Concordiensis

Issue date: 1/22/09 Section: Sci/Tech

Some of you may be familiar with philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard's view that the progression of science and technology will result in a world in which nations will fight over information instead of territory (if you fought for a last copy of this Concordy, perhaps you can relate to this idea), and that learning will no longer be associated with teaching, but with the transmission of knowledge via computers. Thirty years after the book possessing these ideas (The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge) is published, I see this vision as being realized in the research that is underway on autistic savantism. What role do savants play in cognitive enhancement and the evolution of learning, you ask? About 10% of the autistic population display "savant skills", which is defined by researcher Darold Teffert as "a rare, but spectacular, condition in which persons with various developmental disorders, including autistic disorder, have astonishing islands of ability, brilliance or talent that stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to overall limitations". Savants are capable of playing piano beautifully and transposing pieces without any training, creating magnificent drawings at very young ages, calculate which day of the week a past date was (one set of twins could calculate dates 40,000 years in the past or future), while some can multiply very large numbers in their heads, or, for example, instantaneously count spilled matches on the floor. One savant named Eric, whom I am particularly jealous of, could find the spot in a room full of speakers where sound waves hit his ears at exactly the same time. Researcher Allan Snyder, who is director of the center for the mind at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, is perfecting a technology called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in hopes of giving non-savants abilities such as these. More on how this works later. First let's contrast the brain of a person with normal cognitive function and someone with autism. It is thought that autism originates early in development; while a healthy infant's brain is quickly making connections, an autistic infant's brain makes these essential connections in an arbitrary manner. This results in a disjointed view of one's environment; they see the individual components rather than the whole. People with normal cognitive functioning see the whole picture so clearly that they are unaware of the individual details the brain had analyzed in order to compose it. This absence of a mental processor in autistic savants allows them to recall abundant detail and focus on a single activity for an extended period of time. The object of Allan Snyder's research is to disable this mental processor in people with normal cognitive function so that they too can access the undeciphered components of their world. If this technology comes into use, it would raise many philosophical questions about the way in which we understand our environment; should we understand our world at the very basic level, i.e. face recognition and distinguishing between a circle and a ball (things that the autistic have trouble with) or grasp instantly the complexities of our world which otherwise would take years of training. In other words, possessing a beautiful new understanding of the world would require sacrificing the mental processes that allow us to connect with and relate to each other (autistic savants have very limited social abilities). Snyder's TMS could give us access to abilities like those mentioned above by using magnetic fields to disrupt neuronal firing to disable our conceptual brain machinery. In one trial including 17 volunteers, neuronal activity was inhibited in the frontotemporal area of the brain, and volunteers were asked to perform tasks that autistic savants are inclined towards, such as horse drawing and multiplying. The 5 volunteers whose frontotemporal areas were successfully targeted displayed improvement in these tasks, though not to savant levels. Snyder's research also shows that drawing exercises can also temporarily shut down conceptual machinery, and hopes that we will someday be able to watch our own brain waves and learn to control them, shutting down parts we don't need in order to see the problem at hand more clearly. This could be especially helpful to engineers and scientists by giving them multiple viewpoints on a project-and this improvement alone has startling implications as to the progress of science and technology that Lyotard so astutely envisioned.

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