This submission's title is misleading, and the original work could be better summarized as "improving at one task while doing another". The authors first determined a pattern of brain activation (indexed by blood flow) associated with the presentation of a target (visual) stimulus for a given subject. Then, they gave subjects real-time feedback about their brain activation while they performed a superficially different task. The trick is that the feedback on the second, different task was based on a subject's ability to cause the same pattern of brain activation (again, indexed by blood flow) that the experimenters first observed when the target stimulus was presented in the earlier session. Finally, subjects were tested on their ability to identify the target stimulus and others like it, and they showed a statistically reliable improvement for the (unknowingly) trained target, but not for other, similar items. It's fascinating, but suggesting that this is anything like what's been depicted in science fiction movies (yes, like The Matrix) is silly.
Here's the full report at Science: <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1413.full" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1413.full</a>
Brainwashing now has a science behind it.<p>Interesting, but could be bad:<p>1 - larger divide between those who can afford a service like this and those who can't<p>2 - governments and other entities can use it to brainwash people to create highly ideological and loyal agents/staff.
I don't really understand why this is so significant or perhaps I don't understand the experiment. You are fed some training set and a certain brain activity pattern is identified as the "target." Then you show a whole bunch of other stimuli and try to teach the brain to display the target activity pattern for a different stimulus by having this proxy indicator that tells you how close you are (green disk).<p>Don't we do this all the time? If I'm teaching a child the letters of the alphabet then I would show an example, have them try to guess it and then give them some indication of how close they are (yes you got it, you are pronouncing it weird, no that's the wrong letter). The only difference here is that you are using proxy whereby you identify a target brain activity pattern first. It seems pretty much impossible, however, to get a target for an individual without first seeing what the target is. Certainly everyone's "target" for the same problem must look quite different.<p>I suppose this could be pretty useful for brain-computer interfaces but I don't know if I'd go as far as saying this is matrix-like learning.
This looks either very amazing, or complete BS. I want examples. How did their experiments work? I don't care what it is that I'm learning, I wanna see a demo. Is there something I can buy/fund/donate to? Shut up and take my money.
Might as well take the chance to go slightly off-topic: anyone here a skill acquisition nerd? What methods do you utilize to gain more "I know Kung Fu" moments in life? :)