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."
Terminology is relative (Score:2)
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Terminology certainly is relative.
As in Zoolander...
"The FILES are INSIDE the computer!"
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It is just a little bitty Brain EMP. What could possibly go wrong?
How long before we have cartoon style helmets that radically increase cognitive abilities? Want!
I would suggest we develop a protocol to stimulate the pleasure centers and lower inhibitions, but ethanol seems to work okay for now.
Noninvasive? No. Physically noninvasive? Maybe. (Score:2)
Yes, the researchers are not jabbing a needle into your skull, but that doesn't mean TFA should refer to the process as "noninvasive." This method of studying the brain is as "noninvasive" as an electron's position and momentum may be simultaneously known.
Sooo... (Score:5, Funny)
Can I just wear a hat with magnets in it? Or would that kind of be like stabbing yourself in the face and calling it acupuncture?
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Can I just wear a hat with magnets in it? Or would that kind of be like stabbing yourself in the face and calling it acupuncture?
I suspect that some kind of homeopathic learning helmet will soon hit the market, pointing to this study as proof that "magnets make smart"
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Please, please, I'm begging you, don't give those quacks any MORE stupid ideas. It's bad enough when you ask them why people who are subject to MRIs aren't the picture of health yet a bracelet can somehow cure your ills that they expel nonsense about this, that or other thing which has no bearing on reality.
We don't need to see these devices popping up at $29.99 a pop and having people wander around with what is effectively a colander on their heads.
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"We don't need to see these devices popping up at $29.99 a pop and having people wander around with what is effectively a colander on their heads."
We don't?
Really?
I'm totally for this plan. In fact I think it would be awesome to see credulous morons wandering around with colanders on their heads all the time.
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Yeah, but if stimulate the entire brain, certainly you're just as likely to stimulate the "idiot" areas too. So, those magnetic hats we're gonna see? It's not that they don't work. THEY DO! It's just that they cancel themselves out. Or maybe it would be more of an idiot testing hat. Those with more "idiot" areas to stimulate will become even more moronic.
Obligatory x2 (Score:5, Funny)
If somebody can find an xkcd about Pinky and the Brain, we can wrap this one right up.
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Just put the damn helmet on.
Obligatory link (Score:2)
http://open-rtms.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
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Weaksauce. Why not go all the way and do some DIY trepanation [trepan.com]?
Although I'm not a fan of experiments on animals.. (Score:2)
... I'd consider paying for the National Institute of Menthal Health to do those experiments.... :)
iTBS? (Score:2)
From the caption on the pretty picture in TFA:
Brain slice of the frontal cortex of a rat showing nerve cells before and after treatment with the iTBS protocol
When I read that, the very first thing I thought of was this ITBS [uiowa.edu], which pretty much just made learning more obnoxious.
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.
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Relevant to your argument: http://dresdencodak.com/2009/09/22/caveman-science-fiction/ [dresdencodak.com]
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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.
Indeed. [wikipedia.org]
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http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx [drfuhrman.com]
http://www.healthpromoting.com/article/breaking-free-dietary-pleasure-trap [healthpromoting.com]
And also: "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://books.google.com/books?id=HQlg3rQquUoC [google.com]
All to support your concern...
Another aspect, that animals may turn to addictive-seeming behavior under stress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park [wikipedia.org]
See also Larry Niven's fictional "Droud":
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?B [technovelgy.com]
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"'you can't improve upon the performance of your brain and your body without longterm tradeoffs'
i hate that kind of defeatist, "nature/god knows best" attitude. everything you have right now is thanks to people who believed they could do better than nature, and they did. yes, you shouldn't do lines of coke to be better at your job, because that is a
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The essence of science is to form an idea, try it out, take an honest look at what the results are, and then modify accordingly. Nearly everything in life can be viewed that way, to me 'science' is almost synonymous with intelligence.
I agree that the 'natural' status quo is a poor god. We are a part of nature, and using our intelligence to make nature better IS natural. But after we try something the next step is to look honestly at what follows and take it into account, or else we're not doing science.
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[snip] everything you have right now is thanks to people who believed they could do better than nature, and they did.
hmmm, really? I'm not convinced - I'll need examples...
Find me any of man's inventions that is in any way better than nature. Sure, we've made many things that assist us. But better? I disagree.
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Well like you I also didn't read the actual paper so really don't know what I'm talking about, but from the article it sounds like they are saying that whatever TMS protocol they are using is resulting in less active cortical interneurons. I'm also relatively unfamiliar with TMS but the way I understand it is that the magnetic fields are pushing and pulling ions to induce action potentials in some subset of neurons that are susceptible to it for whatever reason (like stimulating at the resonant frequency of
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I want to start by asking if you, yourself, are a neuroscientist or affiliated with the field. If not, are you at least, in an HONEST opinion, well informed about the field? I ask this not to accuse anything, but simply to understand the perspective.
I have worked as an engineer with neurofeedback, and have additional peripheral awareness of the neurology field in relation to medical imaging. On these topics I would consider myself well informed relative to the average /. reader, and not well informed relative to someone like yourself. I've got a couple of reasons to think that I have a useful perspective even relative to subject matter experts however. One is that I've paid a lot of attention to the way the motives of researchers affects their work
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Headaches are almost always a symptom of a bigger problem. Sure, aspirin will remove the pain of the headache, but probably wont remove the root cause (although your body may well recover during that time).
Pain isn't a negative. It serves a very important purpose. Removing the pain is not necessarily an improvement. Its more of a work-around and it can definitely have negative consequences.
Research abstracts (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't linked to in the article, so here's the actual abstracts for the two papers:
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/31/4/1193 [jneurosci.org]
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2010.07425.x/abstract [wiley.com]
Theta-Burst Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Alters Cortical Inhibition
Human cortical excitability can be modified by repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), but the cellular mechanisms are largely unknown. Here, we show that the pattern of delivery of theta-burst stimulation (TBS) (continuous versus intermittent) differently modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex. Intermittent TBS (iTBS), but not continuous TBS (cTBS), enhanced spontaneous neuronal firing and EEG gamma band power. Sensory evoked cortical inhibition increased only after iTBS, although both TBS protocols increased the first sensory response arising from the resting cortical state. Changes in the cortical expression of the calcium-binding proteins parvalbumin (PV) and calbindin D-28k (CB) indicate that changes in spontaneous and evoked cortical activity following rTMS are in part related to altered activity of inhibitory systems. By reducing PV expression in the fast-spiking interneurons, iTBS primarily affected the inhibitory control of pyramidal cell output activity, while cTBS, by reducing CB expression, more likely affected the dendritic integration of synaptic inputs controlled by other classes of inhibitory interneurons. Calretinin, the third major calcium-binding protein expressed by another class of interneurons was not affected at all. We conclude that different patterns of TBS modulate the activity of inhibitory cell classes differently, probably depending on the synaptic connectivity and the preferred discharge pattern of these inhibitory neurons.
Continuous and intermittent transcranial magnetic theta burst stimulation modify tactile learning performance and cortical protein expression in the rat differently
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can modulate cortical excitability in a stimulus-frequency-dependent manner. Two kinds of theta burst stimulation (TBS) [intermittent TBS (iTBS) and continuous TBS (cTBS)] modulate human cortical excitability differently, with iTBS increasing it and cTBS decreasing it. In rats, we recently showed that this is accompanied by changes in the cortical expression of proteins related to the activity of inhibitory neurons. Expression levels of the calcium-binding protein parvalbumin (PV) and of the 67-kDa isoform of glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD67) were strongly reduced following iTBS, but not cTBS, whereas both increased expression of the 65-kDa isoform of glutamic acid decarboxylase. In the present study, to investigate possible functional consequences, we applied iTBS and cTBS to rats learning a tactile discrimination task. Conscious rats received either verum or sham rTMS prior to the task. Finally, to investigate how rTMS and learning effects interact, protein expression was determined for cortical areas directly involved in the task and for those either not, or indirectly, involved. We found that iTBS, but not cTBS, improved learning and strongly reduced cortical PV and GAD67 expression. However, the combination of learning and iTBS prevented this effect in those cortical areas involved in the task, but not in unrelated areas. We conclude that the improved learning found following iTBS is a result of the interaction of two effects, possibly in a homeostatic manner: a general weakening of inhibition mediated by the fast-spiking interneurons, and re-established activity in those neurons specifically involved in the learning task, leading to enhanced contrast between learning-induced and background activity.
PTSD? (Score:2)
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As an Iraq vet with [PTSD] (mild case), who has friends who suffer a lot more, I hope this can offer some hope.
you'd be interested in my other comment:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1976324&cid=35077664 [slashdot.org]
Also see David Feinstein, PhD's report about what they had to go through to get Congress to fund a study at Walter Reed [energypsyched.com].
"Activates?" "Stimulates?" Real articles please. (Score:3)
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci [nih.gov] and Mix et al Euro J neurosci [nih.gov] seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one [nih.gov] that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
Magnets! How do they work?! (Score:2)
Side effects? (Score:3)
I can't believe that magnetic stimulation will have no side effects whatsoever, as they claim. I won't let anyone go near my head with such a thing until more is known about the influence and long-term effects of this technique, or I have no choice but to try it.
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My brother is a psychology PhD student - he's had TMI on a couple of occasions and has described it as a generally interesting experience. So far he's shown no ill effects other than a tendency to talk about it a lot.
Side effects (Score:2)
I won't have anyone go near my head with a magnetic stimulator until I either have no other choice or more is known about long-term side effects.
Maybe there is a DIY? (Score:2)
Really, I am now learning German and at my age..what a pain in the butt. Would be great to pop on my magnet hat for my lessons.
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Really, I am now learning German and at my age..what a pain in the butt.
I didn't know Dieter made any Learn German with Sprockets DVDs. I suppose the might not be popular due to the price.
Long term effects? (Score:2)
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci [nih.gov] and Mix et al Euro J neurosci [nih.gov] seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one [nih.gov] that suggests magnetic fields cause ne
Cue scams in 10... (Score:2)
I see thousands upon thousands of magnetic "performance enhancing" headbands in the near future.
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Why wait? The future is already here! The 8 Coil Shakti [shaktitechnology.com] headband can be yours for only $285!
Or you can just tape some kitchen magnets to your head and probably get the same effect.
Let me be the first to say (Score:3)
That I'd love to have something like this to help learn skills and languages faster and to remember things better.
It's not quite the Matrix's "I know jujitsu.", but we're getting there. Baby steps.
sledge hammers are not precision tools (Score:2, Interesting)
The Iraq Vet Stress Project [stressproject.org] uses very precise & minute magnetic fields - those generated with fingertips - to help soldiers with PTSD. The procedure involves tapping on specific locations on the skin while thinking about a specific distressing thought or emotion. They don't know exactly why it works, just that it does.
Leadership in the American Psychological Association is actively subverting continuing education credit for Energy Psychology for unknown reasons:
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The Iraq Vet Stress Project [stressproject.org] uses very precise & minute magnetic fields - those generated with fingertips - to help soldiers with PTSD. The procedure involves tapping on specific locations on the skin while thinking about a specific distressing thought or emotion. They don't know exactly why it works, just that it does.
Here may be part of the problem. You start with a completely unjustified claim about "precise and minute magnetic fields" that is probably false, and end with a completely contradictory claim "they don't know exactly why it works". So on the one hand you are claiming a detailed knowledge of one aspect of the process, and on the other claiming a deep ignorance of it. That kind of thing sets off the bullshit detector in most people's minds pretty loudly. Tapping the skin is not precise, and while there ar
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So on the one hand you are claiming a detailed knowledge of one aspect of the process, and on the other claiming a deep ignorance of it. That kind of thing sets off the bullshit detector in most people's minds pretty loudly.
I so wish that were true.
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The human body has electrical signaling. When electric current flows through human nerve tissue, minute magnetic fields are generated. The fields are applied to specific locations in the body that correspond and connect to specific locations in the brain.
In the EFT protocol, the first point that is tapped is on the eyebrow, or alternatively, on the bridge of the nose between the eyes. This is a point on the bladder meridian described by ancient chinese anatomists. The second point is on the side of the eye,
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They don't know exactly why it works, just that it does.
Either they know why it works, or they are incredibly ignorant. It's called the Observer-expantacy effect, and it's the primary reason why the double-blind experimental procedure was developed. This isn't some obscure bit of Psychology, it's covered in the first intro to Psychology class in detail.
neat (Score:2)
So sticking hard drive magnets on my tinfoil hat will be making my smartness more better? Horay!
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new age ftw! (Score:2)
Sweet, new age is making a come back.
Amateur Hour (Score:5, Funny)
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I have a similar wife, but there's nothing temporary about the procedure.
Magnets (Score:3)
Peer reviewers wore magnets on their skulls? (Score:2)
Maybe the peer reviewers wore magnets and temporarily deactivated parts of their brain - while suffering from a placebo effect?
I'm scared (Score:2)
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Anyone ever read Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness In the Sky"? Sounds like "focus" :D
We have that mind-enslaving procedure already. It's called "Slashdot".
I knew it! (Score:3)
I knew it! They can deactivate my brain with magnets and stuff!
*proudly wears tin foil hat*
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I knew it! They can deactivate my brain with magnets and stuff! *proudly wears tin foil hat*
Dude, tin foil isn't going to shield these magnetic fields! ;-)
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I knew it! They can deactivate my brain with magnets and stuff! *proudly wears tin foil hat*
Dude! You need to switch to mu-metal [wikipedia.org].
(But keep the tinfoil as a lining for high frequency stuff.)
Can it treat (Score:2)
ADHD... (Score:2)
Any possibility of turning of.... hey do you want to go ride bikes?
Magnets, snake oil or legit? (Score:2)
In 2001, I was living with a friend briefly and slept on a bed with one of those magnetized mattress top things. I'm not sure if it was coincidence or not, but soon I began to dream quite vividly each night, often lucid, and my friend said it was the magnets.
I did some brief research and found information about the effects of magnets on the brain, specially Melatonin (if I remember correctly). I'm not sure if this stuff was fact or fiction, but the claims seemed logical.
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Was she hot?
I know when I briefly live with a hot friend that I have very lucid dreams while sleeping in her bed. I don't think it has anything to do with the magnets.
Wait a minute. This is /. I must have been dreaming.
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However, humans are collections of magnetic fields. So basically "common sense" is saying, "how dumb are you to believe that magnets affect magnet fields".
It's kind of ironic that a large part of the culture that pursues physcial determinism seem to exclude themselves from said physical determinism. Which is just proof that the western viewpoint still lacks a c
Obligatory (Score:2)
"I think so Brain, but I can't be sure... That magnet has temporarily inactivated my pondering section."
Algernon! (Score:3)
Diary entry:
Algernon the Mouse writing. I don't feel so good any more. Miss Kinnian says she is worried.
ouch! (Score:2)
With out reading the more detailed description with the pictures, it looks more like a destructive treatment, though apparently its not.
But thankfully the closing paragraph seems to indicate they aren't trying to describe this as a guaranteed new amazing treatment, but rather something that warrants future works.
energy boost (Score:2)
What is really going on here? Might this magnetic stimulation be nothing more than a crude way to pump energy directly into the brain? Or dampen it? Same sort of idea behind why vibrations help surgery patients recover faster.
I'm wondering how easy it is to cause damage with too much stimulation.
Doubt it would do anything for Alzheimer's patients.
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As for Alzheimer's what's your basis? As far as i can tell it could possible help considering that a symptom of alzheimers is the deterioration of the matrix that suspends the neurons in the brain. Brain growth stimulates the strengthing and growth of the matrix. In f
Uh, oh ... (Score:2)
... Don't let Bender hear about this ...
Is this science or "Science"? (Score:2)
A peer-reviewed publication [jneurosci.org] in The Journal of Neuroscience suggests that it is, in fact, science.
Despite that, I have watched too much Star-Trek and know too little about neuroscience to be able to read about "cortical excitability" via "theta-burst stimulation" or about "enhanced spontaneous neuronal firing and EEG gamma band power" and not feel that I'm reading a sci-fi screenplay.
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Exposure to electromagnetic energy of sufficient strength will definitely have some effect on your body, and just about anything else, so the sci-fi treatments certainly have a grounding in objective reality. The real story is not *what* is being used, but *how* it is being used.
Where these scenes usually fail is that they talk about applying some sort of energy which then fixes an issue. However, energy is simply energy, and as we all know, the difference between a nuclear plant and a nuclear bomb is wha
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A) Sleep on the floor of your house (hopefully you live in the city full of electricity and gadgets)
B) Go camping and sleep on the ground far away from man-made magnetic fields
C) Observe the difference.
I have not met one person that hasn't been able to notice the difference.
If you can turn off part of the brain... (Score:2)
... could you turn off all of it? Put someone to sleep? Could it be used as an anasthetic.
Cell phones might be doing this already (Score:3)
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They affect extremely short term memory around here. It seems all the females forget that they're driving when they bring the phones close to their heads.
SkyMall? (Score:2)
obvious application (Score:2)
"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 and religion."
Even more obvious application (Score:2)
How about a cure for low grades or "the boss want me to learn the new software/hardware platform and have it rolled out tomorrow"?
The Fourth "R" by George O. Smith (Score:2)
This looks like The Fourth "R" by George O. Smith.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18602 [gutenberg.org]
First post (Score:2)
I used TMS to speed up the first posting part of my brain
First post! (Score:2)
Thanks to TMS stimulation!
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Update: Slashdot is buggy as hell. That is all.
Promising (Score:2)
Awesome! (Score:2)
Will the fancy magnetic brainwashing machine have a spinning psychedelic disc?
Brainwashing has been so out of fashion for too long. It used to be a staple in the cheezy movie diet, but I thought we had eaten into extinction..
So thats why hard drives have those huge magnets! (Score:2)
Its so they can remember all that stuff!
Please, Mr. Schizophrenic, remove the tinfoil! (Score:2)
orgasmatron? (Score:2)
Or ... (Score:3)
You could get some exercise. There is simply no other thing you can do for brain health and performance that has anything close to the volume of research support that exercise has. Recently I was reading in Science News about how rats given a test requiring them to remember subtle differences performed significantly better when they had an exercise wheel in their cage.
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By this definition there is no such thing as an (effective) noninvasive procedure. Anything meeting this definition of noninvasive would be utterly pointless.
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From my perspective, any external process that changes anything in or on my body is invasive, including flipping the on/off switch to various regions of the brain.
In medical speak, "noninvasive" means they didn't have to cut you open or poke holes in you when they tweaked your innards.
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Nothing was showing up, I assumed it was my browser. It was late, so it was only after hitting submit the third time that I thought "Maybe I should just wait a bit."
Oops.
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wwwwhhhyyy dddiiiddd yyyooouuu pppooosssttt ttthhhrrreeee tttiiimmmeeesss ?
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Of course they are. They show a shocking lack of anatomical knowledge. Now if they were magnetic headbands...
BRB founding company. How does " Magnasmart" sound?
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This isn't such a bad dup. If it keeps getting duped, eventually the slashdot editors will dup it while wearing the gadget, and will have a greater probability of realizing it is a dup next time. So it's self-limiting.
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depression is caused by low concentrations of reward hormones.
most depression are more complexes than that, read about the partial anta/agonist/recaptureIhnibitor of serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline and adrenaline called remeron and its effect on the brain and you will see that depression is excruciatingly complex disease.