Scientists have developed a novel approach to human learning through noninvasive manipulation of brain activity patterns.
Imagine being able to inscribe a new pattern of activity into a person's brain that would allow for faster learning, or better treatment of psychiatric and developmental disorders such as depression or autism. Now imagine being able to do that in a way that doesn't require brain surgery or any physical manipulation. Sounds like science fiction?
It still is. But that's exactly what Coraline Iordan, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences and of neuroscience at the University of Rochester has been working toward, showing for the first time that it can certainly be done for learning new visual categories of objects.
Generally, learning happens when our brain changes through experience, study, or instruction. But Iordan and colleagues at Yale and Princeton successfully tested a novel approach for teaching the human brain to learn through external manipulation and neural feedback-what they call the "sculpting" of brain activity patterns. The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"With our method not only can we nudge complex patterns around in the brain toward known ones, but also-for the first time-write directly a new pattern into the brain and measure what effect that has on a person's behavior," says lead author Iordan.
Brain sculpting-a new approach to learning?
The scientists used real-time neuroimaging and second-by-second neurofeedback to modify how the brain represents and processes information about visual objects. Lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, study participants viewed objects projected onto a mirror above their heads, which looked like a small screen. The object-an abstract shape that some participants described as a petal, plant bulb, or butterfly-pulsed gently on the participants' mirror until they managed to "move it" by their own thought processes to the pattern of activity in their brain (monitored via fMRI in real time) that the scientists had previously chosen. The researchers instructed the participants to "generate a mental state" that would reduce the shape's oscillation but had not taught the study participants how to achieve such mental state.
"One of the striking features of the study is that the neural responses and corresponding behavior to the new categories occurred without explicit awareness of those categories, showing that a long tradition of work in psychology on implicit processing-that is, the ability to respond to information meaningfully outside of awareness-also extends to the learning and formation of new neural representations," says coauthor Jonathan Cohen, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton University.
