Scientists Discover How to Upload Knowledge to Your Brain Article of the Week Answers

March 16, 2017 (For calendar week of March vi)

I was thinking to myself the other day: "hmm, I haven't see a really shitty news commodity about encephalon science recently, I wonder if science journalists in the neurosciences stepped up their game after feeling the pressure from my intensely popular web log posts about science communication?"

Then, this gem dropped out of the heaven into my lap (thanks Kelvin). Give it a read, it'due south worth it.

I can't think of a more click-allurement proper name than this, honestly. Any they're paying these people, it's not enough.

Are y'all non entertained?

Apparently, since I last popped my head up from working on some trivial problems in neuroscience, somebody had gone and figured out how to directly upload noesis to our brains! (I had to look thrice to make sure that this wasn't the fucking Onion.)

"Whoa, I know Kung-Fu."

What journalists think scientists did:
So, what happened hither? Well, offset, according to this news commodity, "scientists" believe that we could soon feed knowledge directly into the brain Matrix-style, and researchers "claim" to accept already adult a stimulator that can do so. Uh…so which is it? Tin can we already do it or volition we be able to practise it soon? And who the hell are these scientists and researchers claiming that?

Okay, nevermind that. On the next line, we learn that apparently it only "amplifies" learning, and on a much smaller calibration than seen in Matrix. This is Practiced Journalism 101: if your readers are not disappointed by the third paragraph, you're non doing it correct.

Merely wait! On the very Adjacent line, it says that scientists "studied electric signals in the encephalon of a trained pilot and fed the data into novice subjects…and improved their piloting abilities and learned the task 33% better." The article goes on to conclude with some words similar "neuro- plasticity" and "synergy of cognitive and motor performance", and reminds us that Egyptians used electric fish to stimulate the brain some 4000 years agone.

What I think the scientists did after reading this commodity:
Then the article itself sends some confusing messages. In the best possible estimation (or is it the worst?), these scientists were able to directly upload the skills of flying a flight simulator into some novice brains. This is fucking groundbreaking! Why? This implies that we've broken the code with which the brain encodes information, such as concepts of altitude and speed, as well as motor commands. Non only that, we can now upload that information directly and through digital ways in a completely nonchalant way to random volunteers! Why the hell practise we nonetheless have grooming programs?!? This is literally Captain America: the Winter Soldier!

Okay, maybe this optimal reading is a bit besides literal (I mean literal as in I'm literally reading the words that are showing up on my screen.) Afterall, had that been truthful, this paper probably would've been in Nature AND Science in the same week, non Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Nothing wrong with Frontiers, I just don't typically run across papers casually pause the neural code there, that'south all.

So and so, to exist off-white, this news article pares back and seems to inject a hint of actual scientific rigor. In this interpretation, scientists recorded encephalon signals from trained pilots and played them back into the novices' brains through an electric stimulator. Having adjusted my expectations appropriately as such, I was really pretty excited nearly this outcome. 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 manifestly it facilitates learning! This would too be pretty groundbreaking (less sarcastically and so) and it would ask many more questions than it would answer, such as: "why the hell should that work at all?" Anybody's EEG is pretty unique, and if playing that back onto someone else's brain helps them learn, it would hateful that in that location are some invariant brain signatures that correspond certain skills or information in general. I tin inappreciably contain my excitement at this signal. And so I dig upwards the paper, and what did these folks exercise?

What the scientists actually did:

"Sham or actual tDCS was applied with the Starstim organisation (Neuroelectrics) post-obit the finger tapping task (run across Effigy 1A). The full current applied was 2 mA, with scalp current density of 0.04 A/m2 for agile tDCS (for threescore min), or 0.1 mA (0.002 A/m2) for sham tDCS (for 1 min)."

— Methods: tDCS. Choe et al., 2016

Fuck you lot, the Telegraph.

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Addendum: I would've concluded this rant correct there, but I think my non- neuroscience friends wouldn't get the joke. Basically, tDCS is a method of brain stimulation, a very unsophisticated one at that. tDCS stands for transcranial Straight Current Stimulation. Transcranial as in through the caput, and Direct Electric current as in…that's right, direct electric current. Essentially, tDCS is connecting a (or many) 9 Volt battery to your head such that a steady flow of electrons comes out of the bombardment and through your head. Information technology is as unexciting equally y'all could possibly make brain stimulation to be (though it is literally shocking), and it certainly does non rails the "recorded brain signal of the professional airplane pilot". I don't fifty-fifty know where this journalist person got that thought from. I re-read the Methods department like 4 times but to make sure I didn't miss something that was super important, only nowhere in at that place (nor in the abstruse & introduction) does it mention variable brain stimulation. As far as I can tell, the innovation in this written report is the concurrent recording of encephalon signals with brain stimulation, and a more than focal/ spatially precise way 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 up to a bombardment during training versus those that weren't.

Addendum to the annex: I honestly can't imagine how this news commodity could have come up out so wrong. It seems like the chief authors of the scientific paper are not at an bookish institution, so perchance their PR team wasn't equipped with dealing with "science journalism". I cannot imagine what the authors must exist thinking right now, though I suppose at that place is no bad publicity, especially if people won't fifty-fifty realize this is bad publicity. For all I know, somebody could've read this and thought we tin can plug into the Matrix now, and that'southward where I swoop in and salve the mean solar day from bad science journalism. Go me! Besides, I realized I did not make a annotate on the actual scientific finding, which is that, as unsophisticated as zapping your brain with a (DC) battery is, it led to bodily performance gains overall, as measured by some flying-landing metrics. I honestly don't know as well much hither, but I will say that this finding falls squarely within a larger context of the contentious debate about whether tDCS really does something to your brain, every bit summarized very nicely here.

So the have-home bulletin? Please, for the honey of god, don't get your scientific discipline from the Telegraph.

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Source: http://www.rdgao.com/scientists-discover-how-to-upload-knowledge-to-your-brain/

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