第二篇 Download Knowledge Directly to Your BrainFor the first time, researchers havebeen a
第二篇 Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain
For the first time, researchers havebeen able to hack into the process of learning in the brain, using inducedbrain patterns to create a learned behavior. It’s not quite as advanced as aninstant kung-fu download, and it’s not as sleek as cognitive inception, butit’s still an important finding that could lead to new teaching andrehabilitation techniques.
Future therapies could decode the brainactivity patterns of an athlete or a musician, and use them as a benchmark forteaching another person a new activity, according to the researchers.
Scientists from BostonUniversity and ATR ComputationalNeuroscience Laboratories in Kyotoused functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the learningprocess. They were examining the adult brain’s aptitude for visual perceptuallearning, or VPL, in which repetitive training improves a person’s performanceon a particular task. Whether adults can do this as well as young people hasbeen an ongoing debate in neuroscience.
Led by BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe,researchers used a method called decoded fMRI neurofeedback to stimulate thevisual cortex. First they showed participants circles at differentorientations. Then they used fMRI to watch the participants’ brain activity.The researchers were then able to train the participants to recreate thisvisual cortex activity.
The volunteers were again placed in MRImachines and asked to visualize shapes of certain colors. The participants wereasked to “somehow regulate activity in the posterior part of the brain” to makea solid green disc as large as they could. They were told they would get a paidbonus proportional to the size of this disc, but they weren’t told anythingabout what the disc meant. The researchers watched the participants’ brainactivity and monitored the activation patterns in their visual cortices.
“Participants can be trained to control theoverall mean activation of an entire brain region,” the study authors write,“or the activation in one region relative to that in another region.”
This worked even when test subjects werenot aware of what they were learning, the researchers said.“The most surprising thing in this study isthat mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specificvisual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature,without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned,”Watanabe said in a statement.
Watanabe and colleagues said this methodcan be a powerful tool.
“It can ‘incept’ a person to acquire newlearning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge thathas been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’sawareness of what is learned or memorized,” they write.
what have researchers been ableto do with the help of the study？
A. Discover aperson’s learning process in the brain.
B. Make a person know how to do something without learning.
C. Set up different learning patterns for different people.
D. Enable people to learn kung fu instantly.
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