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Quote by Steven Magee

“After developing serious mental and physical health issues during and after a decade in high altitude astronomy, I decided to dedicate my mind and body to medical research for the biological science of High Altitude Observatory Disease (HAOD).”

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Steven Magee

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“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.”

MindSuperhumanSavant
Author:Matt Kaplan
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“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.”

MindSuperhumanSavant
Author:Matt Kaplan
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“This is why play and communication, and giggling and the recognition of mother’s face, are so important in the first year of life. The physical and mental use of neural circuits makes cells ‘light up’ with metabolic activity so neurons can find one another and make new connections, sometimes at long distances in the brain.” Yet, this connection making can go wrong. “When cells suspect danger, they resist sending out the longer connections. Their axons are shorter and they have fewer branches. However, even though they send out fewer long axons, neurons still engage in local activity as the drive to make connections during early development is very strong,” said Dr. Naviaux. The result is a brain filled with isolated islands of superconnectivity that can perform specific tasks at remarkable speeds.”

MindSuperhumanSavant
Author:Matt Kaplan
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“Dr. Naviaux knew that the cellular danger response took effect when cells were “told” by organic compounds in the blood, called purines, to stop performing their ordinary services and activate defensive systems to stave off attack from viruses or toxic chemicals. Moreover, he suspected that when the danger response was activated in young children, the purines sometimes just kept circulating nonstop and left neurons in permanent defensive lockdown. If this was so, then he theorized that targeting the purine activity could potentially end the lockdown, allow the neurons to make long connections again, and treat the autism. Dr. Naviaux set up an experiment with mice. He knew from past work that if female mice were infected with a virus midpregnancy, their offspring would be born with brains in defensive lockdown and exhibit autistic behaviors such as fear of novelty and difficulty interacting with other mice.”

MindSuperhumanSavant
Author:Matt Kaplan
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