Skip to main content

A Harvard Neuroscience Scheme To Change Decisions In Your Brain

Brain Power Medi-Mation
This week at the British Neuroscience Association, Harvard scientist Gabriel Kreiman described a rather diabolical-sounding experiment: He wants to reverse someone's decision to push a button before the person is even aware they were going to press it.
Kreiman has already demonstrated he can predict decisions before volunteers become conscious of making them. Back in 2011, he used brain imaging to measure the activity of individual neurons in the brains of 12 people with epilepsy (they already had electrodes implanted to identify the source of seizures.) The volunteers were told they could press a button whenever they liked and to remember the position of a clock's second hand at the moment they decided to act.
Five seconds before the volunteers reported they had decided to press the button, Kreiman noticed electrical activity in the area of the brain involved in initiating movement, called the supplementary motor area, as well as in the brain region that controls motivation and attention, called the anterior cingulate cortex.
Now, Kreiman is taking that experiment a step further. As soon as he sees the telltale brain activity that signals a decision to push the button, he flashes a "stop" sign on a screen in front of the volunteer. "So far all we have is people saying, 'that was weird, you read my mind'," Kreiman says.
So, no mind control yet—just a bit of harmless mind reading. Kreiman says that figuring out the mechanisms of volition could eventually help people with Parkinson's or other diseases in which people lose voluntary movement

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a  tattooed ,  deep-voiced  man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called  vivianite  (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are  from him resting  near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...

20,000 megawatts under the sea: Oceanic steam engines

Jules Verne mused about getting energy from heat in the ocean  (Image: Marc Pagani/Getty) Jules Verne imagined this limitless power source in Victorian times – now 21st-century engineers say heat trapped in the oceans could provide electricity for the world IF ANY energy source is worthy of the name "steampunk", it is surely ocean thermal energy conversion. Victorian-era science fiction? Check: Jules Verne mused about its potential in  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea  in 1870. Mechanical, vaguely 19th-century technology? Check. Compelling candidate for renewable energy in a post-apocalyptic future? Tick that box as well. Claims for it have certainly been grandiose. In theory, ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) could provide  4000 times the world's energy needs in any given year , with neither pollution nor greenhouse gases to show for it. In the real world, however, it has long been written off as impractical. This year, a surprising number of pro...

Where the Swastika Was Found 12,000 Years Before Hitler Made Us Uncomfortable About I

Minoan pottery from Crete. The Minoan civilization flourished from 3,000 to 1,100 B.C. (Agon S. Buchholz/Wikimedia Commons) ) Swastika from a 2nd century A.D. Roman mosaic. (Maciej Szczepańczyk/Wikimedia Commons A srivatsa (swastika) sign at Nata-dera Temple, Japan. (Cindy Drukier/Epoch Times) From the Sican/Lambayeque civilization in Peru, which flourished 750 to 1375 A.D. (Wikimedia Commons) Ancient Macedonian helmet with swastika marks, 350-325 B.C., found at Herculanum. (Cabinet des Medailles, Paris/Wikimedia Commons) A Buddha statue on Lantau Island, Hong Kong with a swastika symbol on the chest. (Shutterstock*) A 3,000-year-old necklace found in the Rasht Province of Iran. (Wikimedia Commons) The aviator Matilde Moisant(1878-1964) wearing a swastika medallion in 1912; the symbol was popular as a good luck charm with early aviators. (Wikimedia Commons) A mandala-like swastika, composed of Hebrew letters and surrounded by a circle and a mystica...