For those who are skeptical about our ability to significantly enhance human cognitive performance with currently available technologies, an article in the New York Times this week, Savant for a Day, might change your point of view.
Is it possible that you are a genius of extraordinary powers? You might be surprised to learn that you have amazing untapped capabilities. By shutting down certain mental processes, you can easily calculate the day of the week for every date of the Gregorian calendar, speak dozens of languages without formally studying any of them or can reproduce music at the piano after only a single hearing.
There are technologies that can temporarily disrupt the mental processes that prevent you from enjoying these talents. We are only beginning to understand how this works, but the phenomenon is reproducible by the scientists who are studying it.
