

Huge breakthrough in "direct to brain" learning - suprgeek
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10774546

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mistercow
Man I hate pop science articles that don't give any way to find the original
research. Here's the full text:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3297423/>

So basically, forget everything you read in the Herald article. Except for
this quote:

>A more understandable analogy could the scene from the action movie The
Matrix where the star, Keanu Reeves learns kung fu by being plugged into a
machine - except this method is considerably less invasive.

Remember that quote as an example of when you should stop reading a science
article and start digging for the actual study.

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AngryParsley
This is yet another case of reporters grossly exaggerating a discovery. It was
discussed 10 months ago on Less Wrong:
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/8th/link_matrixstyle_learning/>. Here's the actual
paper: [http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/12/Shi...](http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/12/Shibata-et-al-Perceptual-Learning-Incepted-by-Decoded-
fMRI-Neurofeedback-Without-Stimulus-Presentation.pdf)

Also, it was already known that parts of the brain can be programmed by visual
stimuli. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect> and
<http://www.cheswick.com/ches/projects/me/index.html>.

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FrojoS
Is this New Zealand's version of The Onion? Also, the "article" is from 8:18
AM Wednesday Dec 21, 2011 and the "X-ray picture" should remove the last
doubts.

I have to admit, although I was in disbelief from the beginning, it got me
quite excited and at some point thinking "Wow, if this is true, I should dropp
everything and get into this field NOW"

Nice prank to make it to the front page.

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tokenadult
This is a crap link, and as such doesn't belong on HN at all.

<http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html>

"Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and
don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

Several helpful comments have already pointed out that the press release
submitted here is full of wrong factual statements. Moreover, it is old and
thus now "news." I have flagged it, which is all anyone can do about a crap
submission in the absence of being able to downvote submitted articles.

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hristov
The actual article is not nearly as shocking as the hn title. They have not
been able to implant any thougths yet. What they did was merely put people in
a mental state where they can perform certain actions better.

~~~
mistercow
No, they didn't even do that.

What they did, in a nutshell, is show strong evidence that the adult visual
cortex can be trained. There's a lot of discussion about "induction" here, but
the only intervention here was presenting them with images.

The experiment goes like this (as far as I can tell):

1\. Have a bunch of subjects perform a multiple choice visual identification
task and scan their visual cortex with an fMRI while they do it.

2\. Build a statistical model that lets you predict, based on an fMRI, which
of the three answers the respondent gave.

3\. Have the subjects do more of the same kind of test, repeatedly, but
without answering; just have them stare for six seconds. Use the statistical
model to classify which answer they would give, and show them a circle that
gets larger depending on how strongly the model classifies the answer as
correct. Ask subjects to maximize the size of this circle without telling them
what it means.

4\. Repeat step 1 and measure the change in accuracy.

What did they find? The subjects improved at the task, even though they didn't
know what they were supposed to be doing.

Incredibly cool, and completely unrelated to "direct to brain" learning.

