Do you have a hidden savant inside your brain?

Savant capabilities seem extraordinary, but what if they aren't? What if we all have amazing talents embedded in our brains? In this episode, Marshall discusses different techniques that have revealed savant-like qualities in ordinary people.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com
where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question,
could you have a savant hidden inside your brain? Savants
have amazing skills. You may have seen them on the

(00:23):
news or in some kind of documentary. For example, they
might have the ability to draw or sculpt an incredible detail.
Or they might have photographic memories that allow them to
recall things just after one exposure to a book or
something like that. Or there's a guy who can recite
pi to twenty two thousand digits for a memory. Any

(00:46):
kind of thing like that seems amazing to normal human
beings because we can't even approach that sort of capability.
But is it possible that we all have some of
these capabilities embedded inside our brains and they're simply lying dormant,
or they're being overshadowed by other parts of our brains.

(01:06):
One of my favorite books of all time is called
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards,
and she gets it this from an interesting angle. Her
book's goal is to teach ordinary people how to draw,
and the way she does it is by teaching the
reader how to turn off the left side of the brain.

(01:27):
So she has this set of exercises in the book
that are designed to get the left side of the brain,
the verbal side of the brain, to shut up so
that the right side of the brain, which can do
the drawing part, can actually do its thing without interruption
from the left side. So, for example, one of her
exercises is to take a line drawing and just turn

(01:49):
it upside down and start sketching the upside down version.
And the idea is that when it's right side up,
the left side of the brain is chunking every thing
symbolically and saying, well, this is an eye and this
is a nose, and then the right side of the
brain can't really see what's going on and gets overshadowed

(02:09):
by this chunking. When you turn off the left side
of the brain by turning the picture upside down so
it can't recognize anything, what you're left with is the
right side of the brain being able to see the
actual line segments they are sitting there on the paper
and being able to copy them, and suddenly you can draw.
You can actually trace that picture, drawing it without actually

(02:33):
tracing it, You're you're seeing what's really there and drawing
what's really there without interruption from the left side of
the brain. It turns out that there's now a more
recent technique that's turning off the left side of the
brain using something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. What that translates
into is high intensity magnetic pulses directed into the left

(02:57):
hemisphere that essentially this able it for a period of
time a few minutes. And when they do that, it
appears that we all do have savant capabilities that are
being overshadowed by the left side of the brain that
go beyond drawing. So, for example, they stimulate someone's brain
with magnetic pulses and this person can now suddenly count

(03:21):
things in the way that an autistic person might be
able to. You might have seen the movie rain Man,
where a box of matches drops on the floor or
something like that, and an autistic person, some with savant capabilities,
can look at it and immediately count how many matches
are there, a hundred or a hundred, fifty whatever. They
see the actual image of what's there and can count it.

(03:44):
So with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a normal person can start
to do something very similar to that in the same
way a normal person can go from memory and draw
a much more accurate picture of a horse, say, then
could be possible with the left side of the brain active.

(04:04):
If you think about it, this is really exciting research
because it means that the idea of a savant is
not unusual. Apparently we all have that stuff sitting inside
our brains, but it's being overshadowed by the symbolic processing
capabilities of the left hemisphere. If scientists can figure out
how to disable the left hemisphere for periods of time,

(04:28):
for example, transcarential magnetic stimulation, does that as just very
short acting. If they could come up with a pill
or a therapy of some kind that could turn off
the left side of the brain and allow you to
turn it back on later on, obviously, then it could
be that we could all tap into these savant capabilities
whenever we want to be sure to check out our

(04:50):
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