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Conversation Lesson

Aaron: Okay so, Tell me about Derek Amato.

Dan: Derek Amato. He was the guy who had an accident. He was at a pool party at his friend’s house, and he dove into the pool, accidentally dove into the wrong end. He dove into the shallow end and ended up smashing his head onto the bottom of the pool floor. He was rushed to the hospital and he was in very bad shape. I think he was out of the hospital in a day or two, but he was completely out of it for a while.

When he was recovering, he was visiting a friend who had a piano and he felt drawn to the piano, which he had never played that instrument before. He sat down and he just started to play. He said that from that point, not only did he know how to play; he was almost like his fingers would move by themselves. Even when he wasn’t playing, he would see these strange black and white squares passing across his field of vision that was kind of his own personal, musical notation.

Aaron: So he wasn’t playing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” or anything like that?

Dan: No, he’s playing quite complex music. If you listen to it, it’s not my cup of tea but it sounds kind of “loungy”. You can tell it sounds like somebody who’s been playing for many, many years. His fingers are just flying up and down the keyboard.

Aaron: So he just suddenly had this ability to play this amazing music?

Dan: That’s what he says. He claims that his only musical experience was in high school when he played drums and guitar in a garage band. He said on a scale of 1 to 10, he would rank his guitar and drum playing at a two or a three. So very poor, he said he would not consider himself as a musician.

Aaron: But suddenly out of the blue, he was able to jump from a level 2 to a level 10?

Dan: Right. On an instrument that he never played before. And now in addition to piano, he can play eight different instruments.

Aaron: That sounds like something pretty amazing, and it raises the question: “Do we have, all of us, some kind of unlocked potential just lying there, waiting to be released?” I just wonder if that’s what happened in his case. Maybe that brain injury stimulated something or unlocked some kind of ability to do this, and I wonder if we all have that.

Dan: Yeah. If that was something waiting to come out the whole time or did it knock his brain in some strange way where it was reducing some sort of filters that allowed him to perceive music in a different way, nobody’s really sure what was happening.

Aaron: But it does raise the question if scientists can figure out what actually is going on in cases like Derek, that maybe they could find a way - through technology - to do similar things without the head trauma involved, but find ways to stimulate our brain to unlock these areas that might give us powers over and beyond what we have in our normal lives.

Dan: A lot of people talk about, in the future with gene manipulation, maybe we’ll be able to evolve the human race and do a race of super humans with amazing abilities or physical abilities or mental abilities. But of course that’s looking at from the time of birth that this points to the ability that perhaps, even as adults, we have the potential for amazing, almost instant change. The military, who’s doing a lot of research into unlocking human abilities or enhancing human abilities—

Aaron: For their soldiers, right?

Dan: Right. They’re often involved in this kind of cutting-edge research because they have so much money at their disposal. Unfortunately, they’re looking at it not for ways that are going to benefit humanity, but ways that they can be killers.

Aaron: Perform better on the battlefield and go for weeks without food or something like that.

Being able to perceive things before they happen…

Dan: A couple of different things that they’re doing is research into drugs that improve human performance. One thing that started with the military was this medication called Provigil which is actually used for narcoleptics – people who can’t control falling asleep. So it is a stimulant without being an amphetamine. It’s not the same coin of speedy effects as, say Ritalin, which is a common ADD drug or of course like an illegal drug like methamphetamine.

Aaron: It just allows you to stay aware and awake longer periods of time without all the shaking and the—

Dan: There’s no sense of jitteriness and it doesn’t seem to be any side effects, it doesn’t seem to be any coming down where you’re diminished in any way. So the military has been working with this drug using it on air force pilots to help them stay focused, and apparently they’re able to maintain the same amount of focus in the air. Imagine they’re doing this in flight simulators, but in flight simulators they’re able to maintain focus for something like 36 hours which is high level of focus.

Aaron: Really? That’s phenomenal.

Dan: Often, these kind of discoveries first start with the military because they have the funding for it and then it starts to spread out. Now it’s becoming a big thing in Academia. In the US, a lot of students are taking this to help them focus better and a lot of professors are taking this to help them maintain their focus during their research.

Recently, even in the business world, a lot of businessmen are taking this.

Aaron: Surely there must be side effects, though. It doesn’t sound like a very healthy thing to put in your brain.

Dan: No. It seems like whenever there is some positive there must be a negative, there must be some balancing of the scales but that’s not what people say about this stuff, Provigil. Obviously, the government doesn’t agree. It is something you need a prescription for but a lot of doctors are prescribing it off-label.

Aaron: Aside from drugs, you mentioned something about possibly stimulating the brain in other ways.

Dan: Right, electrical stimulation. Applying electrodes to the head which gives very mild, not convulsive shocks, very mild electrical currents to certain areas of the brain seems to unlock abilities of focus and being able to maintain awareness of multiple things at the same time. The military is also using this with sniper training and apparently even when they have run these experiments with non-soldiers, journalists even come in to learn about what kind of research they’re doing. They do this research with video games, very immersive video games, where you have to maintain awareness of multiple attackers in this video game scenario and then take them out. And I was reading about this one journalist experience, she had no gun training at all. She went in there, played the video game, did terrible at it, and then did this electrical stimulation throughout the day. They put her in the simulator again and she said it was like time slowed down.

Aaron: So she was able to focus on everything and perform much better?

Dan: Yes, she did incredibly well and scored lots of points, which in this game was killing people. And she said she felt like she could see what was going to happen next before it happened. She felt like time was slowing down. In fact she thought she was being tricked. She thought that the researchers had lowered the ability of the game down and she said afterwards, “Give me the real game, the real difficulty,” but that was thereal thing. So electrical stimulation, that’s something that apparently doesn’t take a lot of technology to do. Apparently you can go to your local electronics hardware store and for less than $100 you can come up with a gear to apply this current to your brain.

Aaron: You’d have to be a little crazy to do that.

Dan: Yeah, but a lot of regular people are.

Aaron: It sounds crazy to me.

Dan: And I haven’t checked this out, but apparently if you go to YouTube and search for electrical stimulation, brain stimulation, you’ll find lots of people reporting on the effects of it. And I’ve heard, again I haven’t seen these videos, but I heard that some people are using it to look at– if they can improve the rate that they learn. And some people are even trying this with language learning and reporting some positive results. Me, I wouldn’t be—

Aaron: I would never put electric currents through my brain because you just don’t know what is happening.

Dan: And even if you got some positive effect, who knows what kind of negative effect that you are producing, what kind of permanent damage you could be doing. But electrical stimulation, another thing that some researchers have worked with is magnetic stimulation. I don’t know if that’s electromagnetic waves or some sort of magnetic stimulation. There’s a professor at some university named Persinger and he has developed what’s nicknamed “The God Helmet.”

Aaron: Okay, what’s that?

Dan: It’s this helmet that has these magnets within it placed on certain parts to stimulate certain parts of the brain that seems to induce some sort of paranormal experience, some transcendental experience. A lot of people report out-of-body experiences or they sense a presence of a higher power. There’s all these different ways they’re trying to manipulate different parts of the brain and it seems to be the new frontier whether it’s through drugs or through electricity or magnetic waves. I think they’re still trying to map out what areas do what, and of course what they don’t know is what kind of potential permanent damage they could be doing.

Aaron: It’s interesting. Let’s imagine that research goes on for 10, 20 years, and scientists are able to understand the mechanism of what’s actually happening in these cases where these latent potentials are being suddenly released. And they’re able to replicate that through some sort of way, whether it be through a pill that you take or whether it be through some sort of change that they can stimulate in the brain. It makes you wonder, what’s out there? What kind of hidden potentials are there? We’ve seen cases in the examples of people who suddenly develop a strong musical ability or a mathematical ability. But there could be all kinds of other abilities and it makes me think of one of our listening fluency lessons that we put out quite a while ago about multiple intelligences.

And how when we use that term ‘intelligent’, we often immediately think of people like Albert Einstein who could just do amazing things with their brains, whether it’s mathematically or linguistically. But there are actually many types of intelligences like–. Oh go ahead.

Dan: In fact that seems to be not necessarily with acquired savants, but autistic savants, what we find is they often have a very low IQ matched with an amazing ability, whether it’s through an art or music or memory or calculation.

Aaron: It makes you wonder if you could choose some sort of intelligence to unlock and release, what would it be? Would it be something that is normally associated with cognitive ability? Or would it be something kinesthetic, which means using the body as an athlete would, or a dancer would? Or would it be something interpersonal, the ability to really communicate well with people and to really connect with them outwardly through conversation and your body language? Some people are really super good at that and it makes you wonder what’s possible, what’s out there.

Dan: I’d like to have a photographic memory.

Aaron: It’d be convenient, wouldn’t it?

Dan: I wouldn’t like that memory where I couldn’t let go of things but where I could not be troubled by these memories but just be able to access them when I want to. Because I feel like people who have photographic memory have a really— they got an unfair advantage. They can appear so much more intelligent than they are because they’re able to draw on so many facts.

Aaron: Previous experiences and things.

Dan: But of course, one of the ways that you can measure intelligence is the way that you can put new ideas together in novel ways, and the more than you can draw from, the smarter you’re at least going to be perceived.

Aaron: That’s actually a good point you’re bringing up: the smarter you’re going to be perceived. And I wonder if this is going to be good or not. I mean, so what if you can have some superhuman ability? How does that benefit society? How does that benefit you as a human being? I mean, by what measure are we looking at this situation?

Maybe, the ability to do things like that, to have some amazing ability, could actually lower your quality of life. Maybe it adds certain stresses to your life because you’re so different from other people. Maybe life becomes more complicated. Maybe you’re not as balanced and maybe you’re not as happy, and therefore life becomes more difficult.

So I wonder if this really represents human desire, an egotistical desire to be more powerful or to be stronger. And to do that so quickly, maybe that’s not such a good thing.

Dan: It’s interesting point you make. Should the goal be in this kind of research, happiness?

Aaron: It doesn’t seem like it is. It seems like the goal in this research is to find out how to become superhuman, stronger, better, more powerful.

Dan: I imagine that these things, just like having more money in your life, they found in so many studies, doesn’t make you a happier person. That having amazing musical ability isn’t going to make you a happier person or being able to calculate things or put ideas together in novel ways isn’t going to make you happier. But perhaps it is going to improve the experience of the human race. I mean certainly if you’re a scientist, it allows you to discover the cure for cancer. Or you’re an incredible artist and it allows you to make some creation that propels society into thinking in new ways.

Aaron: Totally. And I think for guys like you and me, just normal human beings, it’s not going to happen in our lifetime assuming we don’t get hit over the head with something.

Maybe the answer for us is gradual improvement, and that’s knowing yourself and knowing the areas you want to improve in and start taking action on a regular, consistent, daily basis. Slowly making that transformation, slowly improving, so that over time you stay in touch with all of your core values and you know who you are and you just slowly grow. Maybe that’s the path that’s actually the best.

Dan: It doesn’t seem to be the case with— actually it does with Derek Amato. He did suffer some negative effects. He got migraine, headaches. But socially it seems to be, a lot of people, there’s something weakened or lost when they suddenly develop these abilities.

Aaron: I think Dr. Treffert, the guy that’s studying this, pointed out that in many cases the damage is through the left hemisphere of the brain and the right hemisphere, which is generally associated with creativity, somehow compensates. He called that a compensatory response. The right side of the brain is compensating for the left side of the brain, and maybe that is what is bringing on these savant-like abilities.

Dan: I wonder if it’s possible to have dramatic change without some sort of loss. How can you maintain equilibrium if certain things change so quickly?

Aaron: And maybe that really is the answer, is gradual change.

Dan: Right. Like you were saying, I think that’s what we focus on at Deep English. We focus on trying to improve your fluency quickly, but also realistically, which means daily practice.

Aaron: It’s not going to happen overnight. Daily practice. Staying focused.