[Hplusroadmap] Accidental Genius

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 9:21 PM, Brad Paulsen <brad.paulsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I happened to catch a program on National Geographic Channel today
> entitled "Accidental Genius."  It was quite interesting from an AGI standpoint.
>
> One of the researchers profiled has invented a device that, by sending
> electromagnetic pulses through a person's skull to the appropriate spot in
> the left hemisphere of that person's brain, can achieve behavior similar to
> that of an idiot savant in a non-brain-damaged person (in the session shown,
> this was a volunteer college student).

That's Snyder's work.*
http://www.wireheading.com/brainstim/savant.html

http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/rTMS

Re: savantism,
http://heybryan.org/intense_world_syndrome.html

DIY rTMS:
http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/tiki
(there's a mailing list)
http://heybryan.org/mailing_lists.html

> Before being "zapped" by the device, the student is taken through a series
> of exercises.  One is to draw a horse from memory.  The other is to read
> aloud a very familiar "saying" with a slight grammatical mistake in it (the
> word "the" is duplicated, i.e., "the the," in the saying -- sorry I can't
> recall the saying used). Then the student is shown a computer screen full of
> "dots" for about 1 second and asked to record his best guess at how many
> dots there were.  This exercise is repeated several times (with different
> numbers of dots each time).

It's not just being zapped, it's being specifically stimulated in a
certain region of the brain; think of it like actually targetting the
visual cortex, or actually targetting the anterior cingulate, the left
ventrolateral amygdala, etc. And that's why this is interesting. I
wrote somewhat about this on my site once:

http://heybryan.org/recursion.html

Specifically, if this can be used to modify attention, then can we use
it to modify attention re: paying attention to attention? Sounds like
a direct path to the singularity to me.

> The student is then zapped by the electromagnetic pulse device for 15
> minutes.  It's kind of scary to watch the guy's face flinch uncontrollably
> as each pulse is delivered. But, while he reported feeling something, he
> claimed there was no pain or disorientation. His language facilities were
> unimpaired (they zap a very particular spot in the left hemisphere based on
> brain scans taken of idiot savants).

Right. The DIY setups that I have heard of haven't been able to be all
that high-powered due to safety concerns -- not safety re: the brain,
but safety when considering working with superhigh voltages so close
to one's head. ;-)

> You can watch the episode on-line here:
> http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/tv-schedule.  It's not scheduled for
> repeat showing anytime soon.

Awesome. Thanks for the link.

> That's not a direct link (I couldn't find one).  When you get to that Web
> page, navigate to Wed, May 7 at 3PM and click the "More" button under the
> picture.  Unfortunately, the "full-motion" video is the size of a large
> postage stamp.  The "full screen" view uses "stop motion" (at least i did on
> my laptop using a DSL-based WiFi hotspot). The audio is the same in both
> versions.

- Bryan

* Damien Broderick had to correct me on this, once. :-)