March 3, 2009 • 20 mins
When Allan Snyder discovered that transcranial magnetic stimulation produces strange cognitive changes, he believed he'd stumbled upon a "creativity-amplifying machine." Learn more about the real-life thinking cap in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and guess who's with me?
That would be Mr Charles W. Chuck Bryant, who, based
on his headwear Today has Headwear Choice Today, apparently has
(00:23):
joined the Cuban Revolution, Right, is that correct? US Friday
Hat Day? So I'm doing my best Fidel Castro. Yeah,
va shay. It's called a combat cat. Feel like that.
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
(00:44):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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
(02:37):
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,
(03:00):
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,
(03:20):
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
(03:42):
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
(04:02):
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
(04:24):
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
(04:45):
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.
(05:06):
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
(05:29):
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
(05:50):
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
(06:11):
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.
(06:32):
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,
(06:53):
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
(07:14):
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,
(07:37):
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
(07:59):
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
(08:19):
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
(08:41):
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
(09:06):
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
(09:27):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:11):
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,
(10:33):
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
(10:54):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:39):
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
(12:00):
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,
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
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
(13:03):
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
(13:23):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:08):
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
(14:30):
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,
(14:51):
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
(15:13):
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
(15:36):
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.
(16:01):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:43):
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
(17:04):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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,
(18:10):
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
(18:33):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:14):
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
(19:35):
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,
(19:57):
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
(20:19):
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready are
you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and guess who's with me?
That would be Mr Charles W. Chuck Bryant, who, based
on his headwear Today has Headwear Choice Today, apparently has
(00:23):
joined the Cuban Revolution, Right, is that correct? US Friday
Hat Day? So I'm doing my best Fidel Castro. Yeah,
va shay. It's called a combat cat. Feel like that.
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
(00:44):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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
(02:37):
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,
(03:00):
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,
(03:20):
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
(03:42):
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
(04:02):
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
(04:24):
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
(04:45):
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.
(05:06):
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
(05:29):
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
(05:50):
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
(06:11):
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.
(06:32):
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,
(06:53):
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
(07:14):
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,
(07:37):
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
(07:59):
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
(08:19):
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
(08:41):
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
(09:06):
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
(09:27):
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
(09:49):
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
(10:11):
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,
(10:33):
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
(10:54):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:39):
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
(12:00):
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,
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
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
(13:03):
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
(13:23):
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
(13:46):
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
(14:08):
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
(14:30):
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,
(14:51):
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
(15:13):
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
(15:36):
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.
(16:01):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:43):
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
(17:04):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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,
(18:10):
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
(18:33):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:14):
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
(19:35):
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,
(19:57):
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
(20:19):
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready are
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