Are we all Savants?

Finding the creativity that seems hidden within all of us would have huge effects on human kind. Imagine the ability to tap into your inner creative stores at will to solve difficult problems? What would the world look like without the left side of your brain creating categories for the people you're with? Black, white, Indian, Jamaican, Caribbean, Hispanic, Asian: What if all of these cultural distinctions melted away and we could see people for how they made us feel? This has been the work of Savant expert and educators like Darold Treffert and Allen Snyder. Treffert is the world's resident expert on Savants and Savant syndrome having spent the better part of 30 plus year career covering the enigmatic illness of the mind. But is the holy grail of understanding on the topic activating the Savant within ourselves or is it finding a cure? Here we place Darold Treffert's idea on treating and perhaps curing this curious abnormality of the brain versus Allen Snyder's ideas about augmenting ourselves by unlocking the Savant within us all.

Allen Snyder thinks that we can all be Savants if only for a few moments. That it's the dream of everyone everywhere that there's a way to unlock some special ability you didn't know you had. That, if you can just trick your brain into going one level up ( or down depending on who you ask) there's an entire world waiting for you to discover. He might be right. He and his team at the University of Sydney have discovered a way to induce the Savant state in we mere mortals. The technique is ingenious. By, inhibiting the the processes of the left side of the brain (where categorizing, language and many other high level functions take place) we can trick the brain into shifting most of it's energy to the right side. It gets more complicated from there. You see, the left side of the brain loves to break things up into pieces. It not only categorizes (this is not just a house but it's Jim's house) but prioritizes as well. Why can't you remember the preamble to the constitution? Because it's not as important to you as, say, your immediate job or that brief you had to write this morning or that math problem that you've been trying to figure out a way to solve. Our minds are more a messy room of drawers where the information exist but the accessing

of it is difficult if not impossible. This makes things difficult for the right side of the brain where memory is specific. You might remember everything of one type of thing but you might not be able to remember anything else. The most interesting of us have been born with some natural super highway between the two spheres where not only is their memory holistic and specific but it's easily parsed and prioritized as well. Then there are Savants. Where through some accident of birth or of fate have damaged the left side of their minds and allowed the right side to take over. When this happens, sometimes, brilliant new abilities emerge. Allen Snyder seeks to unlock this in all of us. His hypothesis is, That Savants have privileged access to lower level, less-processed information, before it is packaged in holistic concepts and meaningful labels. Due to a failure in top-down inhibition, they can tap into information that exists in all of our brains, but is normally beyond conscious awareness. (Snyder 2010) He hypothesizes that no matter where or when Savants occur their skills are always limited to the same sectors. Art, music, calendar calculating, arithmetic, and mechanical/spatial skills. (Snyder 2010) Not only are these domains universal but Savants also typically have no idea how they are able to perform these functions. This also applies to people who become Savants at something through some head injury which can only mean one thing. These talents and abilities were there all along. Somehow dormant? Maybe, and Snyder's created a technique called rTMS to try and get to the bottom of it all.

This technique, rTMS, uses a Low-frequencey repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to inhibit the anterior temporal lobe, a region important for semantic processing, conceptual knowledge, labels and categories. ( Snyder, 2010) But there are some problems. A. The technique doesn't work on all people. The results have been moderate at best. Also, the technique wears off very very quickly. How are you to properly use this augmentation if wears off too quickly for you to notice? Thirdly, It's unpredictable. Savants tend to not know or are able to communicate the ways in which they can do the remarkable things that they do. Other than noted Savant Darold Tammet it would appear that the other Savants that have come under observation are not able to comprehend their ability or understand it's broader

implications. The theory has other holes as well. Does rTMS effect other parts of your mind? Can using or being exposed to magnetic stimulation produce unwanted side effects in it's participants? These are points that were brought up to the counter weight to Snyder's studies Darold Treffert and they're questions that we are now going to explore.

Darold Treffert offers a counter perspective to the idea that the abilities that Savant's are provided with are necessarily ideas that can be accessed in all of us. Indeed, it's unclear whether or not these abilities are the result of some sort of talent that simply was not nurtured during our lives because of some kind of pre-conceived idea of what we're supposed to do. In the example of noted acquired Savant Derek Amato he acquired the remarkable ability to play with prodigious ability the Piano after getting into accident where he dived for a football and injured the left side of his head on the shallow bottom below. After he awoke from his coma he soon noticed that he could see things. Namely, he could see notes and his fingers would begin to move. He soon realized or instinctively knew that these notes were that of the piano. All of a sudden and out of nowhere the middle aged South Dakota resident had all of a sudden acquired a genius ability to play the piano. Literally, he sat down and closed his eyes and the notes just appeared before him in a stream of consciousness. How could this be? Treffert has his theories. In his research of Savants including being a consultant on the film Rain Man where Dustin Hoffman played the Savant Kim Peek he's noticed that these new talents don't just arise out of nowhere. Often these abilities have some sort of genetic precedence where some fore father or mother somewhere in that persons past had those sorts of abilities in their own life. So that, even if those abilities didn't exactly manifest themselves during the life of the person before they got into an accident the ability was there. Waiting, laying dormant underneath the surface. The conclusion could be drawn then that not all people have such a talent. Or, that although it's may be true that all people have sort of talent it is not necessarily true that people have sort of latent right brained centric/ artistic ability. Since the right side of the brain normally deals with non verbal, structural processes relevant to abilities where you have to process things

from part to whole instead of whole to part as the left side of the brain does. Also, the right side of the brain facilitates creativity by allowing a person to see things without prejudice and without comparing it to previously accepted phenomena. Therefore, the dots are just dots. They are not already a picture created and thus can be anything you want them to be. While this ability is coveted it is not necessarily a talent that is seen in all people. Nor should they be.

And, that says nothing of the risks involved with using some sort of magnetic stimulation to acquire Savant like abilities. Namely, we have no idea what happens if these participants are subjected to the treatments for long periods of time. But there are some theories on the subject. Dr. Snyder postulates that the treatment would probably have the same sorts of side effects that people who are Savants themselves exhibit including a reduction in language ability and the ability to communicate along with the ability to perform the sort of complex identifications that the left side of the brain dominates as in, 'That house is not Jane's house but John's house.' Or, I would postulate, the famous barn-facade experiment postulated by Goldman in 1976. You would not be able to tell something that appeared to be what you thought it was from something that is actually what you thought it was. These processes are terribly important to our everyday lives and the ability to induce Savant like abilities in people who are traditionally cognitive would appear to be a secondary concern than to what the effects of the treatments might be.

Which brings us to our next point. Although I, personally, agree that the effects of rTMS are detrimental to everyday life it might be a great way of showing people what the world might look like if they are not clouded by the methodologies that inhibit them from seeing the dots (if you will) in new found ways. Separate from the idea that this treatment may unlock abilities within us is another idea. The idea that all of us have the ability to see ourselves as just a dot instead of a particular kind of dot. Imagine what that would do to the idea of racism, sexism, ageism and all of the other prejudices that I'm

postulating based on the different ideas about the hemispheres of the brain are built on. Do the distinctions created by the left of the brain limit us in seeing the potential of the whole? This idea is one that needs to be addressed I think. From Savantism we could potentially learn that even the most die hard racist or prejudiced individual could potentially see the world differently if they weren't so left-brain dominated. That, it's possible then for people to change. This sort of idea is, to me, a monumental one. The idea that within us is the possibility to see the world completely differently and not only is that change existential ( as in the idea of the mind) but it's underpinnings are biological in their very nature. That, thoughts can change things. This is the most interesting part of the debate for me. Not the ability to come in to some sort of ability ( considering you probably need to have some sort of predilection for that ability according to Treffert) but that even the most staunch, stubborn, most set in their ways person can be opened. Hopefully it doesn't take a bump on the head to do it.

In conclusion, the ways in which we interact with our environment continue to be mysterious and as each layer of the onion is peeled back we find even new questions to answer. Savants and how they interact with the world and their abilities is but one way to try and peel back the curtain of the nature of our existence. That, Savant like abilities can potentially be temporarily stimulated in some us through rTMS is promising and as unknown as the nature of it's complications might be I can't help but be excited at the prospect that not only might there be unknown genius lying dormant inside us but there might also be unknown compassion and understanding inside us as well.