Stuff You Should Know - Could a 'thinking cap' make me a genius?

Episode Date: March 3, 2009

When Allan Snyder discovered that transcranial magnetic stimulation produces strange cognitive changes, he believed he'd stumbled upon a "creativity-amplifying machine." Learn more about the real-life thinking cap in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit bona.com slash Bona Clean. On the new podcast, The Turning Room of Mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Balangene. He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you,

only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like, he was a god. Listen to The Turning Room of Mirrors on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and guess who's with me? That would be Mr. Charles W. Chuck Bryant, who based on his headwear today, his headwear choice today, apparently has joined the Cuban Revolution. Is that correct, Chuck? It's Friday Hat Day, so I'm doing my best Fidel Castro. Yeah, with my app. It's called a combat cap, you know. It is. It's very cool. It's very cool,

Chuck. You want to know something cooler? Yes. Okay, so actually, I don't know if cool is the right word. Maybe horrific is a better word. Okay. There is a study conducted here in the States, and of course, you know, the United States, like most other countries, have a long history of, you know, well-meaning, but really misplaced medical experiments or right psychological experiments, like giving LSD to unsuspecting Americans, which we've talked about. Right, exactly. This one was a little different. This one involved separating twins who were up for adoption at birth in the state of New York. And there were, I think, 13 sets of twins in one set of triplets, and they were all separated through this one adoption agency as part

of a study of nature versus nurture. Oh, yeah. So like the only thing the adopting parents knew was that their kid was part of an ongoing child psychology study. Right. And so these researchers were allowed access to these kids over their lifetimes. And then it went from the 60s to, I think, 1980. And the guy who was running the show, his name was Peter Neubauer, right? He was a child psychologist. He apparently realized that if he were to publish this study, basically he'd be lynched, right? Right. That by the time 1980 rolled around, people didn't think too highly of separating twins, like the ethics of experimentation had changed enough. Not based on the results, just based on the fact that he did this to begin with. That he under, yeah, right. Sure. So basically

what he did was take all of the research he had the study, it was ready to be published, and he sealed it, and it cannot be opened until 2066. Really? And it's sitting in the archives at Yale University. I imagine 2066, he imagined he'd be long dead by then. Right. So in 2066, we're going to find out a lot about nature versus nurture. I will be long dead, but you might. I'm supposed to make it to 2041, as you know. That's what your death clock said. The death clock says so. I don't think so. I'll be long dead. Yeah. I've got my biggest odds are against that. Right. Yeah. So, okay, so Chuck, that's an example of a really terrible experiment. Yeah. Right? For sure. Have you heard of savants, autistic savants? I have indeed. You have. Okay. They actually

provide a much less horrible natural experiment, perfect natural experiment, to study the brain. Right. Okay. You want to talk about savants for a second? Because I'm going to explain later how they make this perfect experiment. Sure, Josh. You know, autistic savants are people who are mentally deficient in some areas, but excel in others. Like a lot of times, I know there's that kid that plays the piano. Have you seen him, the jazz trio? I have not. He's 15 or so now, and when he first started playing, he was really young and very advanced musically. So, and he's autistic savants. So, that's one good example. Yeah. Music comes out a lot in savantism. There's a guy named Blind Tom. He was this African American guy at the turn of this last century. Not hippy Rob.

Or not hippy Rob. No, Blind Tom. And he was severely autistic. And he could play pretty much any piece of music that he heard once on the piano. Interesting. Well, it's autistic savants. It's different than autism, though, aren't those two? Sure. Not everybody who is a savant is autistic, and not everybody who's autistic is a savant. Correct. So, there is like, yes, that's a good point. There is a very, I guess, a subgroup called Autistic Savants. And perhaps the most famous savant is a guy named Kim Peek. Rain Man? Rain Man. Is that what they call him? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. He's the real Rain Man is what they call him. Oh, my father just made that up. No, no, you were dead on, Chuck. You have an amazing intuition. Maybe I'm a savant. Yeah, maybe,

I don't think so. But maybe. I'm terrible at math, so I doubt it. Yeah, that comes into play, too, as well. But Kim Peek is this guy who, the guy who wrote Rain Man, Barry Morrow met in 1984. And in 1988, the movie came out. So he was very much based on Kim Peek. Did not know that. Yeah, the guy can, if you tell him your birthday, your birth date, tell you what day of the week you were born on. He apparently has read 12,000 books around that around that. He started reading and memorizing things at 14 months. Wow. But he has severe brain damage, developmental brain damage, so he can't like button his own shirt. Right. He can't care for himself. Luckily, he's got a really good dad who cares for him. Sure. But the cool thing about this story is

after Barry Morrow won an Oscar, he gave it to Kim Peek. Oh, did he write the screenplay? Yeah. Ah. And so Kim Peek carries it around everywhere he goes. I would, too. Yeah. Isn't that cool? Yeah, it's awesome. All right. So the reason why savant and there have been some really spectacular ones throughout the ages provides such a great natural experiment for us to investigate the brain is because they, most of them, they almost exclusively have left damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. Right. And, you know, just the very fact that they can excel in math but can't button their own shirts, it provides this kind of certain framework to compare the rest of our brains to. Right. Right. You know, it's an excellent comparison.

Right. And the left side is more about detail, correct? And the right side is more about the big picture. Do you love the lateralization of brain function, don't you? I do. Well, I like the brain period because it's still so mysterious, you know. It's amazing how little we know still about the brain. Yeah. It's amazing and disconcerting. Yes, at the same time. I predict the next 50 years are going to see tremendous advances in our understanding of the brain, in part because of the study of savant, right? Right. In 1968, five black girls, dressed in oversized military fatigues, were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform

school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, and they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mt. Mays was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare and how those five black girls changed everything. All that on unreformed. Listen to unreformed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God took a walk into the devil's den. The car fells. They just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams' body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island.

Chester would claim he did it all for this CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Listen to Murder in Miami on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah, you were talking about the lateralization of brain function. Yeah, you were right. Left is the detail-oriented side.

Right. And right sees the big picture, right? And so there's some people who are studying savants. And like I said, one of the reasons why they are interesting is because almost all of them have damage in one form or another to the left side of the brain. Right. And even more suspicious is you can maybe get in a car wreck or have a stroke. And if the left side's impaired, people have been known to basically come out of it a savante.

Right. And sometimes autistic savante. Interesting. All right. So one of the people that I'd like to talk about today who's studying savants is Dr. Alan Snyder. Yes, Snyder is I like to call him. He is an expat American who runs the Center for the Mind that's the British Spelling Center in Sydney, Australia.

Esyntra. And he is a very eccentric person. It sounds like it. He really is. But he's been studying savants for years and he has come up with a theory about mindsets. And it's based on the lateralization of brain function. I love it. I love that.

Yeah, the mindset basically his theory is that mindsets are created. They're personal, basically definitions on your experience. Right. So if you see, you know, a bear in the woods. Well, that's a little less common. Let's say a dog in your driveway. You'll note things about the dog that he's furry, that he has a tail. He walks on four legs, that kind of thing.

And your brain kind of stores that away. So next time you don't see a dog, you think, oh my gosh, what is that creature walking? What is that? I've never seen one of those before. Yeah. And he calls these mindsets. Right. So Chuck, when we were basically assaulted with stimuli all times, all the time, raw data,

basically, from like the humming of a fluorescent light to, you know, conversations that we overhear in restaurants, that kind of thing. Colors, actions, tastes, smells. Yeah. We're constantly assaulted with sensory input, right? We have this thing called latent inhibition, which is a brain process. They're still, again, trying to get a handle on. But latent inhibition is basically the process by which we filter out stuff we already know.

Right. So if we can identify, so we're not constantly focused on the buzzing of a fluorescent light. Exactly. You're hearing all the voices in a restaurant. Obviously, that'd be maddening. Right. And actually, as a side note, schizophrenics have very low latent inhibition. Indeed.

So they're constantly assaulted with all of this stuff. But they also have the added horrible side effect of attaching meaning to these snippets of conversation, right? So, specifically, you're hearing voices, and you're not able to externalize or internalize, meaning you can't tell the voices are coming from your head, and you're attaching meaning to them. Right. That schizophrenia. Right.

That's horrible. So it's Snyder's belief, and I'm pretty sure the medical establishment at large is that we're getting all of this raw data. It's being accepted into our right hemisphere, right? Which sees the big picture. Mm-hmm. And it sends it over to the left hemisphere, which processes it into details, which we hang on to.

This interplay between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere creates those mindsets you were talking about, right? Exactly. Which, like you said, is how we can see a dog and come to understand what a dog is. Exactly. Later on, when we see another dog, we just say, oh, that's a dog. Right. Like we kind of categorize things in packets, right?

Sure. So we say all that to say this, if supposedly we have damage to the left side of the brain, the detail-oriented brain, all we're doing is getting raw data, and we're not able to create these mindsets. Exactly. There's this wonderful article by a guy named Lawrence Osburn, and it was in the New York Times in 2003 called Savant for a Day. And he spent the day with Alan Snyder, and the whole article is very long, but it's

definitely worth reading. He chronicles his day with Alan Snyder, and one of the things that Snyder mentions is that some of the savants that he studies, when they come to see him at the center for the mind, they may have been there dozens of times, but they can get lost every single time just because of the change of shadows. Right. It looks different. They're getting different input, right?

That makes sense, sure. So they'll get lost because it doesn't look the same way it did that last time, and they can't form mindsets saying, right, this is the direction I'm going, right? Right. So since people with left hemisphere brain damage tend to be savants, right, or people who are savants have that condition, Snyder has actually come up with a theory that all of us are savants. If you get struck on the head and your left hemisphere is damaged, you could become a

savant. Right. So we're all potential savants. Right. And basically the left side that helps create these mindsets, it pays attention to these details and hangs on to them, are keeping us from being savants. Right. Right.

That's really interesting. So how do you investigate something like this? Well, he uses a process called transcranial magnetic stimulation. He does. But we're going to call it TMS. Yes, it's much easier for our purposes. TMS was originally designed, Josh, to examine brain functions during cranial surgery, and what it does is it focuses magnetic pulses to either suppress or enhance the electrical

functions of the brain. Yeah, it depends on the frequency of the pulses, right? Absolutely. And we were talking privately, and I thought it sounded very relaxing as if your brain was being massaged and disappointed. I was disappointed because you said that you don't feel anything. You're not supposed to feel anything. It sounds very nice to me.

It does kind of, but I think that you could probably get something like what you're describing at Brookstone, maybe, so don't fear. Yeah, that's where you should get it. Sure. Sharper image, perhaps. They're under. Are they? Yep.

Yeah. Anyway, Alan Snyder started using TMS because he found this curious little side effect of people that were getting tested with TMS, had some cognitive malfunctions. Right. So, like speech impediments. Exactly. While this thing was trained on their brain, right? Right, but it also had some, if you put this on an average person, had some pretty cool results.

Yeah, this is what Snyder's been doing. This is his new experiment. Right, and it's very cool. 40% of the people, the normal folks, let's call them, that he exposed to TMS, they displayed artistic and quantitative abilities that they didn't seem to have before. Right. So, right on the money, it seems like it's actually tapping into a part of our brain that we have and we don't use, which sort of backs up his theory.

Right, and some of the things he puts people through, well, he uses TMS on them, which apparently kind of, it looks a lot like a shower cap. Right. It has a bundle of magnetic wires in it. Right, a thinking cap, if you will. Yeah, which is kind of an inaccurate moniker, but an unfortunate one, the press has kind of put on it. Right, they had to label it.

Right, sketchy. You got to. You got to get people to read, right? Yeah. Which is why we used it in the title of the article I wrote, right? Sellouts or something. Yeah. So, depending on where you put it on the skull, it's going to affect that very localized region

of the brain. Right. So, of course, Snyder's interested in training this on the left hemisphere of the brain. Sure. And he's actually using a low frequency, so he's depressing the left brain's function. And reportedly, like you said, 40% of people are showing results. One of the things he likes to get people to do is draw animals. Right.

And apparently, with those 40% who show a reaction to TMS, their drawings tend to get better or more realistic, more lifelike. And Snyder's theory is that this drawing from memory is not based on the preconceived notions that you already have. Right, right. That would come from the left hemisphere of the brain. Curiously, he also has found that ordinary people we're talking about can identify prime numbers from sight.

I love that one. From the field. Yeah. And words, I believe, proofreading, grammatical errors all of a sudden out of nowhere. So over the course of this TMS therapy or whatever, they're getting progressively better at these tasks, right? But only lasts about an hour, though. Is that correct?

Yes. And it may not happen at all. There's an argument out there that if you draw 14 cats in a row, they're going to get better. Right, true. That may or may not be true, but it is pretty interesting data that he's coming up with. And I don't think arguments like that are really putting the kibosh on his investigations using TMS, right? Right, I don't think so.

No. Which, by the way, also, I understand you said has just been approved by the FDA for use in treating depression. So, yeah, Josh, they studied 300 people that had clinical depression in Philadelphia, and they found out that people that underwent the TMS therapy were twice as likely to go into remission. That's awesome. In 1968, five black girls, dressed in oversized military fatigues,

were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, and they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mt. Mays was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy-Rice, and in a new podcast, I investigate how this

reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare, and how those five black girls changed everything. All that on Unreformed. Listen to Unreformed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1980, cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West.

Unleashing a wave of violence. My God took a walk into the devil's den. The car fells, they just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams' body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for the CIA.

Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh no, not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright-Pacheco. Join me for Murder in Miami. Listen to Murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And they're also now, this is just as of last week I think,

are asking for stroke victims to volunteer for studies with TMS. Apparently with depression, if you train it on the frontal lobe I believe, and you put it on a high frequency, they've actually shown that it restructures the brain. Like your neurons are restructured. And of course in the frontal lobe that's where your ability to regulate mood is. Right. So that's just weird but very hopeful. It is.

It makes you wonder if this thing could be the key to making people smarter, curing brain disease. Sure. Yeah. Interesting. So I guess the takeaway from this one is the next time you meet a savant of any kind, and here she tries to impress you with their mathematical or musical skills, you can think to yourself, I could do that too if I had left side brain damage. Sure.

Yeah. You're not so special. Exactly. So Chuck, that would be what's a thinking cap and could it make me a genius? The answer is no, not really. But that's what you would type in if you wanted to go to howstuffworks.com. Right. Indeed.

And I think you had something you wanted to say to everybody. Well, yeah, Josh, this is pretty exciting before we get to listener mail. We are launching a blog, not just UNI, but I believe six or seven blogs on the website. A whole mess of them. A whole mess of them. And they gave UNI, as you know, our own little blog called Stuff You Should Know. Yes. Although the whole entire blog section is called Stuff You Should Know.

Don't get confused. Yes, it is. I hadn't noticed that. Wow. They named it after us. You need to pay more attention. So we would like our listeners to get active. This is a call out to our listeners to get on the blogs.

We're going to be discussing all kinds of cool stuff that isn't long enough to make into a full episode. So like shorter topics on there. And we'll also be talking about the shows that we do every Tuesday and Thursday release. So yeah. And actually we've picked up on a couple of listeners mail, listener mail suggestions. Sure. We've written on.

So keep those ideas coming too because, you know, Chuck and I can only do so much. Right. So go to the website and look for blogs. It should be pretty easy to find. We'll have a URL for you very shortly. Yeah. And enjoy. Talk to each other.

Connect. That's great. What nicely done, Chuck. Thanks. Okay. So you know what this is, right? It's listener mail time. Yes, it is, Chuck.

Yes, it is. So Josh, this week we heard from a man named Jason Divineer. Is that how you pronounce it? Do you know? I don't. I've never met him or email pals. He works for How Stuff Works up in Chicago. Okay.

So this is an insider deal, but that's fine. Sure. Because Jason did write us. This is about the moon landing episode and whether or not it was faked. Right. Jason is a three-time space camper, which is kind of cool. I hope you ribbed him for that. I totally did.

And full-time nerd, self-professed. Yeah. And he said he was excited to see a podcast about the moon landing. When you were talking about dust on the moon, he said in the photos, video dust appears to be clouding or kicked up more than dust would be on earth. This would occur because the particles are airborne longer due to the lack of gravity. One sixth of gravity, by the way.

Yeah. And it's not an upgrade. What didn't fit was when you insinuated that to recreate this effect on earth, it would require a vacuumized sound stage. Josh, apparently the air has nothing to do with it. On earth, the dust particles will rise and fall at the same rate, regardless of the presence of air in the room. The only effect air would have on a falling object is provide resistance.

When you're dealing with something as small as tiny rocks that make up this dust, air resistance would be such a small factor. It would not be perceptible to the naked eye. So, Jason, fully geeked out, set us straight. That's awesome. Yeah, thanks. And on that note, with the moon landing, we had a bunch of people write in about the Mythbusters episode,

where they tested out some of these theories, and they actually shot a beam of light, a laser, which I guess is a beam of light. And there are these reflectors that they left on the moon, and it bounced back, and they saw this. So, they pretty much proved, absolutely, that we did land on the moon. And I don't have a list of everyone that wrote in telling us about that show, but it was a lot of folks. Yeah, so you have it marked lots of listeners.

Lots of listeners. Where the names should be nicely done. Yes, thank you. Well, if you want to become Chuck's or my email buddy, you can send us an email about anything you like at StuffPodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you?

The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, The Turning, Room of Mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Balanchine. He used to say, what are you looking at, dear? You can't see you, only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like he was a god.

Listen to The Turning, Room of Mirrors on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.