The Genius Brain

Carl Zimmer suggests that athletes are geniuses because the super-efficiency their brains exhibit during athletic activity:

Del Percio’s team has also measured brain waves of athletes and nonathletes in action. In one experiment the researchers observed pistol shooters as they fired 120 times. In another experiment Del Percio had fencers balance on one foot. In both cases the scientists arrived at the same surprising results: The athletes’ brains were quieter, which means they devoted less brain activity to these motor tasks than nonathletes did. The reason, Del Percio argues, is that the brains of athletes are more efficient, so they produce the desired result with the help of fewer neurons. Del Percio’s research suggests that the more efficient a brain, the better job it does in sports. The scientists also found that when the pistol shooters hit their target, their brains tended to be quieter than when they missed.

Zimmer goes on to describe numerous examples of athletes' brains being energetically efficient.

But it is barely touched on that this same efficiency can extend to almost any human process. I humbly submit that we engineers are absolutely sick-fast at math, and do complicated calculations in our heads with relative ease and efficiency, but art students don't. The mental processes that can be optimized do not have to be the ones that lead to physical motion. A good example would be people who do a lot of public speaking get better and better at both their oratory style as well as their ability to improv on the fly. Another example is people who become extraordinarily good at card games, or board games. The plasticity of the brain allows a person to become more efficient at whatever they focus on, given that focus is frequent and regular.

Zimmer drops a little gem at the end of his piece:

The scientists also trained another group of people on the same game, but with a twist. They put a battery on top of the head of each subject, sending a small current through the surface of the brain toward a group of neurons in the primary motor cortex. The electric stimulation allowed people to learn the game better.

Subjecting people's brains to electrical excitation during an event to make their memory stronger is not new; scientists have known for a long time that during traumatic events, like a car crash, people's observation that "time seemed to slow down" was in fact due to a huge surge of electrical activity in the brain during the event, essentially giving them photographic memory.
But what is striking here is the implications for all types of learning. By providing the brain with mild excitation, people were not only better at remembering, they were better at learning. Zimmer worries that tennis players of the future may cheat by wearing a portable electrode while she practices her serve.
But I wonder instead if the future isn't a much brighter one: people can actually learn faster, and remember what they learn better, making them more productive humans. Kids can spend less time in school, or perhaps spend the same time in school but double their total knowledge. And they remember what they learned better than they can now. Imagine people getting college degrees in less time, or getting more degrees in the same time as now. Imagine new hires learning their job skills faster, and doing them more efficiently.

Simply put, if cortical electrical stimulation makes people better learners, and gives them better memories, then I say plug me in.


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