Vale Middle School Reading Article Scientists Discover How to Upload Knowledge to Your Brain Answers
March xvi, 2017 (For week of March 6)
I was thinking to myself the other 24-hour interval: "hmm, I haven't come across a really shitty news article about brain science recently, I wonder if scientific discipline journalists in the neurosciences stepped up their game after feeling the pressure from my intensely pop blog posts virtually science communication?"
Then, this jewel dropped out of the sky into my lap (thanks Kelvin). Give information technology a read, information technology'southward worth it.
Are you not entertained?
Apparently, since I final popped my head up from working on some trivial problems in neuroscience, somebody had gone and figured out how to directly upload knowledge to our brains! (I had to look thrice to brand sure that this wasn't the fucking Onion.)
"Whoa, I know Kung-Fu."
What journalists retrieve scientists did:
So, what happened here? Well, first, according to this news commodity, "scientists" believe that we could soon feed noesis directly into the brain Matrix-way, and researchers "claim" to accept already developed a stimulator that tin exercise so. Uh…so which is it? Tin can we already practice it or volition we exist able to do it soon? And who the hell are these scientists and researchers claiming that?
Okay, nevermind that. On the adjacent line, we larn that plainly information technology only "amplifies" learning, and on a much smaller scale than seen in Matrix. This is Good Journalism 101: if your readers are not disappointed past the tertiary paragraph, you're non doing it right.
But wait! On the very Side by side line, it says that scientists "studied electric signals in the brain of a trained airplane pilot and fed the data into novice subjects…and improved their piloting abilities and learned the job 33% better." The article goes on to conclude with some words like "neuro- plasticity" and "synergy of cognitive and motor operation", and reminds us that Egyptians used electric fish to stimulate the brain some 4000 years ago.
What I think the scientists did later on reading this article:
So the article itself sends some confusing letters. In the all-time possible interpretation (or is it the worst?), these scientists were able to straight upload the skills of flight a flight simulator into some novice brains. This is fucking groundbreaking! Why? This implies that we've broken the lawmaking with which the encephalon encodes information, such as concepts of altitude and speed, as well as motor commands. Non merely that, we can now upload that information directly and through digital means in a completely nonchalant way to random volunteers! Why the hell do nosotros however have grooming programs?!? This is literally Captain America: the Winter Soldier!
Okay, maybe this optimal reading is a fleck too literal (I mean literal as in I'one thousand literally reading the words that are showing up on my screen.) Afterall, had that been true, this paper probably would've been in Nature AND Science in the same week, non Frontiers in Man Neuroscience. Naught wrong with Frontiers, I just don't typically see papers casually break the neural code there, that's all.
So and then, to be off-white, this news commodity pares back and seems to inject a hint of actual scientific rigor. In this estimation, scientists recorded brain signals from trained pilots and played them dorsum into the novices' brains through an electric stimulator. Having adjusted my expectations appropriately as such, I was actually pretty excited about this result. The method itself is plausible enough: record voltage fluctuations on the scalp (EEG) of the professional, and play it back on the scalp of the novice, and apparently information technology facilitates learning! This would also exist pretty groundbreaking (less sarcastically so) and it would enquire many more questions than it would reply, such equally: "why the hell should that piece of work at all?" Everyone's EEG is pretty unique, and if playing that back onto someone else's brain helps them learn, it would hateful that there are some invariant brain signatures that correspond certain skills or information in full general. I can hardly contain my excitement at this indicate. So I dig up the paper, and what did these folks practice?
What the scientists really did:
"Sham or actual tDCS was practical with the Starstim system (Neuroelectrics) post-obit the finger tapping job (see Effigy 1A). The full current applied was 2 mA, with scalp current density of 0.04 A/m2 for active tDCS (for lx min), or 0.one mA (0.002 A/m2) for sham tDCS (for 1 min)."
— Methods: tDCS. Choe et al., 2016
Fuck you, the Telegraph.
Addendum: I would've ended this rant right there, but I recall my non- neuroscience friends wouldn't go the joke. Basically, tDCS is a method of brain stimulation, a very unsophisticated 1 at that. tDCS stands for transcranial Straight Current Stimulation. Transcranial as in through the caput, and Straight Current as in…that's right, direct current. Essentially, tDCS is connecting a (or many) 9 Volt bombardment to your head such that a steady flow of electrons comes out of the battery and through your head. It is equally unexciting as you could possibly brand brain stimulation to exist (though it is literally shocking), and it certainly does not rail the "recorded encephalon point of the professional pilot". I don't even know where this journalist person got that idea from. I re-read the Methods section like 4 times just to brand sure I didn't miss something that was super important, but nowhere in at that place (nor in the abstract & introduction) does it mention variable brain stimulation. Equally far as I tin tell, the innovation in this study is the concurrent recording of encephalon signals with encephalon stimulation, and a more focal/ spatially precise style of stimulating the encephalon, which is achieved through a new fancy system. Other than that, the experiment is literally to compare the performance of those that were hooked upwards to a battery during training versus those that weren't.
Addendum to the addendum: I honestly can't imagine how this news article could have come up out and then incorrect. It seems similar the principal authors of the scientific paper are not at an academic institution, so perhaps 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 there is no bad publicity, especially if people won't even realize this is bad publicity. For all I know, somebody could've read this and thought we can plug into the Matrix now, and that's where I swoop in and save the mean solar day from bad science journalism. Become me! Too, I realized I did non brand a comment on the actual scientific finding, which is that, equally unsophisticated as 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, but I will say that this finding falls squarely inside a larger context of the contentious contend virtually whether tDCS actually does something to your brain, as summarized very nicely hither.
So the take-home message? Delight, for the dearest of god, don't go your scientific discipline from the Telegraph.
Source: http://www.rdgao.com/scientists-discover-how-to-upload-knowledge-to-your-brain/
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