I believe you are referring to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). I had been talking with a friend about the thought that idiot savants might not have the noise of conscious thought to interfere with the power/genius of their unconscious mind. He referred me to this NYT article from June 03 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...mp;pagewanted=1 which you allude to.
I have thought about this a lot recently. Specifically, the power of the unconscious mind. It started when I was introduced to trap earlier this year. Instruction as to how to lead the bird, follow through, yada-yada only served to fill my conscious mind. It was impossible to consistently hit a moving target in a conscious manner. I had to just shoot it; without ego, expectation, analysis. Just see the target shoot the target, with empty mind. Achieving a state of "emptiness" I believe is what many refer to as the "zone" and it is peaceful-- when achieved.
I bought the book "Shooting from Within" by J. Michael Plaxco, because I wanted to extend this experience to practical pistol shooting. I was surprised to see Plaxco dissecting this very concept of unconscious vs conscious mind in his chapter on "Psychology". That is a good book, by the way.
I am starting to think that many, if not all top performers are able to quiet the conscious mind (left brain or where ever it might be) and tap into the power of the unconscious mind (right brain or where ever it might be). The great athletes are often noted to be able to perform under clutch pressure or recover from an errant shot to perform spectacularly on the next shot (Tiger Woods comes to mind). I think amateurs let their conscious thoughts run amok when under the pressure of competition or after a poor shot; their unconscious mind cannot perform with all that other stuff floating around.
I thought it would be interesting to to perform a FUNCTIONAL MRI on a top performer and compare it to an amateur performing the same task. The problem, of course, is you can't do to many complex tasks in an MRI. But maybe one could do an continuous EEG (electroencephalogram) ... Hmmm. And maybe compare both amateur and master to someone in Zen-like meditation. That would be interesting.
