Allan Snyder - Biography

Allan Whitenack Snyder is the director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, Australia where he also holds the 150th Anniversary Chair of Science and the Mind. He is a co-founder of Emotiv Systems and winner of the International Australia Prize in 1997 and the Marconi Prize in 2001 for his contributions to optical physics.

Allan is also the Creator and Chairman of the What Makes a Champion? forum, an official Olympic cultural event first held at the Sydney 2000, then Beijing 2008 and forthcoming London 2012 Olympic Games. Nelson Mandela and John Howard opened the 2000 event. Tony Blair and Kevin Rudd opened the 2008 Beijing event.

Snyder's research career began in optical physics and he has published several important papers and books in this field. More recently, he has begun to work on mind sciences.

His discoveries in brain science are hailed in the journal Nature as "breaking a 19th century mindset", while his advances in physics are described in Science magazine as a "giant step forward".

Snyder has appeared in several television programs promoting his idea that transcranial magnetic stimulation of the left temporal lobe can induce savant-like skills in typical people. For example, these studies claim that after TMS, a person can draw better or count the number of dots on a screen very fast.

Allan Snyder is recognised for his discoveries covering the fields of visual neurobiology, communications, optical physics and the mind sciences. He also proposed that everyone possesses the extraordinary mind skills of savants.

Savant hypothesis

Snyder is interested in savants who are exceptionally good at some specific tasks such as counting, drawing or memorising. Even something as simple as seeing, he explains, 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, says Snyder, 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. Snyder's theory has a radical conclusion of its own: He believes it may be possible someday to create technologies that will allow any nonautistic person to exploit these abilities.

'Imagine if I could temporarily give you a child's look at the world,' he said.

Awards

In December 2001 he received the Marconi Prize in New York City.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1990 and is the recipient of their 2001 Clifford Paterson Prize.

Previously, he was a Guggenheim Fellow at Yale University’s School of Medicine and a Royal Society Research Fellow at the Physiology Laboratories of Cambridge University. He is a graduate of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University College London.

Education

Snyder has a DSc from the University of London, a PhD from University College (1969), London, an MS from Harvard University (1967), an SM from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1965) and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University (1963), University Park.

See also

• Champion mindset

External links

• University of Sydney
• Centre for the Mind
• London Science Museum
• Marconi Foundation
• Is integer arithmetic fundamental to mental processing?: the mind's secret arithmetic.