SPARKING AN IMPROVED POLITICS

Savant for a Day (Lawrence Osborne, NYT Mag, 6/22/2003)

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 ...

The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But ... people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people....

Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills.

I see the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2004 stepping up to the debate podium with this contraption on his head, and for two hours talking like a conservative. Posted by Paul Jaminet at June 25, 2003 9:09 AM