Monday 12 March, 2001
Savant Syndrome Switch Off
Australian scientists say that "switching off" parts of the brain can help people tap into hidden genius. The researchers have just completed a study of "savant syndrome", in which people with severe mental disorders can exhibit extraordinary talents in the field of art, music or mathematics.
The study found that healthy volunteers showed similar talents when parts of their brains were temporarily disabled. Corinne Podger, of BBC Science reports.
Savant Syndrome
Savant Syndrome occurs in about one in ten people with the brain disorder autism. It's characterised by dramatic skills related to memory.
In some individuals, these skills are only just above the average compared to healthy people. However in rare cases savants can be capable of astonishing memory feats - performing a complex piece of music after one hearing, or knowing what day of the week it was on any given date in the past or future.
The cause of savant syndrome isn't known, but people with these abilities tend to have damage to the left side of their brains, where functions such as language and social skill processing takes place.
Switching Off
Robyn Young is a professor of Psychology at Flinders University in southern Australia. Working with healthy volunteers, she applied strong magnetic pulses to their brains, to temporarily disable their language and social skills and mimic the symptoms of autism.
With these parts of their brains briefly "switched off", Professor Young says that some volunteers were capable of "savant" abilities.
‘We found that some of the people that we tested were in fact able to demonstrate superior recall, they were able to demonstrate a better sense of pitch and one in particular was able to draw a horse far better than she was normally able to do.’
‘What this suggests to us is that there is something in some people, like a skill such as perfect pitch, but other higher level processing like our language and all our other thoughts that are going on, prevent us from being able to access those skills. By being able to switch off the brain, we can reveal that those talents are there.’
Mental Exercises
Professor Young says her findings may disappoint people who hope they've got a hidden genius for music or mathematics; it seems only a small proportion of human beings have a latent capacity for amazing feats of memory. Young also concedes that magnetic pulsing isn't necessarily the best way to find them.
While the volunteers suffered no lasting effects from having parts of their brains switched off, several reported short-term memory problems the next day. But Professor Young says other methods - such as mental exercises or meditation - could help people to learn how to suppress some areas of the brain, so they might tap into and develop any hidden potential.
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| Rain Man Rarity |
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In the 1988 film Rain Man, actor, Dustin Hoffman portrayed Raymond, an autistic savant with brilliant maths skills.
Savants - people with profound intellectual disabilities who have a "fragment of genius" – are actually quite rare. Experts estimate that there are probably no more than 25 in the world. |
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