Dazzled by the mystery of mentalism : the cognitive neuroscience of mental athletes
Neural processing bymental athletes (MAs) has received attention fromNeuroscience community, with several publications examining superior memorizers (Maguire et al., 2003; Bor et al., 2008), lighting calculators (Pesenti et al., 2001; Fehr et al., 2010), and savants (Treffert, 2009). In this opin...
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| Autores principales: | , , |
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| Formato: | Artículo publishedVersion |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
2018
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00287 https://repositorio.utdt.edu/handle/20.500.13098/11061 |
| Aporte de: |
| Sumario: | Neural processing bymental athletes (MAs) has received attention fromNeuroscience community,
with several publications examining superior memorizers (Maguire et al., 2003; Bor et al., 2008),
lighting calculators (Pesenti et al., 2001; Fehr et al., 2010), and savants (Treffert, 2009). In this
opinion, we contend that the presumption of extraordinary abilities inMAs is fundamentally flawed
because their demonstrations involve tricks that regular individuals can learn. Since, these tricks
easily escape the scrutiny of investigators, a high standard of rigor should be applied to research
on MAs.
MAs seem to demonstrate abilities—for example, short-term memory and mental
calculations—that by far exceed those of an average person. MAs’ performance is indeed
impressive: for instance, some of them multiply two 20-digits numbers without annotating and the
other memorize thousands of digits of p. |
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