Transcranial Stimulation Shows Promise in Speeding Up Learning

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=amping-up-brain-function

by malvosenior • 15 years ago

70 9 15 years ago

rbanffy• 15 years ago

Brain altering experiments conducted by the military on military test subjects... There must be a huge pile of science fiction written on the subject.

tikhonj• 15 years ago

To be entirely fair, there's a huge pile of science fiction written about almost anything. That's probably one of the reasons it's my favorite genre.

TuxPirate• 15 years ago

I'll buy the first baseball cap that has similar EEG electrodes!

brandall10• 15 years ago

"Remarkably, MRI brain scans revealed clear structural changes in the brain as soon as five days after TDCS."

Interesting... would love to see a study comparing long term results to neurofeedback (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofeedback).

dreyfiz• 15 years ago

How do I build or buy it?

someperson• 15 years ago

http://transcenmentalism.org/OpenStim/tiki-index.php

tokenadult• 15 years ago

This is a very interesting preliminary finding, and I promptly shared the article link, with hat tip to Hacker News, among a Facebook private group populated by many neuroscience researchers. But the finding needs a look more replication and refinement,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

before I'll stick the electrodes over my head. For one thing, I wonder what author neuroscientists who attended the big conference where this finding was briefly reported have had time to dig into the details of how other neuroanatomical models of learning compare to the implicit model here.

disgruntledphd2• 15 years ago

It definitely is a very interesting finding, but if it wasn't placebo controlled, then its not really demonstrating anything. Bear in mind that deep brain stimulation is placebo responsive, which suggests that this could be easily too. That being said, the structural changes are quite interesting. I suppose i'll have to wait for the full paper, and there's no mention of sample size in the article either.

farinasa• 15 years ago

"The researchers reported that TDCS gave a six-times baseline boost to the amplitude of a brain wave generated in response to stimulating a sensory nerve in the arm. The boost was not seen when mock TDCS was used, which produced a similar sensation on the scalp, but was ineffective in exciting brain tissue."

This seems to indicate that it was placebo controlled, but I am also interested to see the published paper.

Transcranial Stimulation Shows Promise in Speeding Up Learning

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