Magnetic Brain Stimulation Makes Learning Easier 208
cylonlover writes "Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a technology that temporarily activates – or inactivates – parts of the brain using magnetic stimulation. Its ability to selectively turn areas of the brain on or off allows the functions and interconnections of the brain to by studied in a noninvasive and painless manner. Now researchers have shown that the technology can be used to enable rats to learn more easily. While smarter rats probably aren't high on anyone's wish list, the technology shows potential for allowing TMS to better treat a variety of brain disorders and diseases in humans, such as severe depression and schizophrenia."
Caution is in order in my opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
The body has evolved to reward beneficial behavior with feelings of pleasure, and to punish detrimental behavior with pain. Its an imperfect system, and it can go awry. But start mucking around with the feedback mechanism, bypassing it by stimulating the brain directly, and you can get into a lot of trouble. Similarly, other aspects of brain functionality tend to be as strong or weak as they are for reasons that have evolved over a long period of time. Almost anything that can be done to stimulate some aspect of brain function is at the expense of something else. The tradeoffs are many and poorly understood, and harmful effects aren't always very easy to detect externally. If it feels good enough, or produces compelling enough short term benefits, how does a person resist the temptation to do something that may have non-obvious long term penalties? By altering your brain function, your altering the one thing that is capable of warning you when you're going in a bad direction. In that regard its a highly unstable undertaking. A person can try to add a safeguard by handing the reins over to another person, like is done with prescriptions for therapeutic drugs. But that other person's judgment is almost unavoidably colored by their own self interest.
Medical technology is great for stuff like repairing busted knees. But if a person adds up all the human carnage caused by devices aimed at helping or correcting brain function, I wonder how its stacks up against the benefits.
Yes of course some people are going to explore this sort of thing anyway. I'm not in favor of banning it, and maybe I'm not even in favor of regulating it. But I still think its worth pause for thought.