Scientific Discovery of the Week - Volume 2

[Agloco]

This installment comes on the eve of a trip to Europe, so I likely won't have the opportunity to peek in on the feedback.

Learning high-performance tasks with no conscious effort may soon be possible

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-1...ort-video.html

In the future, a person may be able to watch a computer screen and have his or her brain patterns modified to improve physical or mental performance. Researchers say an innovative learning method that uses decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging could modify brain activities to help people recuperate from an accident or disease, learn a new language or even fly a plane.

New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise.

This is courtesy of functional MRI, a modality which images the perfusion, diffusion, or metabolic pathways of biologic media (as opposed to conventional MRi which gives anatomic information). We are able to then blend both modalities together to get a more accurate picture of pathologic processes or in this case, cortical activation pathways.

Much like image acquisiton in MRI, visual acquisiton in the occipital cortex begins with edge detection (higher spatial frequencies) and then proceeds to fill in the rest of the object (lower spatial frequencies) with proper contrast.

More details on the experiemntal design:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1413.full

In this case, the researchers are able to have participants reproduce patterns on fMRI without knowledge of the task which is to be learned.

A quote from the second link:

To addresses the question of whether early visual areas are that plastic, we developed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) online-feedback method, by which activation patterns corresponding to the pattern evoked by the presentation of a real and specific target orientation stimulus were repeatedly induced without the participants’ knowledge of what is being learned and without external stimulus presentation. The mere induction of the activation patterns resulted in significant behavioral performance improvement on the target stimulus orientation, but not on other orientations.

If it is indeed possible to induce more complex patterns by a similar method as the one outlined, this is a very exciting breakthrough. The notion of whether or not early visual ares possess enough plasticity to cause visual perceptual learning (VPL) remains a point of contention. The results of this study indicate that those areas are indeed sufficiently plastic.

To borrow a quote from the Matrix:

"I know Kung-Fu"

[ChuckD]

Uh, sorry, that's scary. What if the learning becomes involuntary programming? Our Govt seems to be going that way...

[scott]

The Democratic and Republican parties hailed the research as the greatest scientific breakthrough of our times.

[Wild Cobra]

What's that device called used the "The Doll House?"

[LnGrrrR]

I read a study on a sports page the other day that said that we can learn roughly 80% of a task from watching said task. The same areas that neurons fire when a baseball player swings a bat are the same areas that trigger in your brain when watching it. So it makes sense that they could develop some sort of process in which you could visualize certain tasks in order to increase effective performance/learn new processes.