10

Genius for All

how we can improve our perception

Kim Peek was an unusual man, although at first it did not seem likely that he would ever come to anything. At birth, his skull was one-third larger than that of other babies, making it too heavy for his neck muscles to support and causing it to flop forward all the time. Although he was not diagnosed with the notorious condition hydrocephalus, Kim’s doctors warned his parents not to hold out much hope for their child’s future development. In fact, they considered him to be a hopeless case, arguing that his disability meant that the best place for him would be a care home.

And indeed, Kim did grow up to be a rather awkward and clumsy child, learning to walk and talk much later than normal and never really learning to do up his own shoelaces and shirt buttons. The boy with the oversized head preferred to spend every day sorting scraps of paper, reacting hysterically when he was disturbed. His age peers considered him a misfit, although that did not seem to concern him much. He lived in a world of his own, first learning to read and then remembering everything he read. His feats of memory were truly amazing!

At the age of four, he was already able to recite the contents of eight volumes of an encyclopaedia almost verbatim. Kim’s father realised that his son would require a very different kind of educational support than normal. He solved crossword puzzles with his son every day and provided him with piles of books and newspapers to read. After Kim was expelled from school for his ‘uncontrollable’ behaviour, he was homeschooled by tutors. The strategy worked, and Kim completed the high-school curriculum by the age of 14. Despite this, his performance in IQ tests was varied at best. Depending on the type of test and the skills it focused on, Kim could score as high as 184 — Einstein — or as low as 72 — cognitive disability.

At a church service when he was 12 years old, Kim recited 40 verses of the Bible, despite the fact that he had never read them and had heard them only once. He began to catch the attention of the public, and talk of the extraordinary young man soon reached Hollywood. He became the real-life inspiration for the title character in the film Rain Man, portrayed by Dustin Hoffman as a strange but likeable autistic man with extreme savant talents, who won the hearts of many a movie-goer. While researching his role, the Hollywood star spent a day with this genius of mental recall and advised Kim’s father, Fran, to show his son’s talents off to a wider audience. This would help the young man come out of his shell and bring some money in, which was sorely needed since, as a single father and Kim’s full-time carer, Fran Peek had no time to hold down a paid job.

Fran was hesitant at first. He believed his son would not feel comfortable outside of his familiar environment. But eventually he began accepting invitations for Kim to attend interviews and thrill audiences at schools and universities with his memory talents. This turned out to have a beneficial side effect: Kim’s social skills improved greatly. The Peeks became a competent father–child team: the child was the performer, the father was the manager, and both benefitted from the arrangement. Despite efforts in the media to paint their relationship as exploitative on the part of Fran, there is no doubt that Kim flourished in the face of the new demands his fame placed on him. And anyway, he was not autistic, despite Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of him as such. He was perhaps ‘weird’ and unable to care for himself without the help of his father, his way of communicating was stilted and rather unorthodox, and he sometimes needed time to himself in order to concentrate on things no other person would be even remotely interested in. But otherwise, he sought out the company of his fellow human beings, hoping to earn their respect and understanding, just as anybody would.

Also, Kim loved to amaze audiences with his spectacular feats of memory. He was able to say spontaneously what day of the week any given date fell or will fall on, and he could give the zip code for any address in the United States. He could recite from memory all the leaders of Germany since Bismarck, and identify all the musical instruments playing a piece of orchestral music after hearing just seconds of a recording. Kim had the contents of a total of 12,000 books stored in his memory. He did not understand much of that information, but he could rattle it off on command. It took him around seven seconds to memorise completely two pages of any book.

Of course, neurologists were curious to know what lay hidden beneath Kim’s oversized skull. Using functional magnetic-resonance imaging, they discovered not only a particularly voluminous cerebrum, but also found that it was almost completely unconnected to the lower levels of his brain. His cerebellum appeared to be unusually small, which might explain Kim’s motor problems. The most striking feature of Kim’s brain, however, was that his corpus callosum, which normally connects the two hemispheres of the brain, was almost entirely missing — and when the two halves of the brain are unable to influence each other and keep each other in check, it may be that information flows unhindered into the consciousness.

All this can only partially explain Kim’s abilities. But it does feed our prejudice that savant syndrome, sometimes called ‘islands of genius’, can only occur when something goes wrong in the brain. This prejudice also allows us to comfort ourselves with the fact that we may not have a brilliant talent, but at least we are not sick in the head.

However, the fact is that only 50 per cent of savants are diagnosed with autism, and among the remaining 50 per cent, there are many people who may seem strange to us because of their very specific talent, but otherwise think in more or less the same way as anybody else. This raises the question of whether any one of us could be at least a little ‘savant’. If we are honest, most of us would often be glad of an ability to remember facts as easily as Kim did and to complete complicated calculations by switching on our brains rather than a pocket calculator. And which of us has never secretly longed for the ability to impress others with some extraordinary talent? It may seem unlikely, but in fact it is not impossible for mere mortals like you or me to develop such an ‘island of genius’ — at least, the possibility is provided by our brain.

Drawing by a three-year-old autistic savant

This excellent artistic drawing of a horse displays an extraordinarily high level of ability for a three-year-old, in one isolated area. Highly developed artistic, memory, or calculation skills are particularly common.

Rapid access to the preconscious

Our team in Tübingen studied the phenomenon of savants and examined autistic people with ‘island of genius’ talents. We discovered that their brains are activated much more quickly than normal when they perceive something. The main areas of the brain that were mobilised were those responsible for ‘pre-attentive processing’, the early, preconscious processing of signals that occurs within the first 100 milliseconds of perception. These areas are distributed throughout the brain, depending on which stimulus pathways are taken. In perceiving acoustic signals, they will be in the auditory cortex on the upper sides of the temporal lobes; for visual signals, they will be in the visual cortex at the back of the cerebrum. Combined stimuli — which are the norm — can activate several areas at once.

What is of more significance, however, is that in the brains of savants, it is not conscious, filtered perception that dominates, but rather preconscious, unfiltered perception. Such people have easier access to that which is currently being filed away in the memory but has not yet become conscious knowledge. However, the next process, which takes place 200–300 milliseconds later, is underdeveloped in autistic savants.

An example from everyday life might help to demonstrate what this means in real terms. Imagine you are driving through town in a car. At a crossroads, the lights suddenly turn red. First, that signal passes through the preconscious level, within 100 milliseconds, which is enough time for you to instinctively assess that stimulus as a sign of potential danger — you immediately slam on the brakes. This results in your car skidding to a halt, and, only then, while the tyres are still screeching, do you consciously register the red light. This is because it takes more time and a wider spread of excitation in the brain for a signal to reach your consciousness, requiring at least 200 and perhaps even as long as 300 milliseconds. You draw a deep breath and sit back in the car seat. That was a lucky escape!

But the lucky thing is that our brain reacts to stimuli and assesses their significance before we are conscious of them. This was useful in the evolutionary fight for survival, and it remains useful to this day. The only difference being that we used to have to beware of wild bears, and now our challenge is to survive the traffic.

The brains of autistic savants have particularly good access to the preconscious. However, this doesn’t mean that they react extremely quickly. On the contrary, they are anything but skilled survivors, and would probably slam on the brakes much more slowly than the rest of us in the red-traffic-light scenario. Yet depending on their particular talent, they might be able to say instantaneously how many red traffic lights there are at the intersection, or how many cars or pedestrians are currently there. Or like ‘Rain Man’, they might know immediately how many matches fell out of the box when the car executed that emergency stop. They may have the ability to count things faster than we can slam on the brakes at a red light. But they lack the filter that allows them to sift the important information from a flood of stimuli — in this case, the information that they should step on the brakes because the light has turned red. Instead, they register unimportant things — or rather: things that seem unimportant to us. And they do this with a degree of perfection that we, in turn, find hard to believe.

One way to put it is that the perception window of savants is more open than ours. On the other hand, they have far fewer windows than we do. Kim Peek was able to rattle off the names of all the World Series baseball players of the past hundred years, but had trouble recognising the faces of the people around him. He also never really learned to clean his teeth, and generally paid little attention to his own health. He died of a heart attack in 2009, at the age of 58. This may have been due to the fact that he was a capacious eater and never physically exercised.

Another savant, the Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevsky was far less fortunate. Due to a brain defect, he was unable to forget anything, no matter how meaningless the memory might be. He was tormented by this, was unable to continue working in his profession, and had to earn a living working as a circus mnemonist. He searched desperately for techniques that would enable him to forget. For example, he tried writing down lists of numbers and burning them — but the numbers just appeared to him on the charred remains of the paper. Solomon eventually descended into depression and delusion. He died in 1958, at the age of 70.

The connection between delusional mental illness and unfiltered perception is borne out by the fact that schizophrenia patients often have photographic memories. It is difficult to define cause and effect in this phenomenon — but there is clearly good reason for a person not to keep their perception window too far open under normal circumstances. This would lead to perception overload.

It is no coincidence that savants are often found to be on the autism spectrum. Autism often brings with it a large number of cognitive, social, and linguistic deficits, leading to the development of only a very limited number of wide-open perception windows, leaving people with autism susceptible to being overwhelmed with too much information.

A little bit savant

However, this is no reason for us not to try to open up our personal ‘savant window’. In our research at Tübingen, we examined both autistic and non-autistic people with a savant ability. We found that their brains functioned in a similar way in terms of priority of perceptions, having similarly rapid access to the preconscious. The EEG readings and MRI results left us in no doubt. However, unlike our autistic test subjects, those without autism were not swamped by this flood of data, but were able to filter out the most important information in a given situation. This demonstrates that ‘islands of genius’ do not necessarily go hand in hand with a severe brain disorder. It also means that it must be possible for those with healthy brains to develop savant abilities, at least to a certain extent.

One way to achieve this makes use of the technique of magnetic brain stimulation. A study carried out by the Spanish-American brain scientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone shows how this can work. His test subjects first listened to a story being read aloud, which they were expected to retell later in the experiment. While they were listening to the story, some subjects had the frontal and temporal lobes of their cerebrum stimulated using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which exposes the brain to a pulsating magnetic field. The other subjects had typical TMS coils attached to their heads, but these were not active, functioning only as a placebo. The result was that those whose brains had been electrically stimulated were able to recall 15 per cent more details when they retold the story.

The Australian researcher Robyn Young used repetitive TMS on her test subjects. This involves ‘firing off’ a rapid succession of magnetic impulses at a rate of 10–20 hertz. She concentrated on the areas of the brain that are responsible for preconscious perception. Five of her 17 test subjects did indeed develop a savant-like ability as a result: they were suddenly able to remember any calendar dates, or they developed surprising new artistic abilities.

It must be remembered that the transcranial magnetic stimulation had no effect on 12 of the 17 test subjects in the Australian study. Another issue is that such procedures smack somewhat of manipulation: someone switches on a machine and alters the person attached to it. This not only raises moral issues but also begs the question of how stable the effects it achieves can be — that is, how long the effects will last after the magnetic coils are removed from the subject’s head.

More attention through meditation

Other ways of opening our perception window are offered by meditation techniques such as those used in many Asian schools of philosophy and religion. Their basic principle of achieving a state of being in the moment with no other purpose, and of absolute awareness of that moment, already includes many aspects of pre-attentive perception as described above.

The Japanese Zen master Takuan Sōhō once said: ‘When facing a single tree, if you look at a single one of its red leaves, you will not see all the others. When the eye is not set on one leaf, and you face the tree with nothing at all in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye without limit. But if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.’ This unfixed, pure way of viewing a tree as a whole is very reminiscent of the wide-open perception window of the savant.

Nonetheless, I used to be highly sceptical of yoga, meditation, and other supposedly consciousness-expanding exercises. This was partly because my team and I had been unable to see any special brain activity represented in the EEG readings of meditating test subjects. Their EEGs looked like those of someone in normal, worldly sleep rather than indicating some kind of transcendental consciousness. However, it appears that this was due to the fact that our test subjects were beginners rather than experts in meditation techniques. If you attach experienced yogis or Zen masters to an EEG machine, however, the results look very different. Still not transcendental, but different to those of a sleeping person — and not only in terms of their brainwaves.

When, in 1992, the Canadian psychologist Jane Raymond showed her test subjects a rapid succession of letters on a screen, she found out that they could only reproduce the sequence perfectly if there was an interval of at least 500 milliseconds between each letter and the next. When two letters appeared in quicker succession than that, the second one was almost always completely missed: as far as the subject’s conscious mind was concerned, the second letter never actually appeared. After Raymond’s results became known, the idea that human beings are unable to perceive visual stimuli appearing in very rapid succession came to be seen as the basic constant of human perception. But, in 2007, it was shown that this can vary.

The Dutch neuroscientist Heleen Slagter repeated Jane Raymond’s test with 17 subjects.18 The difference was that the subjects were tested twice; once at the beginning of the study, and then again after an intensive (eight to ten hours a day!) three-month training course in meditation. In the second test, every subject was able to perceive the second letter. The 23 people in the control group, who had received just one hour’s introduction to meditation techniques and had practised occasionally by themselves at home, were not able to improve their so-called ‘attentional blink’ deficit. The second letter still slipped through their perceptive net.

To investigate why the meditating subjects were able to increase their perceptive awareness to such a large extent, Slagter hooked them up to an EEG. The brain potentials she measured showed a less pronounced response to seeing the first letter, which also continued for less time than before. This means that, before seeing the second letter, the subjects’ perception level had almost returned to its initial state. This might indicate that the subjects had regained sufficient neuronal capacity to perceive the second letter consciously. Or to put it another way, they were better able to apportion their awareness resources because they reacted less intensely to the stimuli they received — and that, in turn, might be due to the fact that they really were now seeing the letters individually, without their brains trying to arrange them into some structure, context, or hierarchy of meaning.

What we can learn from this is that meditation exercises can help to open the brain’s momentary perception window. Furthermore, compared to technology-based procedures, meditation has the added advantage of enabling people to push themselves towards developing savant abilities. It is not others activating savant capabilities when they see fit, but the person him- or herself, acting of their own volition.

Meditation techniques are not everybody’s cup of tea, however. Various studies have shown that such techniques as yoga or Buddhist meditation only work when the practitioner has the requisite motivation and beliefs. Without those, practitioners will not be sufficiently disciplined meditators, and the results will be the same as those registered for Slagter’s control group of occasional, self-guided meditators, whose perception windows did not open even a tiny bit wider. Nevertheless, other procedures remain available to those hoping to activate their savant potential despite being sceptical about meditation. One of those techniques is neurofeedback.

More attention through neurofeedback

As with other areas in which neurofeedback is applied, the procedure here is based on the principle of users watching the workings of their own brains in real time. Again, the representation of this can be very simple: for example, a red dot on the screen, which the participant is asked to attempt to turn green. Participants will then try anything they can think of: clicking their fingers, thinking of the last time they had sex, humming a tune, or remembering the time they failed that crucial school exam. What they don’t know is that the colour will only change when they manage to activate that part of their brain that’s responsible for perception within the preconscious timeframe of up to 50 milliseconds. Eventually they will manage to change the dot’s colour by chance, and then they must try to repeat that success by ‘tuning’ their brains to the same ‘wavelength’ as before. As a rule, people require just two, one-hour training sessions to learn to activate the relevant parts of their brain at will.

When the unconscious controls itself

Using savant brain training, my colleague Sunjung Kim proved that healthy people can learn to control their preconscious and unconscious minds. First, she presented her test subjects with images of various faces on a screen, with either happy or sad expressions. However, the faces appeared for a period of 16–100 milliseconds, while conscious perception usually takes 100–300 milliseconds. So, although the test subjects were in fact constantly looking at happy or sad faces, they claimed to have seen nothing.

Sunjung Kim’s experiment on conscious and preconscious perception

A blank ‘fixing’ screen was shown first for 6 seconds, then a positive or negative facial expression (called the ‘prime’) appeared for such a short time that it could not consciously be perceived (in this case, for 16 milliseconds). The screen then went blank again for 150 milliseconds, before a neutral face (the so-called ‘mask’) appeared for 250 milliseconds and could easily be recognised. Then came another short pause (the sequence is shown on the left of the illustration). After that pause, test subjects had to use their right hand to rate the facial expression of the ‘mask’ as positive or negative, and then rate the visibility of the first ‘prime’ (shown on the right of the illustration).

Kim then presented her subjects with an image of a face for a longer duration, so that they could consciously perceive it. This face was neither happy nor sad, but completely neutral and indifferent in its expression. Basically, a poker face. The subjects were asked to evaluate its expression — and they always picked the same emotion as that which they had just ‘seen’ before, even though it was below the threshold of their consciousness. When they had unconsciously looked at sad photos, they judged the neutral portrait to be sad; if they had unconsciously seen happy photos, they believed the portrait to be displaying a happy expression. Their unconscious experience had coloured their conscious perception.

It is not difficult to see why politics and industry are interested in subliminal methods of manipulating our moods and opinions. Luckily, it was made illegal in most countries many decades ago — as the result of an experiment carried out in movie theatres in 1957 by James Vicary, in which cinema-goers were induced to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola by hidden advertising messages. However, this study later turned out to have been a hoax. It was not until this century that studies proved that subliminal advertising can work if it matches with the recipients’ desires at the time.

In the next phase of her experiment, Kim trained her — completely non-autistic, healthy — subjects to increase the blood flow to those areas of the brain responsible for perception within the preconscious time window, using the savant brain-training method described earlier while in a magnetic-resonance scanner. Her results were astonishing: all subjects who had learned to strengthen those neural systems (and only those!) were able to consciously perceive the faces and emotional expressions that had been invisible to them before the training, even if they were shown them for only 15–30 milliseconds. Such a reduction in perception time had never before been observed in healthy people! Kim then trained the same subjects to reduce the blood flow in the relevant parts of their brains, and their perception times returned to their original level.

What would Freud have said if he had been told that it does not take hundreds of hours of psychoanalysis sessions to become conscious of our unconscious, but just two, one-hour neurofeedback sessions? This is all the training Kim’s test subjects required. Furthermore, her experiment showed that we are able to learn to control our subconscious subconsciously. None of the subjects were able to say how they increased the blood flow to their brain’s consciousness system, although the savant effect was clear — ‘islands of genius’ for all is not just a pipedream.

An option for autism therapy

Neurofeedback is not only able to tease savant abilities out of healthy people; it can work in the other direction as a therapy for autism — regardless of whether the person has savant characteristics or not. For it to be used, the patient’s brain activity must first be carefully analysed using visualisation technology, since autism is a many-faceted condition. Patients who display particularly severe compulsive behaviour and fixation on certain actions often show increased beta-activity in the brain, while others who are highly impulsive and hyperactive are more likely to show pronounced theta and delta activity. Different wave patterns require different neurofeedback approaches: patients with compulsive behaviour need to reduce their beta waves; those with impulsive behaviour must reduce their theta and delta activity; and so on.

Initial studies have now been completed into the effectiveness of neurofeedback in treating autism. An improvement of up to 40 per cent was observed in symptomatic social avoidance behaviour, whereby the success was always greatest when patients were required to reduce the activity in a certain region of their brain or in the connections between specific brain regions.

Persuading people with autism to undergo treatment in the first place remains a major challenge. They often avoid social contact and new experiences, preferring to remain in their familiar environment. A plus point for neurofeedback therapy, on the other hand, is that it mainly requires the autistic patient to interact alone with a computer, without the need for any intensive communication with other people, which is a circumstance likely to suit autistic patients. As with the treatment of hyperactive children, neurofeedback training can be designed as a game, in which, for example, patients try to manoeuvre a car or a spaceship through a labyrinth using the activity of their brains. In this way, neurofeedback training is experienced not as treatment, but as play.

No brilliance at the push of a button

Despite the great therapeutic successes achieved using neurofeedback, I would like to stress that it cannot perform miracles. It will not turn anyone into a genius overnight in an area they have no talent or training in. Someone who has never been able to play the piano is not suddenly going to become a virtuoso at the keyboard just by activating the relevant brain regions. Brilliance at the push of a button is not going to happen. Research into the nature of talent has shown that great musicians such as Mozart or Beethoven, and also John Lennon and Michael Jackson, all accumulated around 10,000 hours of practice by the time they were 20 years old. This shows that genius only comes to fruition as a result of dedication and diligence, and must first manifest itself in early childhood.

For this reason, it makes sense for us to awaken our savant potential in an area in which we already have some talent. A person who is already a relatively accomplished guitarist can train her preconscious mind so that she can think less about planning her playing and can allow the music to simply flow from her fingertips, so to speak. This can be especially good for music genres such as jazz or blues, in which improvisation plays an important part. That is one side of the coin.

The other side is that opening the savant window can lead to a musician disappearing down the rabbit hole of his or her own attentiveness and blocking out the rest of the world. This can hinder communication with an audience or with fellow musicians, creating a temporary state of ‘musical autism’, which is a drawback in particular at live concerts with a band or orchestra.

How far are people willing to go to develop their potential? Even the Ancient Greeks complained of people’s pleonexia — their self-indulgence and greed. We always want more than is good for us or our environment. More talent, more money, more power. More love, more sex, more entertainment. Why are we unable to just sit back and be satisfied with what we have? Why must we always want more and more, even when it defies all reason? Once again, the answer to that question is to be found in our brain and its matchless capacity for plasticity.