Explaining and inducing savant skills

From the amazing mind of Allan Snyder: "I argue that savant skills are latent in us all. My hypothesis is that savants have privileged access to lower level, less-processed information, before it is packaged into holistic concepts and meaningful labels. Owing to a failure in top-down inhibition, they can tap into information that exists in all of our brains, but is normally beyond conscious awareness. This suggests why savant skills might arise spontaneously in otherwise normal people, and why such skills might be artificially induced by low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation."


More here: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1522/1399.full

Facilitating Insight

Our experiences can blind us. Once we have learned to solve problems by one method, we often have difficulties in generating solutions involving a different kind of insight. Yet there is evidence that people with brain lesions are sometimes more resistant to this so-called mental set effect. This inspired us to investigate whether the mental set effect can be reduced by non-invasive brain stimulation.

More from Allan Snyder and Richard Chi here:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016655

Transforming organisations with the arts

“The interesting thing about an artist’s way of work is the ability to think differently and to create something new and unexpected out of something perceived as static and impossible to change.”
Jan-Peter Idström, Chief of Clinical Studies, AstraZeneca


http://creativeclash.squarespace.com/storage/TILLT%20Europe%20Policy%20recommendations%20March%202011.pdf

Where does that creative spark come from?

Stanford's Tina Seelig teaches people how to get their creative juices flowing. She's done this for the past dozen years with students at Stanford and at companies around the world.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/april/ingenius-seelig-creativity-043012.html

Innovations that will change tomorrow

We tend to rewrite the histories of technological innovation, making myths about a guy who had a great idea that changed the world. In reality, though, innovation isn’t the goal; it’s everything that gets you there. It’s bad financial decisions and blueprints for machines that weren’t built until decades later. It’s the important leaps forward that synthesize lots of ideas, and it’s the belly-up failures that teach us what not to do.http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innovations-issue.htm