Learn Matrix-Style, With A Brain Pattern-Generating Machine
The journal ’Science’ has published that American and Japanese researchers have discovered a technique which makes ‘Matrix-style’ learning possible.
To ‘upload’ new skills into your mind, the technology uses a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine to generate specific patterns inside your brain to teach you new things.
The journal says: “Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, demonstrate that through a person’s visual cortex, researchers could use decoded fMRI to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.”
This means that you can automatically learn a new skill without consciously paying attention—as your brain patterns get modified to be familiar to what is generated by the machine.
The novel-learning approach caused test subjects to have long-lasting improvements in tasks that required visual performance—even when they were not aware of what they were learning.
“We found that subjects were not aware of what was to be learned while behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed that subjects' visual performance improved specifically for the target orientation, which was used in the neurofeedback training," Watanabe, director of BU's Visual Science Laboratory, said.
For now, the method is still being tested, and might be used for various types of learning—such as memory, motor and rehabilitation. Other types of learning would be tested in the future.
[via DVICE]
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