Electric 'Thinking Cap' Controls Learning Speed 112
An anonymous reader writes "Vanderbilt researchers say they've shown it's possible to selectively manipulate our ability to learn by applying a mild electrical current to the brain. Using an elastic headband that secured two electrodes conducted by saline-soaked sponges to the cheek and the crown of the head, the researchers applied 20 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to each subject. Depending on the direction of the current, subjects either learned more quickly, slower, or in the case of a sham current, with no change at all. The [paywalled] study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience."
It looks like people are going to line up (Score:5, Funny)
People are going to be lining up around the blockfor the "learn slower" electric charge.. if our society's obsession with alcohol is any indication.
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Whoosh!
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But even this child's play get results. Lots of low hanging fruit.
But at what cost ?? (Score:1)
But even this child's play get results. Lots of low hanging fruit
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read TFA (not the paywalled one).
Before we get any understanding of the function of our brain they already are messing it up with currents.
What kind of consequences are we willing to risk ? I mean, no matter how mild the electric current turn out to be, at the cell level (neuron level) that current is still a SHOCK to them.
How much stress must we put the neurons under ? What would happen to the neurons after repeat electric shock treatments ????
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I don't want to come off sounding like I endorse the practice of randomly fucking up people's brains, but this is how we get an understanding of how the brain really works. We'll try this to see what happens, then we'll think about the brain some more and we'll try something else to see what happens and eventually we'll work out what's actually going on.
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Alternately, he may simply have meant that the very fact that we enjoy intoxicants in the first place suggests we want to dumb ourselves down. Again, same outcome.
And again, whoosh!
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..says the anonymous coward.
You obviously like alcohol very much. Perhaps you should go drink yourself into another senseless stupor and tell everyone that you're not doing it to forget.
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A euphoric reaction can easily be created from a slightly different positioning of the electrodes. Think about it: euphoria combined with the inability to learn = instant panty dropper = huge profit for whoever can invent a social situation where everyone puts one on. Look at how much money alcohol makes, and they can't target different experiences.
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You just doubled down on stupid.
Is that a threat? Are you threatening to post for a third time??
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I see this a lot, and it seems like everyone and his brother rapidly makes claims and charts of their snake-oil to show to those who they think they can extract a dollar from.
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So does this article come from the same people who made pluripotent cells by bathing them in acid or not?
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People are going to be lining up around the block for the "learn slower" electric charge.. if our society's obsession with alcohol is any indication.
Alcohol? The continued success of America's two political parties seems like better evidence.
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Piss on an electric fence one time... you will learn quickly, grasshoppah...
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I do think that alcohol lovers seem to be extraordinarily quick to case aspersions against anyone who posits an opinion that threatens their way of life. It must have something to do with their repetitive use of a substance that dulls their ability to learn.
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Well, This Makes Sense... (Score:5, Funny)
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lol...really?? that's exactly what "experts" said about self-driving cars just 6 or 7 year ago...it was an impossible task.
read "The 2nd Machine Age" and "The Singularity Is Near"...the Technium is growing at a non-linear, exponential rate which mean linear approximations of where technology is taking us is radically off target, even projecting just 6-8 years into the future. using simple math and an x^2 growth rate, in 4 years the Technium will be (16 - 4 ) 12 TIMES further along then what most people can
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ahhh...the ad hominem attacks cometh. ...preparing for nazi reference in 5....4....3....
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well...since you seem to have me dead to rights i might as well confess all my sins to you oh keeper of the /. grammer and style.
in 2nd grade i colored outside the lines. i know i know the horror...THE HORROR!!!
thank you, kind sir, for your virtual wrist slaps and absolution from my sins. i feel much better now.
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The Singularity is just another type of slippery slope argument. Some foolish "experts" draw an exponential curve and say it intersects with infinity in ~50 years. Everyone who studies reality knows that as the speed of anything increases so does the resistance. That's why if you drop something out of an airplane it doesn't accelerate to infinite speed, and neither does technological progression.
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i guess Moore's law is too, right? ...and the fact that you currently have an 80's Cray supercomputer sitting in your pocket says nothing about the rate of change.
very very few people in the 80's could have even begun to predict that.
and you must be trolling...to say Ray Kurtzweil [wikipedia.org] is just some "foolish expert" is to be utterly clueless about the history of technology, and shows how little you know about much of anything.
he probably did more before breakfast this morning then you will achieve in your entire
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(...)to say Ray Kurtzweil [wikipedia.org] is just some "foolish expert" is to be utterly clueless (...) he probably did more before breakfast this morning then you will achieve in your entire life.
You mean, like having some nice morning sex? Given the Slashdot famed population statistics, you might be just right.
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Wow, connie, it seems like all you're really saying is that you believe in the singularity, which, unfortunately, we all already knew. Yes, Moore's law is no more a law than Occam's razor. Moore's law is just a principal that works until it doesn't.
I see a car outside my window right now driving on the highway at 65mph. So I'm coining the term "Ablaze's law" right now that says that that car will just keep driving at 65mph forever. Ablaze's law will probably work for quite a while, certainly long enough for
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i never said I believe in The Singularity and obviously know that Moore's Law is a misnomer...it's more like a prediction that has so far been quite accurate.
i did say, however, that I believe Ray Kurtzweil is a genius, and knows more about engineering and technology then probably the entire userbase of slashdot combined. a quick look at his long list of serious technical achievements proves this beyond a reasonable doubt, altho i'm sure there are people here who are fantastical engineers. this is fact.
i
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Ray Kurtzweil is a very smart man. He is also a very sad man who thinks would be a good and practical idea to have a computer imitate his dead father. He's actually quite a pathetic -- in the sense of moving one to pity -- figure, unable to come to terms with basic truths about existence.
We're already soaking in the Vingean singularity: anyone with a smartphone and a data connection has effective I
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The laws of physics are statistical. Why can't we learn to exploit the statistics?
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Woah, rein your horses my man! Having a smartphone doesn't make anyone more intelligent, quite the contrary indeed, if I'm to believe what I see everyday in the street, public transports, restaurants, social events etc. The ability to find more information faster may provide Knowledge Amplification, but it has nothing to do with the Intelligence of the person that carries the smartphone. I'd say the smartphone is more int
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I don't think the Singularity [wikipedia.org] means what you think it means. It isn't intersecting with infinity, but with human intelligence. It is not claimed that human intelligence is infinite.
If as the speed of anything increases, so does the resistance, why are galaxies speeding away from each other at an ever-increasing rate?
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If as the speed of anything increases, so does the resistance, why are galaxies speeding away from each other at an ever-increasing rate?
Technically they aren't. Technically they are getting further apart without moving away from each other at all (if you average momentum). But I expect you just threw that in there as a red herring, since even if galaxies were moving away from each other it does nothing to refute my claim that at some point in the future they would encounter a resistive force and stop accelerating at such a rate.
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So that's all you're doing, making unsubstantiated claims.
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Exponential progress is simply put an idiotic theory that fails at so many levels _even_ for the tour de force of technology: that of computers in general and silicon based microchips in particular. Waving ones hand and uttering the "SINGULARITY" mantra doesn't change scientific fact sadly.
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I think you mean social, not physical reality. Aristarchus of Samos's heliocentric theory was more "real" than the epicyclists; yet he had trouble getting anyone to accept it, because the social reality of the time was so fixated on geocentrism.
In the same way, Mendel's ideas correlated with reality, but the social reality of his time prevented him from getting stuff done.
Wegener is another example.
I think you're guilty of naive realism [wikipedia.org], which fails when it comes to quantum physics, for example.
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Your argument can apply equally well to both sides of this debate. By pushing equally hard in both directions it has a net zero effect, and thus can be completely ignored.
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The point is, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. And plausibility relies on social reality, not what's really going on.
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Not that this is even remotely related to what you're talking about. I don't if I'd even describe what you're suggesting as "rapidly approaching" We barely understand the very rudimentary aspects of the brain, much less how "Thought" gets made. But I do concede that should we survive long enough as as a society then yes, something like this will come along and someone bad will use it for bad things. So what do you propose we do? Make it illegal? That wont stop North Korea from doing anything. Ban research?
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The Greeks must have said about the same to Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC. There was no evidence of parallax motion of the stars, therefore the earth didn't move around the sun. But their instruments just weren't sensitive enough to detect the parallax.
And of course it was wildly implausible that the earth was not the center of the universe. So even though Aristarchus was right, he was dismissed and science was set back some two millenia. That's the risk you run by being so dismissive. Instea
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But just imagine the dangers if they can somehow transmit these signals over the air and somehow get them to be transmitted directly to the brain through the visual system.
It could paralyze a whole nation into giving up their civil liberties!!
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i dunno...3d print it with polymers?
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Of course they are coming, but i doubt they will be simple "caps", as for real control i see no real way around internal electrodes.
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When somebody can attach a headband on you against your will, you are already enslaved.
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When somebody can attach a headband on you against your will, you are already enslaved.
Paying for it is a problem too. That's why we had design the Occulus -- so nerds would pay us to put that headband on.
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Who pays for this research? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. We need people to become more eager to _buy_ stuff, not to learn faster!
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Hardly. Why would all those universities and their employees want to take a 50% paycut just so you can complete your degree in half the time?
If you found a way to double the number of educated people in every field, I'm sure it would have economic advantages, but it would also depress the wages in every field as there would be twice the supply of workers and definitely not twice the demand.
Treatment (Score:2, Offtopic)
I wonder if this could be used to treat conditions like chronic fatigue. Those of us suffering from it are just about ready to attach electrodes and a 1.5V battery to our heads.
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Look up tensegrities and study physics.
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There is much we don't know, but I don't think we have to start wearing our Aluminum foil hats 24/7 just yet.
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There is much medical science doesn't know.
It worked wonders for me and the people who would listen. Also got rid of the constant pain. I remember being confused as a child when doctors would poke and prod me and asked 'does that hurt?'
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To whoever modded me off-topic, I ask because certain drugs that are used to enhance learning are known to be helpful for people with chronic fatigue.
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Is there an app for this? (Score:2)
... will it work with my Lightning connector? ... will it drain my battery?
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oh, and sorry I forgot to be polite:
FUCK BETA, and the Mobile edition while you are at it.
The brain is a delicate organ (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems analogous to grabbing a smartphone, connecting a wire to some metal part, plugging that wire directly into a 120 V AC source, and hoping that the smartphone works better afterwards. Yes, smartphones have electricity running through them, too, but what you're doing isn't like to be productive.
We're only going to be able to safely operate on the brain when we can stably reprogram individual neural networks. That's the model we're going to have to have of the brain. Something on the order of sophistication of microchip and circuit designers with a cadre of millions of neuroprogrammers. Brain programming might one day be the growth field. We can't have opinions of how the brain might work. We need to have facts about how the brain does work, in minute detail.
risk aversion (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. The inventors of the trebuchet had no idea about the Higgs, the inventors of the windmill didn't understand Bernoulli's work, and the first people to take Valerian root had no concept of biochemistry. We can use observed patterns to serve our needs without understanding the reasons for those patterns. Yes a lot of people died eating random plants, but there are a lot of us, and we learn quickly. My favorite part about engineering is using techniques to solve problems that no one understands yet. Its like magic. The best is when a true subject matter expert tells me "that shouldn't work!" and yet it does. Science always catches up and we are the better for it, but that is no reason to proceed with caution when we have so many people, and so much to learn. I would qualify this by saying test subjects should be informed and consenting.
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My objections are evidenced throughout this thread: For example, someone wants to go to Radio Shack and spend $15 to build his very own brain stimulator. Hopefully nothing goes wrong but the cost to society of people with damaged or malfunctioning brains in a lot more than $15. People with damaged or malfunctioning brains can commit murder or become a ward of the state. That's liable to cost society more like in the millions.
You don't go to Radio Shack and build a kidney dialysis machine for $15, and I don'
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>> refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable ... what? ...
Or did you mean
refactor the law, it's bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Or possible
Refactor the law, it's bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Dammit, you're supposed to be a geek. Learn the grammar.
And you are right, I haven't had my coffee yet.
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Re:The brain is a delicate organ (Score:4, Insightful)
We can't have opinions of how the brain might work. We need to have facts about how the brain does work, in minute detail.
Isn't that precisely what this research result is all about? It's not like they're hawking a product. We knew learning was affected by electrical currents already. Slashdot covered that story. One presumes this result fines that down in terms of what parts of the brain are involved. Or possibly it broadens the study group. I don't know since I can't read the article, but it's going to be something like that. It's research. Experimental research, rather than empty hypothesizing. These researchers are learning how the brain works, and whether or not it's a "delicate organ" as you claim. You only have a hypothesis. They're finding out.
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Perhaps it's like putting an overclocked CPU in the fridge and observing that it works better there. You don't have to understand something fully in order to manipulate it in certain ways.
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Give special attention to the electrodes. A pair of quarters was not a good idea.
What issue is this in? (Score:2)
So, the Electric 'Thinking Cap' "study appears in the current issue".
I am shocked.
For certain values of learning (Score:3)
The task in the study that the subjects had to learn is one specifically tailored to make use of the brain area stimulated. Whether this can help in, for example, memorizing the contents of a book remains to be seen.
what about the ones form battlefield earth (Score:2)
Now that is a good idea.
Now wifi? (Score:2)
Harrison Bergeron (Score:2)
This electronic thinking cap seems like it will be slightly more pleasant than someone having "a little mental handicap radio in his ear" which emits "some sharp noise to keep people... from taking unfair advantage of their brains."
For those that wish for the singularity, sadly there's a 50-50 chance of it slipping into a dystopian singularity of forced equality or a professional sports analogy to "The Dark Fields". These possibilities appear to be nearly upon us and we don't even seem realize it... The sp
"One Helmholtz coil hat please!" (Score:1)
Helmholtz coil in a hat is what you really want when said and done and all the regions are better understood. .. setting A, polarity Y .. setting B, AC [cycle-time, intensity, loc_data, ...] ...
Want to learn a new physical skill
About to drive in hazard conditions
Hope the cancers and what not hold off till after puberty.