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Crossposted from Our Technological Future.KurzweilAI.net posted two interesting articles today. They are both related to intelligence amplification. A Dose Of Genius: Studying with diligent friends is fine, says Heidi Lessing, a University of Delaware sophomore.
But after a couple of hours, it's time for a break, a little gossip: "I want to talk about somebody walking by in the library."
One of those friends, however, is working too hard for dish -- way too hard.
Instead of joining in the gossip, "She says, 'Be quiet,' " Lessing says, astonishment still registering in her voice.
Her
friend's attention is laserlike, totally focused on her texts, even
after an evening of study. "We were so bored," Lessing says. But the
friend was still "really into it. It's annoying."
The
reason for the difference: Her pal is fueled with "smart pills" that
increase her concentration, focus, wakefulness and short-term memory.
As
university students all over the country emerge from final exam hell
this month, the number of healthy people using bootleg pharmaceuticals
of this sort seems to be soaring.
Rare counting ability induced by temporarily switching off brain region: A
minority of people with autism have one or more extraordinary
intellectual talents, such as the rapid ability to calculate the day of
the week for a given date, or to count large numbers of discrete
objects almost instantaneously - they're often called 'autistic
savants' or 'idiot savants'. Now Allan Snyder and colleagues have shown
that by placing a pulsing magnet over a specific area of the brain,
these kind of abilities can, to some extent, be induced in people who
aren’t autistic.
...
For example, before the TMS,
one participant had 20 goes at estimating the number of blobs onscreen,
and each time she was more than 5 away from the true figure. Yet
immediately after receiving the TMS, she made 6 out of 20 guesses that
were within 5 blobs of the true figure. Before TMS, another participant
scored 3 estimates out of 20 that were within 5 of the true figure,
compared with 10 out of 20 immediately after the TMS.
...
The
researchers think that by temporarily inhibiting activity in the left
anterior temporal cortex, the TMS allowed the brain’s number estimator
to act on raw sensory data, without it having already been
automatically grouped together into patterns or shapes. In other words,
they believe it caused the 'normal' brain to function more like an
autistic 'savant' brain. “We argue that it removes our unconscious
tendency to group discrete elements into meaningful patterns, like
grouping stars into constellations, which would normally interfere with
accurate estimation”, the researchers said. “By inhibiting networks
involved in concepts, we may facilitate conscious access to literal
details, leading to savant-like skills”.
I wouldn't mind having my own intelligence amplified a little...
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