so like shorter topics on there. And we'll also be talking about the shows that we do, uh every Tuesday and Thursday or release. So yeah, and actually we've picked up on a couple of listeners listener male suggestions. Sure we've written on so keep those ideas coming too, because you know, Chuck and I can only do so much, right, So go to go to the

website and look for blogs. It should be pretty easy to find. We'll have a you are all for you very shortly and uh enjoy talk to each other, connect what nicely? Don't show thanks? Okay, So you know what this is, right it listener mail time? Yes it is, yes, it is uh so Josh, this week we heard from a man named Jason divin Ere. You pronounced it? You know, I don't. I've never met him or email palace. He

works for how Stuff Works up in Chicago. Okay, so this is an insider deal, but that's fine because Jason did right. This is about the moon landing episode and whether or not it was faked. Jason is a three time space camper, which is kind of cool. I hope you ribbed them for that. And full time nerd self professed and he said he was excited to see a

podcast about the moon landing. When you were talking about dust on the Moon, he said in the photos video, dust appears to be clouding or kicked up more than dust would be on Earth. This would occur because the particles are airborne longer due to lack of gravity. One six to gravity. By the way, yeah, it's not no growing. What didn't fit was when you insinuated that to recreate this effect on Earth that would require a vacuumized sound stage. Josh,

Apparently the air has nothing to do with it. On Earth, the dust particles will rise and fall at the same rate regardless of the presence of air in the room. The only effect air would have on a falling object to provide resistance when you're dealing with something as small as tiny rocks that make up this dust. Air resistance would be such a small factor it would not be perceptible to the naked eye. So Jason fully geeked out

setis straight. That's awesome. And on that note, with the moon landing, we had a bunch of a bunch of people right in about the MythBusters episode where they tested out some of these theories and they actually shot uh beam of light a laser which guess is a beam of light, uh, and it there are these reflectors that they left on the moon and it bounced back and they saw this, so they pretty much proved absolutely that

we did land on the Moon. And I don't have a list of everyone that wrote in telling us about that show, but it was a lot of folks. Yes, so you haven't marked lots of listeners, yes, thank you. Well, if you want to become Chucks or my email buddy, uh, you can send us an email about anything you like uh at stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. MHM brought to you

by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready are you