Check out my first book—The Superhuman Mind: True Tales of Extraordinary Mental Ability

Presenting a number of unique case studies, this 280-page inspirational science book “The Superhuman Mind: True Tales of Extraordinary Mental Ability” is an eye-opening, informative, often shocking, coverage of cases of people with special talents and mental abilities that exceed what we expect of ordinary human beings. The book begins with the amazing case of Jason Padgett. After a brutal assault in 2002, he started seeing complex mathematical patterns everywhere. After three years in solitude, he began to draw what he saw and is the first in the world to draw complex mathematical patterns by hand. Our laboratory did the first brain scans on Jason and found that his brain has undergone a remarkable reorganization after the assault. This research was featured on ABC’s Nightline and many major international newspapers. From there we move onto accounts of a profoundly deaf man who can act on sounds he cannot consciously hear. We talk to a young Danish math student who can remember a deck of cards in one second and recite Pi to over 20,000 decimal points. We then look at cases of blind people who use echolocation to navigate through difficult terrain and to discern the shape of small objects nearly as well as sighted people. Most of the remainder of the book looks at cases of sleepwalking, sleep-cooking and sleep driving as well as U.S. military sponsored research on extra sensory perception and artificial telepathy used in the CIA for the transfer of thought. We conclude by reporting on studies done in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Hospital on how magic mushrooms and other psychoactive drugs may enhance vision and change people’s personalities for the better. What’s interesting about all of these cases is that they seem not to be far away from how the neurotypical brain functions. Many of the cases covered in the book, like that of Jason Padgett, are acquired ones. Others, such as human echolocation, can be developed with practice. Drawing on our experience of running the St. Louis Synesthesia Lab and teaching and publishing in the areas of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology, the chapters are mixed with studies done in our laboratory and interviews with the people behind the cases.