Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Stella Ralfini

Quote by Stella Ralfini

Author

Stella Ralfini

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Stella Ralfini. more

You May Also Like

“Autistic savants tend to have left-brain dysfunction coupled with right-brain compensation, and this has led numerous research groups to wonder if sabotaging a portion of the left brain might grant savant-like abilities. Numerous experimenters, but most especially neurobiologist Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney in Australia, have used magnetic pulses to temporarily disable the left anterior temporal lobe of the brain in ordinary people before giving them specific tasks.8 In one case, participants were given a minute to draw a horse, dog, or face. In others, they were given challenging proofreading or number-estimation tasks after being exposed to the magnetic pulse. In all experiments, a portion of the participants showed dramatic improvements.9 After one drawing experiment, one man could not believe that the highly accurate drawings were his own. Yet the effects were not universal; savantlike skills were not induced in everyone. Nobody knows why. That’s obviously worth looking into, but even more intriguing is what happens to these superhuman abilities when autism is ultimately cured.”

“In case you think I am just making some sort of wild speculation here about Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon coming true, think again. In Keyes’s story, a mentally disabled janitor named Charlie is healed of his handicap with an experimental medical procedure shortly after it does the same for a mouse named Algernon.10 Charlie’s tale was the stuff of fiction when it was written in the 1950s, but—based upon work being done in cellular biology—it does not look as if it will remain fiction for much longer. Robert Naviaux, a cellular biologist at UC San Diego, was fascinated by autistic savants and curious about what precisely was happening in their brains that granted them their incredible abilities. “Neurons that are developing contacts in the brain ‘look’ for little lights in the darkness, the metabolic activity of other neurons that have been activated by use,” explained Dr. Naviaux. Once they find these lights, they send out projections called axons to handshake with them and form connections.”