Savants and TMS

TMS, which stands for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, is explained as a procedure that can be used along with EEG and fMRI. What TMS essentially does is short-circuit parts of the brain, so that those parts are no longer functioning for set duration (usually on the scale of minutes). At the end of the hack, there was a reference to an article that mentions the connection between TMS and savants, showing that shutting off parts of the brain can make the subject experience savantism. Autistic savants are autistic, yet are peculiar in that they exhibit extreme talent in memory, artistic ability, etc.

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fMRI Claustrophobia

The fourth hack explains what fMRI is and what it's used for. fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging and is a technique to map brain activity. It gives a very clear 3-D image of brain activity by 'push[ing] the hydrogen atoms in your brain into a state in which they all "line up" and spin and the same frequency.' That just doesn't sound good for your brain, even tho' this technology has been around for a couple decades. Basically, anything that greatly changes the way your body function at the elemental level makes me very wary.

On the flip-side, it seems that the technology is progressing even further and being integrated with other technologies to make of for some of its failings. The Wikipedia article has a good overview.

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PET Radioactivity

Today's hack again was merely descriptive. PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography and is used to gauge brain usage by inserting a radioactive element in the subject's blood stream:

The level of radioactivity is not dangerous, but this technique should not be used on the same purpose on a regular basis.

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Open EEG

This day's hack described what an electroencephalograph (EEG) was, how it was used, why it was used, and the pros and cons of using it. It also mentioned a project called OpenEEG that tries to provide instructions, hardware, and software for hobbyists to fool around with EEGs. The project has separate hardware and software mailing lists, and (unfortunately) the wiki link gives me an error page. (The correct address to the wiki is http://wiki.asiaquake.org/openeeg/published/HomePage). Besides that, there are a quite a few links on the main home page, which will get someone started if they are truly interested.

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Self Reporting

I'm going to try to go through a hack a day in Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain. The first hack just gives some background on cognitive psychology and science, and this sentence stuck out to me:

Another problem with trying to guess how the mind works is that you can't trust people when they offer their opinion on why they did something or how they did it.

I think this sentence was poorly worded because it's not necessarily true that you can't trust people when they offer their opinion about something they did. The way that the author wrote the sentence seemed (to me, at least) to assert you can never trust what someone says about why or how they did something. In light of everyday experience and logic, you can trust people to offer why or how they did something, it's just not a rule. The simple reason being ego (making yourself look like what you are not). But just because you can't always trust everyone doesn't mean that you can't trust someone in certain situations. Two simple examples:

• I can trust my mom telling me that she gave me a car because I am her son and she loves me.
• I can trust my friend who is out of the country when he writes e-mails to me because he misses me.

Other than that, the first hack wasn't that interesting, but just briefly implicitly mentioned that the mind and brain are not distinct, and that's what should be kept in mind when reading the book.

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