Researchers Teach Subliminally; Matrix Learning One Step Closer

An anonymous reader writes "For the first time ever, scientists from Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan have managed to use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI to decode the process of learning. As the research stands to date, it isn't capable of much. Rather than working with skills like juggling, the researchers relied on images so they could tie into the vision part of the brain, the part that they have managed to partially decode. Nevertheless, they demonstrated that information could be taught using neurofeedback techniques. And it was effective even when people didn't know they were learning."

Citation needed

[anton.karl]

This story really needs a link to an original paper.

The sorry state of science reporting

[bonch]

The article claims that they recorded the brain patterns of jugglers imagining the act of juggling, and then had a non-juggler imagine doing the same thing and rewarded them if they matched those brain patterns, thereby teaching them how to juggle.

That's absurd on its face. But then the article tucks away the fact that what the study really only dealt with visual imagery. It used fMRI, which has been around for years and "decodes" the visual process of the brain. So what this study is really about is figuring out visual perceptual learning, not a physical skill like juggling. Using fMRI, they can "improve performance on visual tasks" [infozine.com].

It says right in the article that they have yet to test if this process works with any other type of learning. It's more likely that it may have uses in rehabilitation and memory learning, or at least provide insight into those processes. There's no Matrix learning here.

Does anyone even remember The Matrix anymore?

[TFoo]

seriously: my wife teaches high schoolers, she made a comment about The Matrix and got a whole room of stares in response. 1999 was 12 years ago...

Re:Citation needed

[zlel]

is it http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1413.full [sciencemag.org] ? "Our results indicate that the adult early visual cortex is so plastic that mere repetition of the activity pattern corresponding to a specific feature in the cortex is sufficient to cause VPL of a specific orientation, even without stimulus presentation, conscious awareness of the meaning of the neural patterns that participants induced, or knowledge of the intention of the experiment. How is the present research on VPL distinguished from previous approaches? Unit recording and brain imaging studies have successfully revealed the correlation between VPL and neural activity changes (1–8). However, these correlation studies cannot clarify cause-and-effect relationships. The studies that examined the effect of a lesion (15) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) (16, 17) to a brain region on VPL have shown whether the examined region plays some role in VPL. However, these studies cannot clarify how particular activity patterns in the region are related to VPL. In contrast, the present decoded fMRI neurofeedback method allowed us to induce specific neural activity patterns in V1/V2, which caused VPL. "

Re:Does anyone even remember The Matrix anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too bad they never made a sequel.

I'll have to disagree. Twice.

I'll have to whoosh: http://xkcd.com/566/ [xkcd.com]

Re:Citation needed

[cp.tar]

Getting rid of memories is something that’s already being done, primarily with trauma victims, especially veterans.
It is actually really simple: since the act of recollection pulls the memory from long-term storage and then processes it back through short- and mid-term storage, patients are given drugs that inhibit passing from short-term to mid-term storage. (My mother was also given those after waking up from a coma; even though she was conscious, she remembers almost nothing. Which is good, given that just being plugged in to all those machines is very painful and causes a tormenting feeling of thirst even though you are properly hydrated. A week of those memories would leave serious consequences.)
Anyway, people come to a psychiatrist, drink a pill, and talk about their traumatic experiences, which are then slowly erased from their memories.
It is not always the preferred method; after all, we learn from bad experiences, and it wouldn’t do to erase them all. We’d only make the same mistakes again.