Researchers Create Matrix-Like Instant Learning Through Brain Stimulation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
And people thought that title was over the top.
It's an extraordinary claim that feeding some electromagnetic representation of the thought patterns of one person into a completely different (and perhaps differently wired) brain that isn't necessarily designed to interpret such electromagnetic signals, magically causes the second person to learn a task faster.
Given the poor repeatability of medical research and the subjectivity of "improvement" I find it just as likely that i) this is a statistical anomaly or ii) feeding random noise into a person's brain as a control causes them to perform more poorly than normal, or iii) stimulating a brain in any way causes an increase in "performance", or iv) something we didn't think of.
Extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence. Of course if they were developing this for the military then maybe the standard is just not the same.
tDCS was what was used, which is simply a low current meant to modulate firing rates at the cortical layer. There is NO interpretation of thought patterns and conversion into some modulatory electric field.
I do agree there are a lot of issues with clinical based trials especially ones with less concrete physiological measures, but the evidence for tDCS is certainly slowly stacking on.
I think you may not have an objection to what I wrote if I remove the words "thought patterns" and replace them with "brain activity" as used in the press release.
Nonetheless, even this I find implausible. Why should I use the "brain activity" of a commercial pilot and not a meditating monk? Surely any actual information about flying a plane is totally absent from any such transfer. I see no plausible mechanism here.
But in the paper, it is pretty clear they do hd-tDCS. Spatially there may be an attempt to target more specifically areas that are activated during normal flight activity, but there is no attempt to "transfer activity" which has a huge temporal and amplitude implication.
This is really no less exciting, though, and no less sci-fi.