Savant syndrome occurs when a person with below normal intelligence displays an incredible ability in a specific area — like, for instance, if George W. Bush had extraordinary musical, mathematical, or artistic talent. ;-)

One thing to note about the super abilities of savants: they are gifts usually associated with the right side of the brain.

The Divine Right Side Brain

People with savant syndrome seem to have right-side brain abilities on steroids.

Savants may be able to mentally double 8,388,628 up to 24 times within a few seconds, paint amazingly accurate cityscapes from photographic memory, or sit down at a piano and play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 after only one listen.

Until recently, savant syndrome was thought to occur due to some sort of injury to the left side brain — occurring either inside the womb, or shortly after birth — which caused the right side brain to overcompensate.

But more recently, scientists have pondered whether we all have unconscious right side brain super abilities.

Allan Snyder, award-winning physicist and director of the Center for the Mind at the University of Sydney, says everybody has the innate capacity for savantlike skills:

Even something as simple as seeing requires phenomenally complex information processing.

When a person looks at an object, for example, the brain immediately estimates an object’s distance by calculating the subtle differences between the two images on each retina (computers programmed to do this require extreme memory and speed). During the process of face recognition, the brain analyzes countless details, such as the texture of skin and the shape of the eyes, jawbone, and lips. Most people are not aware of these calculations.

In savants the top layer of mental processing — conceptual thinking, making conclusions — is somehow stripped away. Without it, savants can access a startling capacity for recalling endless detail or for performing lightning-quick calculations.

This theory has been bolstered by a growing number of cases in which normal people suddenly acquire savant-like super talents after a head injury, after the onset of frontotemporal dementia in old age, and also, sometimes during deep hypnosis.

The Right Side Brain Experience of Jill Bolte Taylor

Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor got the opportunity to experience the full power of the right side brain firsthand. One morning, when a stroke disabled her left side brain, she experienced the world according to her right side brain.

After years of rehabilitation, Taylor was able to tell the world about her experience:

TEDTalks Video: Jill Bolte Taylor describes what it’s like to lose your left side brain.

Daniel Tammet: The Rosetta Stone of Brain Research

Daniel Tammet is a savant gifted with super mathematical and natural language abilities. He’s most famous for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits, and for learning Icelandic in a week. He’s also fluent in English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Welsh and Esperanto.

There are fewer than 50 prodigious savants in the world, and unlike the rest of them, Tammet has no obvious mental disability. Because his language skills are functioning to a high degree, he can describe his own savant thought processes, which makes him a scientific Rosetta Stone for brain researchers.

Tammet explains that he “experiences” numbers, each with its own unique shape, color, and texture, and emotion. When solving math problems, he doesn’t consciously work out the answers, but sees the answers appear, emerging from mutating, multiple-sensory landscapes.

In 2005, Tammet was the subject of an engrossing UK documentary, well worth the watch:

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (1/5)

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (2/5)

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (3/5)

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (4/5)

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (5/5)

Update: Don’t miss the next post on Achieving Left and Right Brain Balance.

Read More: autistic, savant, savant syndrome, left side brain, right side brain, Jill Bolte Taylor, Daniel Tammet

A 3-day-old, 8-cell embryo created through in vitro fertilization.

There’s a fierce debate in America over the right of mothers to abort their unborn children.

Facts and figures and philosophical speculations are bandied about, but the brassiest argument knocking legal abortion is that it’s all too often used as a convenient form of birth control.

Statistics show that the women who most use abortion as a convenience are poor single uneducated minority women:

Unintended pregnancy rates are substantially higher among women aged 18–24, unmarried (particularly cohabiting) women, low-income women, women who did not complete high school and minority women than among other groups.

Anti-abortion pundits sometimes use a sordid expression when alluding to this demographic: “welfare crack whores.” More about that later…

Life Begins at Conception

Another anti-abortion argument is that life begins at the moment of conception.

As far as science is concerned, life does indeed begin at conception, because at that moment, the conceived becomes an entity with all 46 chromosomes and a complete set of human DNA.

Danger, Will Robinson! Keep in mind…even blood samples, fingernail clippings, and skin cultures are genetically complete, but I dare say, do not constitute “personhood” or harbor human souls.

Crack Whores vs Soccer Moms

While some anti-abortion pundits are quick to point out the splinter in the eyes of welfare crack whores, they don’t talk much about the log in the eyes of another demographic.

On page 200 of Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, Jana Sawicki defines this demographic:

At present, in vitro fertilization is available primarily to married, white, upper middle-class women who perceive biological motherhood as very desirable.

As a level-playing-field wannabe-pundit, I’ll give this demographic its own sordid name: “barren soccer moms.”

Welfare crack whores may accidentally create unwanted embryos, but barren soccer moms use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to create unwanted embryos on purpose! Which is worse?

These in vitro fertilizations by barren soccer moms have left behind over 500,000 conceived human lives frozen in fertility clinics. Most of these human embryos will be abandoned, eventually thawed, and in the end — just like the aborted embryos of crack whores — they’ll end up in a medical incinerator or a landfill.

While barren soccer moms point their fingers at welfare crack whores using abortion for convenience, let us all keep in mind the upper middle-class white women who use in vitro fertilization for their own convenience, abusing a medical luxury which often, to save time and money, fertilizes many more eggs than needed — often leaving as many as two dozen unwanted embryos.

These barren soccer moms don’t implant all the conceived human lives they produce, and they use the same excuse as crack whores to justify their action: “What am I going to do with twenty kids? I can’t afford that!” Well, la-te-da! To cop a phrase from many anti-abortion rants, shouldn’t these barren soccer moms “stop and think before they spread their legs” at a fertility clinic?

In acts arguably more irresponsible than those of crack whores, barren soccer moms often leave it up to the staff at fertility clinics to decide how to trash the unwanted human lives they’ve created.

The Cheapness of Human Life

If crack whores should be forced to carry their embryos to term, then upper middle-class soccer moms who “irresponsibly” produce gluts of embryos should be forced to carry each of those human lives to term, too. And, if Americans make abortion a federal crime, then both demographics should face stiff prison sentences for first degree murder of each and every abandoned embryo.

But before our nation punishes mothers as criminals for conveniently killing human embryos in order to advance their own life agenda, I believe we as a nation would have to punish warmongers for conveniently killing innocent human adults out of convenience to advance our collective agenda, and collateral damage should no longer go unpunished. At the least, our laws should not value innocent embryonic life above innocent adult life.

Read More: abortion, pro choice, pro life, frozen embryos, crack whores, soccer moms

A laboratory in Texas has produced a light brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun.

Prof Todd Ditmire, with help from colleagues at the Texas Center for High-Intensity Laser Science at The University of Texas at Austin, has flipped the switch on the $14 million Texas Petawatt laser. Thank God he had his shades on.

The Texas Petawatt laser is so named because it generates one thousand million million watts of laser power, making it the most powerful laser in the world. While the laser can’t yet destroy an entire planet, I do feel confident that VP Darth Cheney will be arriving to inspect it soon.

The Petawatt laser generates 2,000 times the power output of all the power plants in the United States — but only for a 10th of a trillionth of a second. Still, you can’t just suck that kind of juice out of a typical wall socket. Ditmire explains:

To fire up the Texas laser, electrical charge has to be pumped into twenty 20,000-volt capacitors. These capacitors energize the amplification tubes that pump up the energy of the laser light beam. Each tube contains an amplifying material, usually glass, that is “excited” by lamps powered by the capacitors. Every time the laser passes through one of these sheets of glass it gains more energy.

Ditmire and friends plan to use the laser to create and study matter at temperatures greater than those inside the sun — temperatures so high that gases break down into a soup of particles called a plasma. In the coming months, they will explore atronomical phenomena on a tiny scale, creating tabletop stars, min-supernovas, and studying advanced ideas for creating energy with controlled fusion.

Read more Amazing, Orgasmic, and Fantastic Facts: Amasnic Fact Off Archive.

Read More: Texas Petawatt Laser, Todd Ditmire, Center for High-Intensity Laser Science, University of Texas, Austin

Remember when there was only one kind of spaghetti sauce on the store shelf. And now, there are, like, 36 varieties from traditional to extra chunky? How did that happen?

Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, wonders about these kind of things, too.

In the following talk, filmed at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in 2004, Malcolm explains how spaghetti sauce, and eventually the rest of the marketing world, was changed by the ideas of one Dr. Howard R. Moskowitz, a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics.

This talk covers everything from what we think makes us happy to how one person’s ideas can change the world in little ways that ripple into something huge.

To watch, click on the video below, or this link: Learning from Spaghetti Sauce.

Read More: Malcolm Gladwell, Harold Moskowitz, TED, spaghetti Sauce

Tested positive for drugs lately? Yeah, everybody’s doing it, even if they don’t inhale.

The big commotion is over an Associated Press investigation of American drinking water:

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.

The AP report goes on to fill in the blanks, just in case the picture isn’t clear: People take pills. The medication passes through their bodies and into the sewers, maybe via one of these super-duper fancy toilets. It comes out the other end of the toilet as wastewater, which is a nicer word for the two things most often found in a diaper.

This wastewater runs through a sewer to a wastewater plant where it’s treated and then dumped into a reservoir/river/lake. Then, other cities pump water out of the reservoir/river/lake, clean it up a bit, and pipe it to your refrigerator’s chilled water dispenser.

But don’t worry, because, as columnist Gordon Dillow points out, the amounts of pharmaceutical drugs found in the drinking water were “tiny” and are measured in “parts per billion.” For example: in Orange County, California, you’d have to drink 250,000 gallons of water to get a 100-milligram dose of a popular mood stabilizing drug called carbamazepine.

The Big Wastewater Swimming Pool

But that’s a small comfort, because I don’t think it’s the amount of drugs in the water that has shocked so many readers. I think it’s the realization that they are drinking from the same giant swimming pool into which we’ve all been relieving ourselves.

The lightbulb has turned on, and millions who never thought this thought before are now pondering it: before my drinking water becomes drinking water, it flows downhill, but it’s certainly not the only thing that flows downhill.

Thus, people who turn squeamish in the face at the mention of astronauts drinking recycled water on the International Space Station, are coming to realize the Earth is very literally just a spaceship, and every ounce of water we drink has passed through another person’s plumbing.

Paranoid BushCo and the EPA

And, if you’re wondering what turns the Bush administration squeamish, there’s this clue:

While [Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] said the EPA had analyzed 287 pharmaceuticals for possible inclusion on a draft list of candidates for regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, he said only one, nitroglycerin, was on the list. Nitroglycerin can be used as a drug for heart problems, but the key reason it’s being considered is its widespread use in making explosives.

That’s right! The EPA doesn’t care about the other 286 body and mind tainting drugs Americans are drinking. But they want to screen for nitroglycerin, otherwise, those dadburn terrorists might just bomb us with our own drinking water! Shazam!

And humans aren’t the only creatures drinking the drug-laden wastewater.

In a landmark, seven-year study of a Canadian lake published last year, researchers deliberately dripped the active ingredient in birth control pills into the water in amounts similar to those found to have contaminated aquatic life, plants and water in nature. The result:

After just seven weeks, male fathead minnows began producing yolk proteins, their gonads shrank, and their behavior was feminized — they fought less, floating passively. They also stopped reproducing, resulting in “ultimately, a near extinction of this species from the lake,” said the scientists.

The “glass is half full” takeaway is this: if Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the chickenhawk neocons continue to pollute their own drinking water, they too may experience shrinking gonads, fight less, and stop reproducing.

Amen to that.

Read More: pharmaceuticals, drugs in drinking water, EPA, environment, wastewater