Savant for a Day

The New York Times has a new story about a procedure that can possibly stimulate your creativity in a non-harmful manner, without the use of drugs. Basically it's a big machine, and once you are strapped in and the machine is turned on, your brain is stimulated. Several odd things have been observed by people strapped into this machine (a transcranial magnetic stimulator) including the ability for some people to draw much better (see the picture on the NYT site). This sounds absolutely fascinating to me. I can imagine a device like this being used by people all over the world to get over creativity hurdles. Maybe writers could use something like this to get over writers block? Of course there are still many tests to perform to ensure that the device is safe. Here is a quote from the story:

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.'' This was not just any old Danish-made transcranial magnetic stimulator, however; this was the Medtronic Mag Pro, and it was being operated by Allan Snyder, one of the world's most remarkable scientists of human cognition. Nonetheless, the anticipation of electricity being beamed into my frontal lobes (and the consent form I had just signed) made me a bit nervous. Snyder found that amusing. ''Oh, relax now!'' he said in the thick local accent he has acquired since moving here from America. ''I've done it on myself a hundred times. This is Australia. Legally, it's far more difficult to damage people in Australia than it is in the United States.''