
Novice pilot skills improved via expert-pilot brainwave patterns - rayascott
http://www.kurzweilai.net/now-you-can-learn-to-fly-a-plane-from-expert-pilot-brainwave-patterns
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cjhveal
I'd have liked to have seen two control groups. One group which received the
"mock brain stimulation" and another which received no brain stimulation. It
may be the case that playing noise into someone's brain has a detrimental
effect on performance which is less prevalent when the stimulus roughly
corresponds to the activity of a healthy brain.

If you drop a heavy weight onto someone's foot, they're likely to perform
better on tests of mental acuity than if you were to drop a heavy weight onto
their head. That doesn't necessarily mean that dropping the weight on their
foot improved their performance, just that it was less harmful.

Unless I'm missing something, the poor experimental design coupled with the
small sample size makes me very skeptical of the results. I'd love to see
another experiment with more conclusive findings either way.

~~~
BWStearns
I read the "mock brain stimulation" as meaning the headset seemed to be doing
something but was doing nothing. I guess the critique of the experiment would
more or less stand, though it'd be slightly rearranged. Maybe dropping weights
on any part of the body improves performance?

~~~
pygy_
It's "sham stimulation" (that's the technical term used in research) and, in
the case of direct current stimulation, it means what you described. The
current used for tDCS is too low to be perceived, so no current is an
acceptable placebo.

~~~
cjhveal
Ah, now I know! Serves me right for not reading the original paper before
criticizing their experimental method. Thanks for the technical term. I see
that the sham stimulation can still incorporate some ramp-up and ramp-down
current, but I'll have to dig deeper to understand how those brief currents
(or lack thereof) affect the quality of the control and the specifics of this
experiment.

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ilostmykeys
The novices performed 33% better could be totally like a cognitive placebo
effect OR MORE LIKELY the fact that they had to do it ONE MORE TIME LOL... I
am either missing something really big or this is a draft of an April 1st joke
released early

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Uptrenda
I remember looking into tDCS quite recently with the thought of boosting
intelligence as there are actually consumer devices available right now that
claim to be efficacious at increasing attention, memory, etc. Part of that
process involved looking at the studies on Google, checking out meta-analysis
etc - and what I found was there didn't seem to be enough evidence to conclude
anything substantial.

Anyway, picture me staring at a bunch of electrodes on a fancy, high tech
startups website and seriously considering whether strapping them to my head
was a good idea. I felt kind of ridiculous even entertaining the thought after
the scant scientific evidence - especially if the end goal was to increase IQ.
Needless to say the device did increase IQ but only through the direct act of
not purchasing it.

(I don't mean to be so negative but intelligence doesn't seem that easy to
hack.)

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laxatives
Is it wrong to think Kurzweil has gone off the deepend? I know he was
extremely productive in his early years, but everything about him just makes
him seem like a crank who spends most of his energy marketing himself as some
kind of thought leader. IMO anyone who calls themselves a "futurist" has very
little to contribute to the technology they are preaching.

~~~
gremlinsinc
He's ALWAYS been a crank, this generations mad genius, doesn't mean he's wrong
though. Just means our world is about to explode as AI starts infiltrating
EVERYTHING. But he's contributed PLENTY to the future -- AI needs to be able
to "see" and "hear" and understand what it sees and hears, and he created OCR
technology AND voice to speech -- both of which had to come before Super AI's
could ever be conceived. So he definitely knows what he's doing and is helping
push us towards that means.

~~~
fit2rule
Must the future be owned by narcissists and hubris?

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nefitty
The headline is a little confusing. Basically, these researchers measured the
brainwaves of expert pilots during a flight simulation, and then stimulated
(using transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS) the brains of novice
pilots during a flight simulation to match the brainwaves measured in the
experts. They found that the real tDCS-applied group showed 33% "increase in
skill consistency", as compared to the sham tDCS-applied group.

The interesting bit is the tDCS use, really. As many here may know, diy tDCS
has become a popular trend among lifehackers. It is thus vital to note the
possible negative side effects of tDCS, as pointed out by the editor of
Kurzweil AI in the comments of the blog post: "Electric brain stimulation
decreases IQ scores and racial prejudice" [http://www.kurzweilai.net/electric-
brain-stimulation-decreas...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/electric-brain-
stimulation-decreases-iq-scores-and-racial-prejudice)

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JorgeGT
On a side note, I'm totally stealing the trick of making MATLAB colorbar axis
white as in Fig. 2
[http://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/175655/fnhum-10-00...](http://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/175655/fnhum-10-00034-HTML/image_m/fnhum-10-00034-g002.jpg)

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bitwize
"I know kung fu."

"Show me."

~~~
kelvin0
Yup, that one crossed my mind as I was reading the article. Looks like we're
still a ways off this though.

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lifeisstillgood
That is without a doubt the freakiest thing I have read this week.

(Tl:dr - they recorded trans-cranial currents in motor and working memory
areas of experts landing a plane and replayed that or a control into novice
pilots heads. The novices perfeomed 33% better.)

~~~
cpncrunch
Where does it say they performed 33% better? The only mention of 33% is:

"the reduced variance reached statistical significance in >33% of individual
N-back trials comparing DLPFC stim with DLPFC sham"

which means something completely different. I think this study might be
terribly overblown.

~~~
adwf
Aboslutely. I'll admit to not having read the actual study, but saying that
33% of pilots improved is fairly meaningless. You could also say that 67% of
pilots _didn 't_ improve.

It might even be the case that those 67% that didn't improve had half of them
get worse. In which case we'd have 1/3 improve, 1/3 no change and 1/3 get
worse. Or in other words, a boring average distribution that means absolutely
nothing...

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3327
sounds too good to be true.

~~~
IshKebab
Agreed. I'm sceptical.

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eloff
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not a study with a sample
size of 32, including the control group. I remain super skeptical that the
statistically significant result actually implies a real result (and the
smaller the study, the lower the chances.)

~~~
Laaw
Small sample sizes don't mean low confidence, why do people constantly make
that mistake?

What you should be asking about are confidence intervals and reproducibility.

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jdimov9
I wonder what else they picked up...

