[LINK] Learning without practice, through fMRI induction
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122523&org=NSF&from=newsFrom the article:
New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “Matrix” franchise.
Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.
Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person’s visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.
EDIT: To clarify, this is almost certainly over-hyped. However, it appears to at least be an instance of very interesting biofeedback.
Right now I can’t watch the video or read the original article, but the comparison of this to Matrix-style instant learning downloaded into your brain appears to be ridiculous hype. After looking through dozens of articles repeating the original press release without providing any details, I finally found this description of how it works. You use biofeedback to adjust your brain state, and then for a while afterwards you can discriminate specific visual textures more efficiently. That’s it. So it’s another example of neurohype.
I still find it interesting, though. Biofeedback seems like very powerful stuff, though clearly not as crazy as the hype makes it out to be.
Original Paper. Is that link paywalled? I’m at uni and so I can no longer tell (I pass through the paywall automatically). Let me know if you want to see the paper and can’t!
If you’d like to know how to tell for biological or medical articles...
First, nih.gov is open-access. They have full papers like the one you link to at “PubMed Central.” For other papers on biology or medicine, the journal’s page usually has a link to “PubMed” (not Central) which contains the abstract and citation. (for this paper, here). If the paper is not open-access, PubMed is usually a better link than the journal website.
At the upper right, the PubMed entry has an icon for the journal’s website, which is a link to article at the journal’s site. The icon tells you whether the publisher makes it free (by including to word “free” or not). There may be other icons, if the paper is available in other places. Thus, this article has two icons: a non-free Science link and a free PubMed Central link.
Outside of biology, it’s more journal-by-journal, but it’s tricky to tell.
Google Scholar is a good way to search for alternate sources, if you don’t have university access.
Cool, thanks!
Nope, worked for me too (although it’s just a preprint rather than the final paper).
emWave sort of does this for relaxation.