Imagine being able to inscribe a new pattern of activity into a person\u2019s 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\u2019t require brain surgery or any physical manipulation. Sounds like science fiction?<\/p>\n
It still is. But that\u2019s exactly what Coraline Iordan<\/a>, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences<\/a> and of neuroscience<\/a> at the 糖心传媒<\/a> has been working toward, showing for the first time that it can certainly be done for learning new visual categories of objects.<\/p>\n 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\u2014what they call the \u201csculpting\u201d of brain activity patterns. The research<\/a> appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cWith our method not only can we nudge complex patterns around in the brain toward known ones, but also\u2014for the first time\u2014write directly a new pattern into the brain and measure what effect that has on a person\u2019s behavior,\u201d says lead author Iordan.<\/p>\n 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\u00ad<\/sub>\u2014an abstract shape that some participants described as a petal, plant bulb, or butterfly\u2014pulsed gently on the participants\u2019 mirror until they managed to \u201cmove it\u201d 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 \u201cgenerate a mental state\u201d that would reduce the shape\u2019s oscillation but had not taught the study participants how to achieve such mental state.<\/p>\n \u201cOne 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\u00a0processing<\/em>\u2014that is, the ability to respond to information meaningfully outside of awareness\u2014also extends to the learning and formation of new neural representations,\u201d says coauthor Jonathan Cohen<\/a>, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Scientists have developed a novel approach to human learning through noninvasive manipulation of brain activity patterns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":942,"featured_media":630992,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[116],"tags":[18672,28462,18572,16072],"class_list":["post-630942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sci-tech","tag-department-of-brain-and-cognitive-sciences","tag-department-of-neuroscience","tag-research-finding","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":{"external":"","hide_featured_image":false,"related":"show_related","style":[621732,599212,620342],"content_modules":[{"acf_fc_layout":"media_text_new","anchor":"","class":"","overline":"","title":"","content":"This simulated video shows the wobbling object in the center that study participants saw projected onto their mirrors while inside an fMRI machine. Their task was to generate a state of mind that would stop the oscillation and, unbeknownst to them, to get their brain to represent the object more similarly to an activity pattern that the scientists had previously designated. The black square insert in the upper right-hand corner models what the scientists were tracking in the participants\u2019 brains. The object\u2019s pulsing slowed down and then stopped once the white dot reached the area marked \u201cstrong category 1 representation.\u201d (Video courtesy of Coraline Iordan)","cta":"","bg":"#f4f4f4","type":"video","image":"","embed":"","video":631022,"layout":"above","animation":"animation-false"},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","anchor":"","css_class":"","title":"","content":"The immediate feedback given to the study participants here meant that the image stopped wobbling on their mirror once they successfully managed to represent the visual object more similarly to a brain activity pattern that the researchers had previously designated, instead of how the object would have been represented in their brains naturally. In other words, the scientists had developed a method that caused people to learn new categories of visual objects, not by teaching them what the categories were, but by changing how their brains worked when they looked at the individual objects in those categories.\r\n\r\n\u201cInstead of teaching you something and measuring how your brain changes, we wrote a new category into your brain that would have appeared had you learned it yourself,\u201d explains Iordan. \u201cThen we tested whether you saw the new category that we had inserted. Turns out you did.\u201d\r\n\r\nTo ensure study participants were highly motivated to succeed, they were rewarded monetarily if they managed to stop the image wobble, which over six daily sessions could amount to a sizeable bonus.\r\nBrain sculpting\u2014a new approach to learning?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Future applications<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nScientists are working to better understand what exactly happens to brain function in people with a variety of neuropsychiatric, developmental, or psychological disorders, such as major depression, visual agnosias (the inability to recognize everyday items), and autism. According to Iordan, a method like theirs may eventually play a role in clinical treatment by modifying the brain patterns of patients to make theirs look more similar to the brain patterns found in the neurotypical population, which down the road could lead to new approaches for treatment, either by itself or in conjunction with already existing therapies.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis study is one of the most powerful demonstrations yet of brain training with real-time fMRI. Dr. Iordan used neurofeedback to help humans create a category in their mind that then influenced their behavior,\u201d says coauthor Nicholas Turk-Browne<\/a>, a psychologist at Yale University. \u201cIn the future, this discovery could inform the development of brain-computer interfaces<\/a> and clinical interventions.\u201d\r\n\r\nAt its core lies the scientists\u2019 ability to access the brain in a way that hasn\u2019t been done before.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe essentially turned learning on its head and taught your brain something that caused you to vicariously gain information, even though you were never explicitly given that information,\u201d says Iordan. \u201cThat tells us we have access to the building blocks of learning in the brain in a way that we haven\u2019t had before\u2014for learning things that are much more complicated, such as entire categories of items, complex visual things, or potentially even beyond that someday.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe study was supported by funding from the\u00a0John Templeton Foundation<\/a>, Intel Corporation<\/a>, and the National Institutes of Health<\/a>.","background_color":"#ffffff","width":"width-medium"}]},"yoast_head":"\n