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.
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"
"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.
I think you're confusing "dangerous" with "working as designed" - the whole point of the experiment was to have the subjects "learn" without explicitly having to do anything. Plus, the article also states that "researchers have said that their method has only been shown to work with visual perceptual learning".
Also, I believe fMRI induction is quite safe (on a physical level), as the actual magnetic field strengths are controlled very precisely to be as weak as required. At most, if you think of parts of the brain as neural networks, the fMRI stimulation might only act to modify the NN weights.
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.
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.
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.