How to Turn Every Brain into Spock's Brain

A machine which stimulates your brain with tiny electric shocks can improve memory, problem-solving and mathematical abilities, psychologists have found.

Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh, a neuroscientist, uses a high-tech system called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to stimulate precise regions of the brain with a tiny buzz of electric current.

When he stimulates the parietal lobes, which are responsible for our skills in reading, writing and numeracy, he can boost mathematical skills...When Dr Cohen Kadosh’s subjects had their parietal lobes stimulated for 30 minutes every day for a week, they were able to pick up maths skills through conventional lessons far more quickly and effectively than they could before.

‘It’s completely safe. The electric current is one thousand times lower than anything that could cause damage,’ he says.

Tests have shown that the subjects’ maths abilities remain boosted six months after the treatment. _DailyMail

Telegraph

Devices which administer the electric pulses required for the treatment can be bought for as little as £500 and are portable, making them affordable and convenient to use. However, this and the fact that there are no rules governing their use, means that they are not restricted to use by professionals in labs and clinics.

... _Telegraph

Daily MailOf course any effective means of improving performance could give certain people an advantage over others. Those who could afford the brain-boosting technology, for example, might be thought to have an unfair advantage over those who had to wait for the price of the technology to fall, before they could gain access.

This might represent a threat to our modern leftist-egalitarian zeitgeist, where it is felt that if anyone advances, then everyone should advance in lock-step. But that is not how nature works, and it is not the way that any meaningful type of abundant future for humanity will be achieved. The sooner that self-improvement technologies escape the grip of the politically correct drone-minded politicians and academics, the better.

"This research cuts to core of humanity: the capacity to learn," says Professor Julian Savulescu. "The capacity to learn varies across people, across ages and with illness. This kind of technology enables people to get more out of the work they put into learning something."

He adds: "This is a first step down the path of maximizing human potential. It is a very exciting development but we need to control the release of the genie. Although this looks like a simple external device, it acts by affecting the brain. That could have very good effects, but unpredictable side effects."

One of the most obvious uses of brain stimulation techniques is in children as an educational or learning aid. The researchers believe that their use in children would be warranted, and that we should begin research to understand how TDCS might be used in children.

Roi notes that: "Parents will often send their child to piano lessons or to football lessons, wanting them to do well." He considers that providing people with ways of fulfilling their potential is not a bad thing. _Medicalxpress

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a technique that has been intensively investigated in the past decade as this method offers a non-invasive and safe alternative to change cortical excitability2. The effects of one session of tDCS can last for several minutes, and its effects depend on polarity of stimulation, such as that cathodal stimulation induces a decrease in cortical excitability, and anodal stimulation induces an increase in cortical excitability that may last beyond the duration of stimulation6. These effects have been explored in cognitive neuroscience and also clinically in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders – especially when applied over several consecutive sessions4. One area that has been attracting attention of neuroscientists and clinicians is the use of tDCS for modulation of pain-related neural networks3,5. Modulation of two main cortical areas in pain research has been explored: primary motor cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex7. Due to the critical role of electrode montage, in this article, we show different alternatives for electrode placement for tDCS clinical trials on pain; discussing advantages and disadvantages of each method of stimulation. _Jove

Basic Primer on Brain Memory

The prefrontal cortex is the chief executive of our brain. It plans complex actions, helps us make decisions, predicts what’s about to happen and applies breaks to bad behavior. Part of this region is in charge of working memory, a kind of mental sketchpad.

The dorsolateral section is thought to be the engine of memory suppression, a type of willful forgetting.

The left inferior prefrontal cortex processes information deeply and helps make emotional memories stick in your mind.

The parietal cortex covers the parietal lobe, a large section of the brain. Parts of it map the position of the body in space and the whereabouts of nearby objects. Other sections help us remember. A brain wave detected over this area shrinks when a person forgets.

Sensory information—sights and sounds—form the raw material for memory.

The visual cortex handles basic information about the orientation and color of objects. It also helps us perceive depth, lighting and texture. When someone shuts a memory out of consciousness, the visual cortex quiets down, as if the brain is trying to rid itself of recollected imagery.

The auditory cortex handles basic sound information: pitch and volume. It also quiets down when the mind is blocking a recollection.

The hippocampus is memory central. When memories form, it is abuzz with neural chatter. It calms down when a recollection is suppressed.

The amygdala comes to life when feelings are involved. It works with the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex to create emotional memories. _SCIAMmind

Of course there is a lot more involved to brain memory than what you find in the brief primer above. Human memory is incredibly dynamic, and involves most of the same parts of the brain in recall as were involved in the original laying down of memory. Even more interesting, is the fact that the memory deals not just with the past, but with the future!

It is proposed that the human brain is proactive in that it continuously generates predictions that anticipate the relevant future. In this proposal, analogies are derived from elementary information that is extracted rapidly from the input, to link that input with the representations that exist in memory. Finding an analogical link results in the generation of focused predictions via associative activation of representations that are relevant to this analogy, in the given context. Predictions in complex circumstances, such as social interactions, combine multiple analogies. Such predictions need not be created afresh in new situations, but rather rely on existing scripts in memory, which are the result of real as well as of previously imagined experiences. This cognitive neuroscience framework provides a new hypothesis with which to consider the purpose of memory, and can help explain a variety of phenomena, ranging from recognition to first impressions, and from the brain's ‘default mode’ to a host of mental disorders. _Abstract...Royal Society

Read the full article at the Royal Society link above.

Once we learn that the brain works much the same during perception, cognition, and memory -- and when reliving the past or predicting the future -- a wide range of opportunities for shaping our experience suddenly opens up to us.

But as always, it is best to view these things in a circular manner, and to begin at the center and work our way outward in a spiral. When beginning at the center, it is best to breathe deeply, and let go a huge belly laugh. After that, things seem to become easier.

For although life is full of surprises, chance favours the prepared mind. Which means that a great deal of laughter is likely to be needed along the way, to build mental resilience and receptivity.

Artificial Intelligence in Dire Need of Better Brain Architectures?

Randal Koene - Whole Brain Emulation from Raj Dye on Vimeo.

The above is a video from a conference on artificial general intelligence (AGI) held in Switzerland, last year. The speaker is a neuroscientist -- an outsider to the typical AI person who attends AI conferences. His appearance at the AGI conference indicates that the entire approach to AI is in a state of flux.

The attitude up until recently has been that intelligence does not rely upon any particular substrate, eg, a brain. AI researchers have boldly believed for several decades that intelligence could be built algorithmically inside machine architectures over a relatively short time span. "Sometime within 10 years . . ."

They have been saying the same thing -- "within 10 years" -- since the 1950s. Clearly not very much has happened in the way of significant breakthroughs since the 1950s. In fact, contemporary AI researchers themselves may well be growing less impressive, over time, than the pioneers of the field.

Hence the perceived need for possibly re-thinking the whole "substrate" approach. Another video in the series deals with the requirements of "cognitive architecture." An impressive phrase, although the reality is likely to prove far less impressive.