In a concrete basement at the University of Sydney, I sat in a chair waiting to have my brain altered by an electromagnetic pulse. My forehead was connected, by a series of electrodes, to a machine that looked something like an old-fashioned beauty-salon hair dryer and was sunnily described to me as a ”Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator.”

While currently, you’re most likely to hear about Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in the context of its being a trendy new cure for depression, there are other experimental uses for the technique that haven’t gotten as much air time of late.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (or TMS for short) describes a handful of methods for exciting neuron activity in the brain with rapid alternating electromagnetic fields. TMS has been reported to be effective in assisting with healing stroke damage, Aphasia, Parkinson’s Disease, Migraines and Clinical depression. While it’s not an FDA approved technique for treating depression in the united states, it’s legal for use in cases of drug-resistant depression in Canada and there’s at least one clinic in Costa Rica targeting US Depression sufferers.

However, TMS also has some less-widely researched side effects, most importantly: the “Savant Effect”. This might be old news in some circles, but as the therapeutic uses of TMS and the stimulation of focused Autism get more air-time, I figured now would be as good a time as any to check in on this Grind.

You may have read recently about how researchers have recently made great strides in “turning on” and “turning off” Autism in mice — the research into the possible enhancement qualities of TMS shares the same roots. In 1999 Dr. Allen Snyder published a paper entitled “Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing? The Mind’s Secret Arithmetic” which explored the questions of how Autistic children really process information — especially mathematical information.

From there, Snyder began experimenting with TMS, in an effort to “enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.”

To prove his point, he hooks me up to the Medtronic Mag Pro again and asks me to read the following lines:
A bird in the hand

is worth two in the

the bush
”A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” I say.

”Again,” Snyder says, and smiles.

So once more: ”A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” He makes me repeat it five or six times, slowing me down until he has me reading each word with aching slowness.

Then he switches on the machine. He is trying to suppress those parts of my brain responsible for thinking contextually, for making connections. Without them, I will be able to see things more as an autistic might.

After five minutes of electric pulses, I read the card again. Only then do I see — instantly — that the card contains an extra ”the.”

On my own, I had been looking for patterns, trying to coax the words on the page into a coherent, familiar whole. But ”on the machine,” he says, ”you start seeing what’s actually there, not what you think is there.”

Snyder’s theories are bolstered by the documented cases in which sudden brain damage has produced savant abilities almost overnight. He cites the case of Orlando Serrell, a 10-year-old street kid who was hit on the head and immediately began doing calendrical calculations of baffling complexity. Snyder argues that we all have Serrell’s powers. ”We remember virtually everything, but we recall very little,” Snyder explains. ”Now isn’t that strange? Everything is in there” — he taps the side of his head. ”Buried deep in all our brains are phenomenal abilities, which we lose for some reason as we develop into ‘normal’ conceptual creatures. But what if we could reawaken them?”

Snyder found that sustained TMS could unlock enhanced modes of creativity and perception. He found that subjects exposed to TMS experienced a sharp increase in the ability to draw, to proofread, to process higher math and other similar skills.

Of course, meanwhile there’s Dr. Michael Persinger, whose use of TMS helped him discover the so-called “God Spot”. Also important, of course, were Persinger’s attempts to use TMS to stimulate “gene expression”.

After spending a little time with Persinger, you get accustomed to the fact that his most polite phrases demand pursuit. Affect gene expression? It sounds so simple, but what he’s really talking about is stringing together a number of different electromagnetic fields to prompt a complicated chemical reaction on the genetic level – for example, directing the body’s natural self-healing instincts.

“We want to enhance what the brain does to help heal the body,” Persinger explains. “Among more sensitive individuals, tests show that their skin will turn red if they believe a hot nickel has been placed on their hand. That’s a powerful psychosomatic effect of the brain on the body. Suppose we could make it more precise?”

For the most part, my thoughts on the enhancile and Grinding applications of TMS can be summed up by Snyder’s quote from the NYT article:

”More important than that, we can change our own intelligence in unexpected ways. Why would we not want to explore that?”

Why not, indeed?