
Researchers Create Matrix-Like Instant Learning Through Brain Stimulation - jessecred
http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/29/researchers-create-matrix-like-instant-learning-through-brain-stimulation
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dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11139703](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11139703)

And people thought _that_ title was over the top.

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wbhart
I find this research quite hard to swallow.

It's an extraordinary claim that feeding some electromagnetic representation
of the thought patterns of one person into a completely different (and perhaps
differently wired) brain that isn't necessarily designed to interpret such
electromagnetic signals, magically causes the second person to learn a task
faster.

Given the poor repeatability of medical research and the subjectivity of
"improvement" I find it just as likely that i) this is a statistical anomaly
or ii) feeding random noise into a person's brain as a control causes them to
perform more poorly than normal, or iii) stimulating a brain in _any_ way
causes an increase in "performance", or iv) something we didn't think of.

Extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence. Of course if
they were developing this for the military then maybe the standard is just not
the same.

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aznpwnzor
Did you read the paper or the title?

tDCS was what was used, which is simply a low current meant to modulate firing
rates at the cortical layer. There is NO interpretation of thought patterns
and conversion into some modulatory electric field.

I do agree there are a lot of issues with clinical based trials especially
ones with less concrete physiological measures, but the evidence for tDCS is
certainly slowly stacking on.

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wbhart
I did read the posted press article and know what transcranial direct current
stimulation is.

I think you may not have an objection to what I wrote if I remove the words
"thought patterns" and replace them with "brain activity" as used in the press
release.

Nonetheless, even this I find implausible. Why should I use the "brain
activity" of a commercial pilot and not a meditating monk? Surely any actual
information about flying a plane is totally absent from any such transfer. I
see no plausible mechanism here.

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aznpwnzor
I'm not sure why the press release says that, but that is not t"DC"S is, and
you're right there would be no reason to do that for any transcranial
electrical stimulation protocol.

But in the paper, it is pretty clear they do hd-tDCS. Spatially there may be
an attempt to target more specifically areas that are activated during normal
flight activity, but there is no attempt to "transfer activity" which has a
huge temporal and amplitude implication.

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vorotato
A 30% increase is hardly "Matrix-like". It's neat, but don't you fuckers try
this at home (you can) and shouldn't because you'll invent a new condition
like permanent laughing or blindness when looking at cats. Anything could
happen this is clearly well into "Who knows" territory.

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mortenjorck
This isn't "instant learning" at all, but rather something more akin to a
different movie, Pacific Rim, in which the two co-pilots of a giant robot
enter a sort of mind meld.

This is really no less exciting, though, and no less sci-fi.

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deckar01
Source:
[http://www.hrl.com/news/2016/0210/](http://www.hrl.com/news/2016/0210/)

Paper:
[http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00...](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00034/full)

