Scientist Discover How to Upload Knowledge to Your Brain Answers
March sixteen, 2017 (For week of March 6)
I was thinking to myself the other day: "hmm, I haven't come up beyond a really shitty news commodity virtually encephalon science recently, I wonder if science journalists in the neurosciences stepped up their game after feeling the pressure from my intensely pop blog posts about science communication?"
Then, this gem dropped out of the sky into my lap (cheers Kelvin). Give it a read, it's worth information technology.
Are you not entertained?
Apparently, since I last popped my head upwardly from working on some niggling issues in neuroscience, somebody had gone and figured out how to directly upload knowledge to our brains! (I had to look thrice to make certain that this wasn't the fucking Onion.)
"Whoa, I know Kung-Fu."
What journalists call back scientists did:
So, what happened hither? Well, first, according to this news article, "scientists" believe that we could soon feed knowledge direct into the brain Matrix-style, and researchers "claim" to have already adult a stimulator that tin do so. Uh…and so which is it? Can nosotros already practice it or will we be able to do it soon? And who the hell are these scientists and researchers claiming that?
Okay, nevermind that. On the adjacent line, we learn that apparently it but "amplifies" learning, and on a much smaller calibration than seen in Matrix. This is Skilful Journalism 101: if your readers are not disappointed by the third paragraph, you're not doing it right.
Simply wait! On the very NEXT line, it says that scientists "studied electric signals in the brain of a trained pilot and fed the data into novice subjects…and improved their piloting abilities and learned the job 33% improve." The article goes on to conclude with some words similar "neuro- plasticity" and "synergy of cerebral and motor performance", and reminds u.s. that Egyptians used electric fish to stimulate the encephalon some 4000 years ago.
What I think the scientists did after reading this article:
So the article itself sends some confusing messages. In the best possible interpretation (or is information technology the worst?), these scientists were able to directly upload the skills of flying a flight simulator into some novice brains. This is fucking groundbreaking! Why? This implies that we've broken the lawmaking with which the brain encodes information, such as concepts of distance and speed, as well equally motor commands. Non merely that, we can now upload that data direct and through digital means in a completely nonchalant way to random volunteers! Why the hell do nosotros still have training programs?!? This is literally Captain America: the Wintertime Soldier!
Okay, maybe this optimal reading is a bit likewise literal (I mean literal as in I'm literally reading the words that are showing up on my screen.) Afterall, had that been truthful, this paper probably would've been in Nature AND Science in the same week, not Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Zip wrong with Frontiers, I just don't typically see papers casually break the neural code there, that's all.
So then, to be fair, this news article pares back and seems to inject a hint of bodily scientific rigor. In this interpretation, scientists recorded brain signals from trained pilots and played them dorsum into the novices' brains through an electrical stimulator. Having adapted my expectations appropriately as such, I was actually pretty excited near this result. The method itself is plausible plenty: record voltage fluctuations on the scalp (EEG) of the professional, and play it back on the scalp of the novice, and apparently it facilitates learning! This would also exist pretty groundbreaking (less sarcastically then) and it would ask many more questions than information technology would answer, such equally: "why the hell should that work at all?" Everyone's EEG is pretty unique, and if playing that back onto someone else's encephalon helps them learn, it would mean that in that location are some invariant encephalon signatures that represent certain skills or data in general. I tin can hardly contain my excitement at this point. So I dig up the newspaper, and what did these folks practice?
What the scientists actually did:
"Sham or bodily tDCS was applied with the Starstim arrangement (Neuroelectrics) following the finger tapping task (run across Effigy 1A). The total current applied was 2 mA, with scalp current density of 0.04 A/m2 for active tDCS (for 60 min), or 0.1 mA (0.002 A/m2) for sham tDCS (for 1 min)."
— Methods: tDCS. Choe et al., 2016
Fuck you, the Telegraph.
Annex: I would've ended this rant correct at that place, but I remember my non- neuroscience friends wouldn't become the joke. Basically, tDCS is a method of encephalon stimulation, a very unsophisticated ane at that. tDCS stands for transcranial Direct Electric current Stimulation. Transcranial as in through the head, and Straight Current as in…that's right, direct electric current. Essentially, tDCS is connecting a (or many) 9 Volt battery to your caput such that a steady menstruum of electrons comes out of the battery and through your caput. It is as unexciting as you could perchance make encephalon stimulation to be (though it is literally shocking), and information technology certainly does not track the "recorded encephalon signal of the professional person pilot". I don't even know where this journalist person got that idea from. I re-read the Methods section like 4 times merely to brand sure I didn't miss something that was super important, simply nowhere in at that place (nor in the abstruse & introduction) does it mention variable brain stimulation. Every bit far as I can tell, the innovation in this study is the concurrent recording of brain signals with brain stimulation, and a more focal/ spatially precise way of stimulating the brain, which is achieved through a new fancy organisation. Other than that, the experiment is literally to compare the operation of those that were hooked up to a battery during grooming versus those that weren't.
Addendum to the addendum: I honestly can't imagine how this news article could have come out so wrong. Information technology seems like the main authors of the scientific paper are non at an academic institution, so peradventure their PR team wasn't equipped with dealing with "science journalism". I cannot imagine what the authors must be thinking right now, though I suppose in that location is no bad publicity, peculiarly if people won't even realize this is bad publicity. For all I know, somebody could've read this and thought we tin plug into the Matrix now, and that's where I dive in and relieve the day from bad science journalism. Go me! Besides, I realized I did not make a comment on the bodily scientific finding, which is that, as unsophisticated every bit zapping your brain with a (DC) battery is, it led to actual performance gains overall, every bit measured by some flying-landing metrics. I honestly don't know too much here, only I will say that this finding falls squarely inside a larger context of the contentious fence about whether tDCS actually does something to your brain, equally summarized very nicely here.
So the take-home bulletin? Please, for the love of god, don't get your science from the Telegraph.
Source: http://www.rdgao.com/scientists-discover-how-to-upload-knowledge-to-your-brain/
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