Steven Specht wrote: > In Betty Edwards best-selling book entitled "Drawing on the Right Side > of Your Brain", she provides a nice example of drawings produced when > students are given an inverted image as a model. Do any of you know > whether there is research which empirically supports this phenomenon?
Not an answer, but a related piece... In last Sunday's NYTimes Magazine
there is a little article about a guy who claims to be able to make people
creative, temporarily, using magnets to turn off conceptual parts of the
brain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/22SAVANT.html
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
==============================================
(excerpted)
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.
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