Are we using our minds to their full potential?

[Very Tired]

This is something I've been wondering for a while now but I've heard stories of rare cases of mental conditions that cause some humans to have almost superhuman like abilities.

For one, a man named Kim Peak was diagnosed with FG syndrome has the ability to read a page out of a book in a second and can memorize literally libraries of information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek

Not to mention there are quite a few cases of human calculators as a result of autism who can do complex math problems in their head and memorize every digit of Pi.



So here is what I am really wondering. It may seem a little bit science fiction but would it be possible to unlock these mental abilities in other humans? It sounds like it would be quite beneficial to all areas of study and could be a huge jump for human innovation and technology.

[Deleted]

no we're not.

[Paperfox]

Consider how many terabytes of visual information your brain is processing every second. If you programmed robots, consider what it takes to merely travel down the hall and into the first room on the right. Then consider that we can cross the street or go downstairs and do a million other things without even thinking about it. You're using way more than 10% of your brain.

[Darsithis]

We use 100% of our brains. Not every bit of it at all times, but 100%. There is no part of our brain that isn't being used. Before you get excited about Kim Peek, note that he had severe abnormalities of the brain and his ability to memorize is theorized to have been caused by his brain attempting to fix the problem. He was essentially a 7-year old in a man's body.

This isn't a matter of just "opening up" our minds.

[Deleted]

Unfortunately these "superpowers" aren't the product of a healthy and undamaged brain. Kim Peek was severely handicapped to the point where he couldn't even take care of himself. His brain didn't develop correctly and as a result it formed more neural connections than normal in some areas of his brain while other areas remained partly undeveloped. Same applies to autistic people. Their "super abilities" go hand in hand with their handicap, it's hardly a fair trade-off.

To answer your question. I'm sure we can design a method to cause controlled brain damage in such a way that it forces our brain to repair itself in ways that promote certain neural functions. But at this point I don't think anyone knows enough about our brain to risk a procedure like that. You are just as likely to end up severely handicapped or worse, dead.

[Kuntantee]

Autism and increased math skill is already a research topic. I bet scientists also tried to understand the case of the guy you mentioned. There is no a switch on your brain witch makes you super human.

also relevant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_brain_myth

[Mihalik]

no we're not.

Yes we do. You are talking about that stupid "Only use 5% of the brain myth."

Now on topic.

So here is what I am really wondering. It mean seem a little bit science fiction but would it be possible to unlock these mental abilities in other humans? It sounds like it would be quite beneficial to all areas of study and could be a huge jump for human innovation and technology.

That isn't necessarily something we would want to "unlock" in the first place.

The so called Savant abilities are usually byproducts of physical malformations of brain. They are byproducts of often severely debilitating disabilities. Our brain is not wired randomly the way it is. The brain has a long list of tasks on hand beyond "thinking" as it processes sensor input, controls involuntary biological functions etc, without you being aware of it.

Think of any sort of task that requires fine motor skills, or even something as simple as going for a run in a forest on uneven terrain.

[Deleted]

Training, discipline and conditioning can go a long way to do seemingly impossible tasks with your mind. Especially if you wave ethical/cultural considerations away and train children from birth to think certain ways.

Othen then that, the mechanisms of the brain and mind are very poorly understood so it's hard to guess at what could be possible.

[Grummgug]

It is generally accepted that rote learning exercises the brain and can dramatically improve overall memory. Recent experiments were done with elderly test subjects. Elderly people can often suffer memory recall issues. They were put through rigorous rote learning exercises over a period of weeks, and they exhibited improved memory and verbal skills afterwards.

Its a bit distressing that modern education is moving away from rote learning. It is essential to get the most out of your brain, even if it may be boring to some.

[Yvaelle]

Typically the ability of savants to remember things isn't markedly better than contestants in the memory championships. For example, the winner of the one-hour playing card contest this year memorized 1404 playing cards (suits and numbers), before making an error on the 1405th card - and that isn't all that unusual, his closest competitors were 1352 and 1305.

None of these people are savants either - they're just regular people who practice memorization competitively.

The speed card winner memorized a pack of 52 cards correctly in just 21 seconds - or 4/10ths of a second per card (and he only barely beat out second and third place by like less than a second?) - they basically just flip through the entire deck staring at the corner and then recite it back on the spot. These are not oddities of nature - human beings have an incredible capacity for practiced memorization, but it requires practice. You could train to become almost as good as any of them in a year of daily exercises.

It's not anything new either - the ancient greeks as early as 400 BCE (and probably much earlier) used the Method of Loci technique to competitively memorize as well - Cicero considered it an essential skill of any great orator to commit the speech to memory so they wouldn't need notes/teleprompters and could focus entirely on their delivery.

We use 100% of our brains, most people just aren't very practiced in memorization is all.

[Deleted]

Can't believe that someone that reads these forums isn't trolling with a statement like that. The vast majority of people, myself included, aren't using their mind to its fullest potential. Surely that is evident by the stupidity all around us?

[Grummgug]

Typically the ability of savants to remember things isn't markedly better than contestants in the memory championships. For example, the winner of the one-hour playing card contest this year memorized 1404 playing cards (suits and numbers), before making an error on the 1405th card - and that isn't all that unusual his closest competitors were 1352 and 1305.

None of these people are savants either - they're just regular people who practice memorization competitively.

The speed card winner memorized a pack of 52 cards correctly in just 21 seconds - or 4/10ths of a second per card (and he only barely beat out second and third place by like less than a second?) - they basically just flip through the entire deck staring at the corner and then recite it back on the spot. These are not oddities of nature - human beings have an incredible capacity for practiced memorization, but it requires practice. You could train to become almost as good as any of them in a year of daily exercises.

It's not anything new either - the ancient greeks as early as 400 BCE (and probably much earlier) used the Method of Loci technique to competitively memorize as well - Cicero considered it an essential skill of any great orator to commit the speech to memory so they wouldn't need notes/teleprompters and could focus entirely on their delivery.

We use 100% of our brains, most people just aren't very practiced in memorization is all.

The added benefit of such memorization skill is that it boosts your knowledge in random everyday situations. Like someone who has strong memorization skills and has applied those to a lot of math formulas enters a supermarket and can quickly and easily perform correct comparison shopping by doing the math in their head and finding the best deal for everything they buy. One item costs $4.75 and there is x ounces of it. Another item costs $3.99 and has y ounces. They run the math and buy the true bargain. Someone else who never applied themselves in math class will go into the same supermarket and wind up paying a LOT more for their bags of groceries because they simply cannot do the math in their head, because they cannot memorize it. They never developed the skill and didn't like math and now it costs them a lot of money.

[Yvaelle]

Its a bit distressing that modern education is moving away from rote learning. It is essential to get the most out of your brain, even if it may be boring to some.

As someone with an interest in competitive memorization and education - I don't think it's a bad thing that public education is moving away from rout memorization the way it occurs in schools. Instead, education needs to focus on teaching critical thinking, linking information to create knowledge, and where/how to acquire the needed information.

At the same time, I think students could learn a lot if proper memory techniques were some of the earliest courses taught in schools - we need to teach kids how to learn, how to flex that part of their brain - and we can do that in more effective and more interesting ways than simply asking them to memorize their times tables or twenty tenses for each French verb.

If we instead devoted a class to something like Learning Techniques, in primary school, we could hopefully have them learn how to learn (memory techniques, critical thinking, information retrieval, how to ask the right questions, how to study effectively, etc) - then the rest of K->12 would go much smoother: not to mention post-secondary and the rest of their lives.

It always baffles me how every university has a "learn good study habits!" optional seminar (I used to teach one) - and nobody bothers attending them until third or fourth year - that should be the first thing any kid learns!

[Deleted]

The added benefit of such memorization skill is that it boosts your knowledge in random everyday situations. Like someone who has strong memorization skills and has applied those to a lot of math formulas enters a supermarket and can quickly and easily perform correct comparison shopping by doing the math in their head and finding the best deal for everything they buy. One item costs $4.75 and there is x ounces of it. Another item costs $3.99 and has y ounces. They run the math and buy the true bargain. Someone else who never applied themselves in math class will go into the same supermarket and wind up paying a LOT more for their bags of groceries because they simply cannot do the math in their head, because they cannot memorize it. They never developed the skill and didn't like math and now it costs them a lot of money.

Approximation math is good enough to figure out a bargain. A first grader can do that.

[endersblade]

no we're not.

FUCK YOUR SIG I have fingerprints on my monitor now >.>

No, we aren't. However, not all of our brain is made for 'thinking'. Most of it is for use of our body. That being said, the vast amount of information, both pictoral as well as words/numbers, that our brain stores and can store beyond what we currently do shows that our brain is quite the compressor when it comes to storage. And if that's the case, who's to say there isn't something else our brains can do that we just don't know how?

[Deleted]

FUCK YOUR SIG I have fingerprints on my monitor now >.>

mission accomplished.

[Grummgug]

Approximation math is good enough to figure out a bargain. A first grader can do that.

Well here's a more complex example for you. I spent decades studying financial markets and did rote learning on my own to understand technical terms and patterns in financial data. As a result, I understand money very well and can invest my money properly. But someone who never did the rote learning to memorize the technical terms and concepts in the industry would be hopelessly turning to a financial web page. They may have to turn to a financial adviser at some point and be at a total loss as to how to tell if they know what they are doing.

[LongTimeCreeper]

This is something I've been wondering for a while now but I've heard stories of rare cases of mental conditions that cause some humans to have almost superhuman like abilities.

For one a man named Kim Peak was diagnosed with FG syndrome has the ability to read a page out of a book in a second and can memorize literally libraries of information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek

Not to mention there are quite a few cases of human calculators as a result of autism who can do complex math problems in their head and memorize every digit of Pi.



So here is what I am really wondering. It mean seem a little bit science fiction but would it be possible to unlock these mental abilities in other humans? It sounds like it would be quite beneficial to all areas of study and could be a huge jump for human innovation and technology.

What? Pi is an irrational number (i.e., there is no "every" digit). Also, latest computer models bring the decimal representation to over 12 trillion digits. I don't care what kind of freak you are, nobody has memorized that.

People that have the ability to do some of these insane calculations in their head or that can count incredibly fast (that box of 500 toothpicks only has 497, and he counted it in less than 1 second) usually don't have the ability to apply this "skill" in any real world situation.

[WarpKnight]

Humans have been biologically the same for hundreds of thousands of years, but in the past few thousand years the general education level of the population has only increased - perhaps exponentially. This has been both the product of and cause of development of technology, culture and language.

Education is the key to unlocking the power of our minds. I do however think there's a hard limit that we've already hit or are going to hit shortly, that is unless we find new revolutionary methods of learning and processing information.

I'm a transhumanist. I believe the best way forward for humans to transcend our physical limitations is to remove or lessen the limitations - to enhance ourselves in new ways, not to simply unlock pre-existing potential.

[Deleted]

Well here's a more complex example for you. I spent decades studying financial markets and did rote learning on my own to understand technical terms and patterns in financial data. As a result, I understand money very well and can invest my money properly. But someone who never did the rote learning to memorize the technical terms and concepts in the industry would be hopelessly turning to a financial web page. They may have to turn to a financial adviser at some point and be at a total loss as to how to tell if they know what they are doing.

Now, that's a good example. There's an entire industry depending on people putting blind trust in incompetent financial advisers. Can totally relate to that.