Magnetic field 'can boost brain'
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 07/06/2006)

Ordinary people could be capable of extraordinary feats of mental
agility by turning off part of the brain with magnetic fields,
according to Australian scientists.

In the Hollywood film Rain Man, the character played by Dustin
Hoffman counts 246 toothpicks at lightning speed when a waitress
spills them in a heap on the floor of a diner.

The ability of ordinary people to do this same feat can be boosted
with magnetic fields, says Prof Allan Snyder, Director of the Centre
for the Mind, a joint venture of the Australian National University
and the University of Sydney.

His study, which is published this month in the journal Perception,
investigates whether repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation,
TMS, can improve a healthy person's ability to guess accurately the
number of elements in a scene.

Participants in the study were presented with 50 to 150 random
elements on a monitor.

Of the 12 participants, 10 improved their ability accurately to guess
the number of elements immediately following TMS treatment to the
left anterior temporal lobe, a skill that receded an hour later.

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