For the last century or so, doctors thought the brains of savants were alien, and their feats of marvel were off-limits to the rest of us. Savants were simply born that way. But the transition of the dementia patients and others suggests that might not be true. Their change came on as parts of their brain were turned down. They did not learn to paint and draw in such strikingly different ways, their ability to do so was released from inside. Brain scans of acquired savants seem to confirm no idle region of their brain springs into life, no part of that apocryphal unused 90 per cent of the brain holds their secret. We all have the same equipment; it’s just some people use it differently. And, handily for neuroenhancement, this hidden brain equipment can do much more than paint and draw. Many other savant skills can be released by a bang on the head.
Orlando Serrell, for example, was ten years old and playing baseball with friends when, racing towards first base, he felt a flash of pain and fell to the ground. Flung by a playmate, the solid ball had struck him high on the left side (the left, again) of his head. Life changed for Orlando that day. It became a lot more memorable.
Orlando had a bad headache for days and, as it eventually subsided, he developed a powerful memory and could recall with remarkable detail the events and weather of every single day since his accident. And something else was different. The youngster found he could identify the day of the week from any date.
The effect continues today. Throw a random date at him, as long as it was after when the injury occurred – 17 August 1979 (a Friday) – and Orlando can reply instantly with the day, and with a moment’s thought, the weather. It’s a skill called calendar calculation and one Orlando says is neither welcome nor any effort to perform. He does not know how he recalls the information, he says, it just comes to him. And he insists he has not studied and learned the details he can recall. He has better things to do, he says, than spend hours looking at old calendars and weather reports.
Then there is Louise, an American woman who fell heavily while skiing on a slope ‘covered in moguls in fading flat twilight’ and broke her collarbone and banged her head. She was diagnosed with moderate concussion and, she said, ‘over the following weeks, shit got weird’. Louise found she could remember too much. She could recall and recreate with extraordinary detail the floor-plan of every building she had ever been through – the rooms, doorways, corridors, everything.
‘This applies only, however, to static spaces. I can tell you what was in the vending machine at the rest stop off the 530 between Little Rock and Texarkana, because it’s a fixed point. I remember what was in there when I was there. It’s because of this that I still (much to my chagrin) will put my keys down in the wrong place, and forget where they are, since they are no longer at their fixed point.’
These examples fit the pattern: some kind of damage rewires the brain and triggers a more concrete-based processing. But they also introduce something new: the ability to recall concrete details stored in the brain from years before, which would never otherwise have come to conscious attention. They were buried in the subconscious, and it’s the subconscious that seems to offer the secret to mental phase transitions.
The only way we can explain Louise’s knowledge of all those buildings and Orlando’s accurate recall of weather from days long gone is that their brains had stored the information somewhere without their knowledge. And then the blow to their heads opened the store and made its contents available to their conscious mind.
We all have a subconscious store of accumulated concrete information – names, faces, and the answer to a crossword clue on the tip of your tongue released only when you think about something else. The subconscious can sound mysterious, and in some ways it is, but there’s nothing unusual about the brain storing information, even important information, in there – it leaves conscious attention free to attend to more urgent matters.
Some of this concrete information buried in our subconscious we have deliberately learned, from multiplication tables to the dates of battles and birthdays. But some goes directly from our senses into our subconscious without us ever being aware of it.
Our senses, after all, are constantly bombarded with sights, sounds and sensations and, to stay alive and thrive, it’s important for the brains of all animals to be able to filter these stimuli, to discard the irrelevant and bring to attention the most important. That can’t be done instantly, so the brain needs a way to store information while it sorts through it. That’s called sensory memory, and it tends to hold stuff for just a few seconds. The most obvious example is when children swirl lit sparklers around in circles at firework displays. The trace of light you see left behind isn’t there – it’s held and presented for your attention by your sensory memory, but only briefly. Most of the information put into the sensory memory is discarded without us ever being consciously aware of it. But the experiences of Louise and Orlando suggest that some of it gets filed away somewhere, and that it can be retrieved.
When I tell people I am writing a book about how a bang on the head can release mental skills from the subconscious, and how scientists are seeking ways to improve intelligence and cognitive abilities, almost all of them mention to me the same example: they heard about or watched a programme on a man or woman who wakes from an accident and can speak a foreign language.
Sadly, that kind of change is impossible. As mysterious as sudden gains of ability in the brain can appear, they must remain rooted to reality and personal experience. Detailed knowledge and expertise of a previously unknown subject, like a foreign language, can’t simply spontaneously appear, or be planted, in someone’s brain. If I have never studied it then a bang on the head won’t make me be able to speak Russian, any more than it could grant me the skills and knowledge to fly a helicopter.
But it could make me sound like I speak Russian, and this is almost certainly where the stories come from. It is not a foreign language people acquire in these circumstances, but a foreign accent. This strange switch was first identified more than a century ago when the French neurologist Pierre Marie encountered a stroke patient from Paris who started to talk like he came from the Alsace region. Dozens of similar cases have been reported since, from Americans who talk ‘posh’ like the British, to a woman from Portsmouth who picked up what sounded to her friends like a Chinese accent. It’s called Foreign Accent Syndrome and despite the air of mystery with which examples are presented in media stories, there is usually a mundane explanation.
The answer is not why the new accent emerges, but how it does. Neuroscientists and linguists think the accent is a speech impediment. When most impediments emerge, often after a stroke, the speech is often slurred or broken. In some cases the changes in emphasis – cadence, pitch and rhythm – is mild and specific enough to sound to us like those of an existing accent. But this is a total coincidence – the connection to the foreign country is made in our brains, not in the speaker’s.
In a related syndrome, a recovering person does start to speak a different language, but the explanation here is equally plain. In these cases, the speaker knew the language already, but spoke it less often or had not done so for some time – rarely enough at least for those around them to be quoted as ‘baffled’ about the new, and to them incomprehensible, vocabulary the affected person comes out with.
New abilities to speak foreign languages may be a red herring, but there are plenty of just as bizarre, real, and well-documented examples of novel skills, sensations and behaviours that do emerge from the subconscious brain, usually when it’s under some kind of stress. Some of these offer some clues on how extra intelligence might be found and accessed. They’re called experiential experiences. And most of us have some experience of this type of glitch in the matrix. Probably the most widely known experiential experience is the feeling of deja-vu.
Science on experiential experiences sometimes gets hijacked to promote the claimed existence of spiritual and religious experiences. But the literal meaning of the word experiential – learned through observation and experience – shows what scientists think is going on. From time to time, stuff stored away in the brain’s archives and data banks, like ancient memories and sensations, forces its way to the front of the mind. Given those archives can conceivably contain anything we have seen, done or thought, experiential experiences pulled from the contents of even the most average of lives can get pretty weird. That’s the case with one of the most well-recorded examples of an experiential encounter: the near-death experience.
The near-death experience is a good example of the way the study of a genuine psychological occurrence has been commandeered by those with a religious agenda. People recover from near-fatal accidents and surgery with stories of seeing angels, for example, and these stories are pounced upon and celebrated by groups who want to believe – and want others to believe – angels are real and waiting for them.
Because of this, reports of other, what may well be genuine, near-death experiences tend to be dismissed, or at the least, viewed with hyper-scepticism. Talk of tunnels of light, voices of deceased relatives and feelings of calm, which would not raise a single sceptic’s eyebrow if reported in a dream, are bundled with claimed glimpses of heaven as fiction when someone talks of them after they pull back from the brink of dying.
Yet, stripped of the religious interpretation, many reported near-death experiences make rational sense, especially given the chaos unfolding in the brain at the time. Indeed, one is so commonly reported it has become a cliché: the ‘my life flashed before my eyes’ moment.
The nineteenth-century Swiss geologist Albert Haim once had a severe fall while climbing a mountain. Convinced at the time he was going to die, he said later: ‘I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance’.
Scientists call this a life review. When people report a near-death experience, they typically say it included a life review, which can appear to them as a movie, a series of still images or even just one or two flashes. The events can flow in chronological order, or run in reverse and finish in childhood. The life review in a near-death experience is a quirk of memory, an unprompted retrieval to consciousness of specific incidents and events, often for the first time since they occurred for real decades before.
Intriguingly, a similar sensation to the life review is described as a symptom of their condition by many people with epilepsy, often during the ‘aura’ phase of increasing electrical activity in the brain before a seizure takes hold. These flashes of memory can be terrifying and distressing, partly because they seem to emerge from nowhere. One epilepsy sufferer describes them coming after a seizure:
I have strange memory flashes for a few days. Random memories, sometimes from long ago, relating to nothing that I am doing, saying or even thinking will just flash in my mind out of nowhere, like a three-second video clip.
Another says distinct memories signal a seizure is coming:
If I hear the theme to The Brady Bunch or The Jetsons all garbled, with the smell of pizza from the lunch room in second grade, I’m going down. Light distortion and Peter Brady. I hear teachers. Why? The pizza taste overwhelms my mouth and I stiffen like a board. Only one side of me, my stomach flips like I’m on a rollercoaster and then I go limp while exhaling. Then black out. If it’s just an image flash, somewhere I’ve been as a kid, usually during second grade, I’ll get sleepy standing up . . . My emotions can change with the memory. Deep sadness, my granny’s funeral, like I’m there. Happiness too.
These retrievals of memories and images in patients with epilepsy do not have to come at random. Scientists have found a way to prompt them with electrical stimulation.
As part of surgical treatment for epilepsy, neurosurgeons implant a series of thin wires deep into the brain, which can be used to pass small electric currents into the surrounding tissue, with the resulting effects mapped using a series of conducting pads on the outside of the skull.
A man in his thirties was having this done by neuroscientists in Philadelphia when, as they pressed the switch to stimulate his brain, he told them: ‘I’m remembering stuff from high school . . . Why is this stuff suddenly popping into my head?’ It happened every time they sent the current into that section of his brain, including when he came back to see them two weeks later.
Brain surgeons at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore had a similar experience with one of their epilepsy patients. In his case, the scientists could bring to his conscious mind one of four separate memories, depending on the location of the electrodes in the man’s head they turned on. One pair of electrodes triggered the theme song from The Flintstones television show, which he had watched as a child. A different electrode pair brought back the memory of baseball commentator Richie Ashburn (who died in 1997) reporting a Philadelphia Phillies game, while another made him hear a familiar female singer, who he couldn’t name. The final electrode pair triggered a strong memory of the Pink Floyd song ‘Wish You Were Here’.
These are not one-off experiences. A large study by scientists in the south of France showed that of 180 patients with epilepsy given brain stimulation there in the early and mid-1990s, sixteen of them reported a side effect the researchers defined as ‘dreamy states’ – including the vivid recall of memories. When these people did have a flashback, it was not always welcome. One woman had repeated memories of a gas mask used to knock her out when she had her tonsils out aged fourteen. She saw a bald man dressed in black coming towards her and felt she was going to die.
In the last decade or so, psychiatrists and neuroscientists have started to use deep electrical stimulation to treat more conditions (in areas beyond the reach of DIY brain stimulation, such as the nucleus accumbens). It’s used mostly to control the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But, given the lack of options to treat many psychiatric disorders, it’s increasingly used to tackle conditions like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And this electrical stimulation has also produced some odd side effects.
Clinical reports of such side effects show a huge range of human observations and experiences can be dragged from the brain with deep brain stimulation: memories and the sensation of reliving a past experience, a feeling someone is nearby, mirth and laughter, uncontrollable crying, tastes, smells, warmth, chewing, bliss and increased motivation. All can be turned on and off with an external switch.
Just like the novel skills shown by the acquired savants like Pip Taylor, these sensations do not seem to be planted or introduced by the current, but released and activated. And besides memory and recall, other changes triggered by deep brain electrodes closely mirror those seen naturally in patients who suffer brain trauma. They can produce speech changes similar to those in foreign accent syndrome. A patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder in Holland given electric current to the brain shocked his wife when his voice took on a ‘very distinguished’ pronunciation and he began to use ‘unusually distinguished’ language. He started to ask for the public toilet rather than the loo.
A second OCD patient in Holland went in the opposite direction. His deep brain stimulation made him adopt, for the first time in his life, the accent common to his local region, and when the current was flowing he would, to his and everyone else’s surprise, swear and use coarse language.
Perhaps most dramatically, neuroscientists have used deliberate electrical brain stimulation to make people involuntarily toggle between different languages as they speak. One man started to count in French and then – zap – he continued in Chinese. Another Frenchman could be made to switch to English and then – zap – back again. Neurosurgeons in Italy made a Serbian woman talk in Italian to them. (All of these patients, of course, already knew how to speak the second language. Again, the behaviour is not introduced by the brain stimulation but released from the subconscious.)
The subconscious is more than a passive store of information. It has its own processing power that can be harnessed. Psychologists have long argued about exactly what this subconscious processing is capable of. They disagree over the relative ability of the conscious and unconscious mind to make decisions, for example.
One thing they thought they could agree on was the subconscious was less advanced than conscious processing. Non-conscious thinking could respond to stimuli, recognize objects, carry out familiar movements and recall basic facts. But more complex mental processes – planning, logical reason and combining ideas, the hallmarks of intelligence – were believed to require attention and so conscious thought. The conscious mind was smart and the subconscious mind was dumb.
That view was challenged in 2012, when scientists showed people could work out basic maths problems and read and analyse sentences without being consciously aware they were doing either. Their brains were finding answers to intelligence tests these people did not even realize they had been asked.
To investigate, the scientists used a technique called continuous flash suppression, in which pairs of special glasses present different images to each eye. Volunteers had their right eye bombarded with vivid and colourful and rapidly changing shapes. (They are called Mondrian patterns because they draw on the appearance of paintings by the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian.) Meanwhile, their left eye was shown a series of simple arithmetic sums – such as what is eight plus seven plus three.
In these tests, the visual stimulus of the shapes to the right eye is so distracting it takes the conscious mind several seconds to even realize the left eye is shown something different. Before this could happen, the scientists took the images away. The volunteers had no conscious knowledge of the maths question at all. Yet, without them knowing the numbers were there, their subconscious was busy working out the answer.
After the images were turned off, the scientists flashed up a number to both eyes, and asked the volunteers to shout it out as quickly as possible. When the flashed number was the same as the answer to the sum – eighteen in the above example – the scientists found the volunteers said it significantly quicker, suggesting their subconscious had worked out the answer and primed them with the number.
The same thing happened with words. In a follow-up experiment, the scientists swapped the maths for a simple sentence. Some statements made sense, for example ‘I made coffee’, and some didn’t, like ‘I ironed coffee’ and ‘the window got mad at her’. This time the researchers left both stimuli running into both eyes, and asked the volunteers to say when the sentence – nonsense or sensible – popped into their head. They were looking for when the subconscious processing of the sentence produced a result flagged to the conscious mind.
The scientists thought the subconscious mind would call attention to the incongruous statements earlier, because the semantic violations they contained were surprising. They were right. These statements popped into the heads of the volunteers significantly faster. The scientists say this shows the subconscious minds of their volunteers were busy reading and working through the semantic meaning of the sentences, even while their conscious awareness was dominated by the colourful shapes. This would seem to support a popular explanation for savant skills: that they can dig into a type of subconscious processing denied to the rest of us. And it means that one way to seek neuroenhancement is to target these regions.
The principle that the unconscious mind can be triggered so it affects conscious activity is called subliminal priming, and it’s pretty controversial. Subliminal advertising – flashing brief brand names and images – is banned in many countries and musicians from the Beatles to Judas Priest have been accused of planting hidden messages in songs.
Some subliminal priming seems little more than pranking and mischief making. If you can get hold of an old VHS copy of the Disney film The Rescuers and pause it around the 38-minute mark, when rodent heroes Bianca and Bernard fly past a building in a sardine box tied to the back of Orville (of Albatross Air Charter Service), then you can see – just – an image of a topless woman in one of the windows. The 1980s BBC show The Young Ones would regularly flash up random subliminal images – a frog in one episode and a skier in another – for no apparent reason, other than it seemed like a laugh and it would annoy people.
Subliminal priming annoys people in science too, mainly when they can’t reproduce the findings of studies that claim, for example, that hearing words linked to the elderly, such as ‘retirement’, makes people walk, like old people, more slowly. Many studies in social psychology that have reported these kinds of effects are now under renewed scrutiny. There’s no doubt subliminal priming can and does occur in specific circumstances; the question is how closely stimuli can be mapped onto specific behavioural responses given what else is going on both outside and inside the brain.
Scientists do agree that the subconscious mind can recognize patterns, even when the conscious mind is unaware of them. Some of the earliest experiments to show this were carried out at the University of Tulsa in the 1980s and 1990s. Volunteers, including a set of PhD students, were shown thousands of images that flashed briefly on a computer screen one after the other. They saw a simple grid, two squares wide and two squares high. In one of the four boxes was a letter or number and the volunteers simply had to press a key to indicate which – top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right. The target moved each time, seemingly at random.
However, the scientists had hidden an underlying rhythm in the sequence – the target moved around according to a set pattern. And unknown to the volunteers, their subconscious was learning it. The more they stared at the screen and pressed the buttons, the quicker and more accurate they got. Towards the end, the scientists threw down a googly and changed the imperceptible sequence. Sure enough, the responses slowed and more mistakes crept in.
Interviewed afterwards, not one of the volunteers was aware of the pattern they had learned and followed. Even more striking, they still couldn’t find it when the scientists showed them the sequence of images as stills, and invited them to spot it. Their conscious mind could not match their unconscious ability to process the concrete information flooding into their eyes.
The same mechanism might explain the cocktail party effect – how you tune in immediately to a separate conversation when you hear your name mentioned. Your unconscious mind is constantly processing all the sounds it hears, but keeps them from your conscious awareness so you are not overwhelmed. Only when something is pertinent – like your name spoken by your boss half a room away – is it flagged for your attention.
Psychologists who have explored how these unconscious abilities vary between people say it does not seem to match differences in conscious intelligence – g, or proxies including IQ. People with higher IQs, in other words, aren’t any better at unconsciously tracking and detecting patterns. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, they argue. Unconscious intelligence probably predates humans, and so relies on brain circuitry and regions different from conventional cognitive ability.
The way this older, deeper, subconscious brain can identify patterns and perform rudimentary calculations – and how some savants can access this – might combine to explain one of the most enduring and puzzling savant skills: calendar counting.
Calendars look ordered but are irregular, peculiar things. British and American calendars, for instance, miss out most of the first and second week of September 1752. At midnight on 2 September, those nations and others around the world skipped forward to 14 September. The dates that should have come and gone between never happened.
Not that Britain could complain. The loss of those eleven days was all its own doing. It hadn’t been keen on the new Gregorian system of keeping track of time that many other European countries had long switched to because they agreed it was more accurate. Protestant Britain and its Empire, which relied on the older Julian system, refused to adopt what it regarded as a Catholic invention for as long as it could. By the time it admitted the new calendar was better, Britain had slipped so far behind that, when the switch did come, it had to skip forward eleven days.
Then there is the timing of Easter, which jumps around March and April seemingly at random, but is actually calculated according to an ancient formula that places it on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. And leap years, of course, have an extra day because they introduce 29 February.
Calendar-counting savants can navigate all of this complexity. Among the best were a pair of twins in New York, George and Charles, who could name the day of any date some 40,000 years into the past or future. And, like most savants, they did not seem to consciously work out the answer. They said it just appeared in their head. It was a product of their subconscious processing.
Exactly how savant calendar calculators do it has puzzled psychologists for decades. From observing savants in action, and by timing them on their performance to identify days and dates from the near to the far future, they conclude it is a mixture of memory and calculation skills.
Calendars are peculiar but they have their own rhythms and patterns. There are only fourteen possible templates: 1 January can only fall on seven possible days and it might or might not be a leap year. The whole thing repeats itself every twenty-eight years, so the calendar for 2016 is the same as for 2044 and so on. If certain anchor points – Christmas Day in 2000 was a Monday – can be remembered, this provides a platform to work out the rest.
Mathematicians have produced various algorithms to mimic the calendar-counting skill of savants. One was Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which itself contains many maths references and in-jokes. Another is John Conway, perhaps best known for inventing what is known as Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ – a simple simulation of evolution and development called a cellular automaton, which spawned several generations of life simulation games, such as ‘SimCity’ and the rest.
In theory, most people could learn to use these anchor points and calculations to identify days from dates, at least for a span of a few decades. It takes time to work out the answer this way though – much longer than savants. It also demands plenty of conscious attention, and so it helps to have lots of conventional intelligence. Even among autistic savants, there tends to be a link between the speed and accuracy of their calendar calculation and their IQ.
In the 1960s, a psychologist in Oklahoma who visited George and Charles in New York became determined to work out how they and other calendar-counting savants do it. After much study of calendars he developed his own method and taught it, step-by-step, to one of his brightest postgraduate students. He then told him to go away and practise. The student was called Benjamin Langdon, and he made slow progress at first. Even with multiplication tables provided to ease the mental workload, for the first eight sessions he struggled to work out the correct day. After sixteen sessions, to Langdon’s own amazement, his subconscious intelligence clicked into gear.
A decade later, one of his colleagues recalled:
Despite prodigious practice on Langdon’s part, he could not match the speed of the twins’ operation for a long time. Suddenly, he discovered he could in fact match the twins in speed. Somehow, surprising to Langdon, his brain had automated the complex calculations, had absorbed the table to be memorised with such effectiveness that now . . . he no longer had to consciously go through the various operations.
As his skill developed, so did the student’s reluctance to discuss it, which defeated the purpose of the project, which was to test and report the method. Another colleague said:
One interesting observation that I have always remembered was that when Benj became proficient and was giving rapid answers, he became irritated when he was pressed to tell us how he was doing it. The answer was there and it was not a step by step process for him. The process resembled what we now call implicit memory in that the right answer would be given but could not be explained by specific, explicit memories.
Implicit memory is another term used to describe the smart unconscious – it’s the memory of procedures and habits which are stored and recalled by the brain without us realizing it. We discussed it earlier in the chapter on sports technique.
While many savants, including George and Charles, spend a lot of time examining calendars, they say they do not deliberately memorize them. And they are unlikely to have consciously worked out the algorithms the mathematicians found to identify the days. Their subconscious instead seems to harvest the relationships between the dates and days from the concrete raw details that passes in and out of their sensory memory. More importantly, they have access to the results of this subconscious processing. They can read it off.
If Benjamin Langdon managed to turn his calendarcalculating method into a subconscious task and in doing so developed a savant-like skill, this seems to support the idea other savants make use of these subconscious processes too. Further, it adds to the evidence that every brain has the subconscious capacity to develop savant skills of its own.